to September 4. Themes and style Hersh's vocal style ranges from softly melodic to impassioned screaming. She has an occasional vibrato that punctuates some of her more dramatic phrasing. Candid about her episodes of mental illness and despair, her songs cover a vast spectrum of topics, including childbirth ("Hysterical Bending"), love ("Tar Kissers", "Lavender"), surreal vignettes ("Delicate Cutters", "Fish"), death ("Limbo"), emotional anguish ("The Letter"), loss of custody of her first son ("Candyland"), and the shedding of a relationship's anxiety ("Snake Oil"). Simon Reynolds in The New York Times pointed to Hersh's "mesmerizing" explorations of "rage, aggression and mental chaos" as evidence of female rock artists of the early 1990s pushing against gender role boundaries to express "more than simply vulnerability or defiance" in their work. Ann Powers, also in the Times, wrote of Hersh's musical style: "Her plastic, sometimes obsessively circular song structures emphasize staggered rhythms and extreme dynamic shifts, and her voice, a carnal cry that pushes through her body gathering up air, lends her often oblique lyrics an oracular veneer." Influences Hersh has said her parents' album collections, featuring Patti Smith, the Carter Family, Stevie Wonder, Robert Johnson, Talking Heads, The Clash, Steve Miller, The Beatles, Philip Glass, and traditional music all influenced her when she was growing up. Among her early contemporary musical influences are The Raincoats, The Pretenders, Talking Heads, Violent Femmes, Meat Puppets, Dead Kennedys, Hüsker Dü, Velvet Underground, R.E.M., and X. Author Hersh's illustrated children's book Toby Snax was published in 2007 and further developed in 2011 as an interactive app for children. The app allows children to hear her read the story out loud and features her recordings of lullabies that she learned as a girl in Tennessee. Her 2010 memoir Rat Girl (published in the UK as Paradoxical Undressing) is based on a diary she wrote when she was 18, touring with Throwing Muses, diagnosed with bipolar disorder and pregnant with her first child. Rob Sheffield in The New York Times called it an "uncommonly touching punk memoir," and named it #8 in Rolling Stones "25 Greatest Rock Memoirs of All Time." Hersh's 2015 book Don't Suck, Don't Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt, is a rumination on her friendship with the singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt. She cites him as one of her songwriting influences with his "fluid timing and the grace of a melody that breaks the rules of meter." Personal life