Part 2/3 of 'I Know How To Live': The Life of Kristen Pfaff (volume 1)

Including Kristen Pfaff lyrics, a hand-scrawled letter on a napkin and Pfaff coming into her own as an activist...

Kristen Pfaff’s letters home offer a rather breathless account of the challenges that meet the young married couple in Holland. A ‘fun and crazy real city with real city hours and real city prices!’ is described. They stay in the ‘Adam and Eva’ youth hostel, paying 17.67 gilder for a traditional Dutch breakfast daily, consisting of bread, Gouda cheese, salami and hard boiled eggs. At nights the young couple would look for what she describes as ‘our kind’ of music, where they would ‘roam around the red light district, where hookers stand in the windows of their place and try to seduce men off the streets.’ But there are other layers to her account. In her letters home she bemoans the difficulty of accessing sanitary products and hints at the isolation that they are increasingly feeling. ‘We have a great apartment for entertaining,’ she writes, ‘just no one to entertain yet!’