One morning, when she was about 7 years old, Neko Case stood on her front porch, closed her eyes and wished with all her might to see a horse.

It was a tall order. She and her parents lived in the coastal city of Bellingham, Wash., and none of their neighbors were equestrians. But, as the musician recalls in her new memoir, “The Harder I Fight the More I Love You,” the young Case “clench-focused as hard as I could,” and when she opened her eyes something incredible had happened: Two gorgeous horses, ridden by two girls, came clomping directly toward her. In the midst of a difficult childhood, this stands out as one fleeting moment when she believed irrefutably in miracles, fairy tales and the possibility that good things could happen to her.

“At 52 years old,” she writes, “I can still see the horses clear as day.”

A cult-favorite singer-songwriter with a gale-force voice and a spiky, irreverent personality, Case has been releasing acclaimed solo and collaborative albums for nearly three decades, and has built an adoring fan base. But readers don’t need to be familiar with her music to be moved by her raw, unflinching memoir, which chronicles her impoverished and at times surreal upbringing as well as her long journey toward self-confidence. It’s a book that mixes defiant humor with an unsentimental resilience that recalls Cheryl Strayed.

“I wasn’t going to go tabloid,” Case said with a dry shrug, sitting in a booth at the Cosmic Diner in Manhattan on a recent, chilly Saturday morning. “I never had sex with famous people, so.”

Still, the book depicts Case’s early life as a minefield of emotional trauma. In a phone interview, A.C. Newman, her longtime bandmate in the power-pop group the New Pornographers, recalled a mutual friend once marveling of Case, “For her to achieve what she’s done, considering where she came from, it’s like winning a marathon with one leg.”

At the diner, Case, now 54, wore a dark-blue button-down, and her predominantly gray mane was skunked with a streak of flaming auburn. At one point she interrupted herself to look — respectfully — at a neighboring table’s breakfast order. “That’s a good-looking pancake,” she said. “I don’t want to stare a hole in their pancakes, but wow.”

Case has lately become a regular at this Midtown restaurant, splitting her time between New York and her Vermont home because of another exciting project she’s working on nearby: She is collaborating on the songs for a musical adaptation of “Thelma & Louise” that she hopes is bound for Broadway in the next year or two. “I was the target audience for that movie,” Case said of the 1991 hit. “I was exactly the right age. I saw it trillions of times.”

Callie Khouri, who wrote the film’s Oscar-winning screenplay and is also writing the musical’s book, was a fan of Case’s music and selected her personally to work on the musical. “Her music has such scope, sonically and lyrically,” Khouri said in a phone interview. “She’s such a righteous, true-north artist and person.”

Case is plain-spoken about the financial realities of being a working musician; she said she wrote the book mainly because she needed another source of income while the pandemic kept her from touring. Later in 2025, she will also release her first new album in seven years, which she described as an explicit rebuttal to what she sees as the digital era’s dehumanization of her industry. She intentionally employed more musicians than usual; some tracks feature an entire orchestra.

“I wanted everything to be played by real people,” she said, “to show how we fill space differently.”

Fans of her off-kilter, country-tinged albums like the Grammy-nominated 2009 release “Middle Cyclone” are unlikely to be surprised that Case writes uncommonly vivid and lyrical prose. Her mother’s pale-green station wagon, for instance, looks like “a nauseous basking shark.” The grasses of northern Washington house “grasshoppers the size of staplers with underwings like striped blushing flamenco skirts.” On a class trip, when her father packed an inadequate lunch (a few sad slices of cheese), a teacher’s aide gave her a pitying look and the young Case “dragged that shame around like a wet wool cape.”

The most startling revelations in the book are about Case’s mother. The musician writes that when she was in second grade and her parents were separated, her father picked her up from school one day, burst into tears and told her that her mother had died of cancer. She was stunned.

An emotionally somnambulant year and a half later, her father just as suddenly announced that her mother was alive and, actually, they were on their way to see her just then. When mother and daughter were reunited, Case writes that her parents informed her that her mother had been sick with a potentially fatal disease and fled to Hawaii for treatment, so her daughter would not have to see her suffer. Case was too young and vulnerable to question the story. “I forgave her with such desperate haste, I didn’t even have time to be mad,” she writes.

Her mother flickered in and out of her life for the next several decades, but even when they were living under the same roof, Case came to experience her mother like “a deer, always just out of reach,” she writes.

After a final, failed attempt at reconnection when Case was in her late 30s — her mother moved in with her when she was living in Tucson and suddenly left without a word — Case cut ties with her mother for good. Shortly after, as she writes in the book, she had a revelation: Perhaps her mother had never been sick at all. The thought was at once crushing and profoundly liberating.

“There was much I could have forgiven,” she writes. “But it was the grift of her that ground that down — that love held out to dance before me, always snatched back just as I reached out my arms for it.” (Attempts to reach Case’s mother for comment were unsuccessful.)

“I guess I was an over-sharer out of desperation, like, ‘Please, notice me,’” Case said, noting that there is nothing in the book about her childhood that her closest friends do not already know. Newman, though, is relieved that others “can now read her story” and understand the scope of what she has endured. “Sometimes, when Neko was being kind of hard to deal with, I’d always have that in the back of my mind,” he said. “Like, I can’t tell you guys, but holy [expletive].”

When asked if any of these revelations were difficult to disclose in such a public manner, Case just shrugged. “So much has been done to me where I haven’t been considered,” she said. “I don’t have any guilt.”

CASE’S DISTINCT VOICE is as mighty as a canyon; she often sings like someone hollering into a void and pausing to let her echo confidently resound.

“We were all kind of shocked she could sing so well,” Newman remembered. He met Case in the tight-knit Vancouver indie music scene in the mid-90s, when she was playing drums in the punk trio Maow. When he heard her sing at a friend’s wedding around that time — she belted out a rendition of the Students’ 1958 doo-wop tune “I’m So Young” — his jaw dropped.

“That’s when I wanted to work with her,” Newman said. “I felt like I was getting in on the ground floor of something, like I’d found this friend who had an incredible voice, but nobody else knew about it yet.”

Case’s debut album, “The Virginian,” recorded with a rotating backing band she cheekily dubbed Her Boyfriends, came out in 1997. “It sounds terrified to me,” she said now. “I’m just like, ahhhh! Singing on 10 the whole time. No dynamic whatsoever.”

But Case found acclaim as she honed her talent over her next few albums. Learning tenor guitar — a four-stringed instrument initially made for banjo players — unlocked a unique sound and sensibility in her songwriting. Newman marveled at her rapid creative growth over that period: Each album, he said, “felt very much like a leap forward.”

Still, Case’s brief forays down the music industry’s more mainstream avenues made her feel that she didn’t quite belong. In the book, she tells her side of a long-rumored story about the Grand Ole Opry. While playing an outdoor festival on its plaza in July 2001, on the brink of heat stroke, she stripped down to her bra.

“It wasn’t an act of punk-rock defiance,” she writes. “I just had an animal need to cool down in any way possible.” The Opry management cut the power and after her truncated set “delivered the classic line,” Case writes, “‘You’ll NEVER play in this town again!’” (Representatives for the Opry said the event predates its current management team, and that “Neko Case is most welcome at the Grand Ole Opry and is among the many artists we’d love to welcome for an official Opry debut in 2025.”)

“I thought about what men had to do to get banned from the Opry,” she writes. Jerry Lee Lewis dropped an expletive on the air. Hank Williams got so wasted, he failed to show up. She eventually chalked the incident up to sexism, but she thinks the situation for female artists in country music is now “worse than it’s ever been.”

“Women have actually been demoted,” she said at the diner, pointing to incidents like the so-called “Tomato-gate,” a 2015 controversy in which a radio programmer recommended limiting female artists’ airplay, likening them to “the tomatoes of our salad” in a trade publication.

“It’s not true at all,” Case said unequivocally. “People don’t turn off their radios because women come on the radio.”

But she has seen firsthand how difficult it is to challenge the full force of the industry. “The gatekeepers are so thick, and they’re everywhere,” she added. “I always feel like people just need to start a new country music.”

Over the years she’s done just that, and beyond. Case’s songs have a spaciousness and a sense of possibility that far exceed the confines of genre. Her music is deeply in touch with the expansiveness of the natural world, and that gives her narration a kind of shape-shifting power: She has written songs from the perspective of killer whales and tornadoes, wronged, aching women and gruff, swaggering men.

“Her songs have always been little movies to me,” said her longtime friend Paul Rigby, a Vancouver-based musician with a jazz background who has been collaborating with Case since 2006. “There are things that are based in reality, but there’s also fantastical stuff. I think it’s very important to her to try to understand what she thinks is her part in the world.”

NOT LONG AFTER “The Virginian” was released, a major label came courting. “Picture it like something out of a fairy tale,” she writes. “There’s a knock at the door, a fascinating stranger stands outside, and they want to grant you all your wishes!” It was like she was a child blinking horses into existence all over again. The label flew her to Los Angeles, wined and dined her — and then the deal suddenly fell through.

“It was such a farce,” Case said, as a waiter cleared her empty breakfast plate. But does she ever wonder what would have happened if she had been on that promised fast track to success? “I don’t think I would have gone very far,” she admitted, “because I just didn’t have the confidence or the skills yet. I wouldn’t have become really famous and gotten weird or anything. I think I just would have gotten kicked out early.”

Instead, over the course of nearly three decades, she’s painstakingly built something more enduring and true to herself. “She’s a person who knows so deeply who she is, and makes no bones about it,” Khouri said. “She’s not a person who is looking at herself and wondering what the world is thinking of her. She’s standing her ground, looking out at the world and saying, ‘Shouldn’t we all be trying to do better?’

Case now knows that she did not actually make those horses appear all those years ago by magic. That doesn’t mean they weren’t important, though.

“As time went on, I began to understand in a new way the appearance of the horses when I was a kid,” she writes. “Not as something that would swoop in and fix me, but as a force pushing me to keep orienting myself toward the cinnamon scent of what was right and good for me.”

“It was like an engine that was running so hard all the time,” Case said of her drive, and that constant thrust of creative momentum. “I was always running away from things, too, like I just very much did not want to be in my old life.”

“The momentum was so great in me that I didn’t ever stop to try and understand it,” she added. “So maybe that’s what kept it going.”