Lola Kirke’s Wild West Village Is A Love Letter To The First Gen Of Rock Star Children

In some West Village circles, Sant Ambroeus on West Fourth Street is the town square. Nestled between the Perry Street Workshop (long rumored to be the most celebrity-friendly Alcoholics Anonymous location in the city) and Carrie Bradshaw’s brownstone, the restaurant is a haven for off-duty celebrities like Camila Morrone or surprising duo Timothée Chalamet and Larry David, who were papped having espresso martinis on the patio in 2021. So when it came time to discuss actor and local Lola Kirke’s debut book, Wild West Village, it only made sense to meet here.

The neighborhood’s lore is something Kirke has spent the past few years interrogating. “The one thing I really researched [for this book] was like, ‘What the f*ck is the West Village? What was the aesthetic understanding of what it meant to live here?’” Kirke tells me over a bowl of cacio e pepe and a round of sauvignon blanc. “And it was like, ‘This was the land of the bohemian and the beautiful.’”

For the 34-year-old in particular, growing up in the West Village meant spending her adolescence amongst what she’s dubbed “the first generation of rock star’s children.” Kirke was 5 years old when her parents — Simon Kirke, the drummer for Bad Company and Free, and Lorraine Kirke, owner of famed vintage shop, Geminola — uprooted their family from London to a West Village brownstone. There, she was babysat by Liv Tyler, became friends with Zoe Kravitz, and even lived with Courtney Love. (The Hole guitarist both flooded and set fire to the Kirke home while crashing there for a stretch.)

“All those rock stars did not have rock star parents. Their parents were bus drivers, in the case of my dad. And rock was this rebellion against the boredom and loneliness of 1950s America and England,” says Kirke, who moved to Nashville in 2020 — but still maintains an apartment in Manhattan — to pursue a career in country music (her own personal rebellion). “You see a lot of people do what they saw their artist parents do, which is use drugs. Then you have this weird thing where they're like, the artist without the art. They just lived the artist's lifestyle.”

It’s a tension that Wild West Village teems with. Set against the backdrop of early-2000s hipster-era downtown Manhattan, Kirke details both the sexiness and succubus-ness of the party scene. (See: her telling of a family wedding where she got drunk on purple champagne, rubbed shoulders with Kate Moss, and woke up in an unnamed rocker’s mansion.)

But the heart of the story lies in her ache — as well as her sisters’, Girls star Jemima Kirke and musician Domino Kirke — to truly commit to the art, rather than just the lifestyle. “I believed if I was good at something, then all the badness would stop. The brighter I shine, maybe the darkness that I have come from can dissipate,” Kirke says, referring to the pervasive substance abuse amongst her family and friends. And for a while, it seemed to work. In 2014, Kirke starred in Mozart in the Jungle, appeared in Gone Girl, and went on to co-star with Greta Gerwig in Mistress America. But she came to realize, “I could never be bright enough to make darkness go away.”

That desire within Kirke is something she has since begun working through in ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families), as well as in the writing process. “When I started writing, I felt like a bit of a fraud because I didn’t have a drug addiction. But I wish I read more books about people being like, ‘My sister really struggled. My dad really struggled and that made me feel pretty neglected, whether that was true or not,’" Kirke says. “A big part of my life, and I write about this a lot in the book, was like, I’m not f*cked up enough to get the attention and I'm not good enough to make the f*cked up people be less f*cked up. So I'm just in this kind of no man's land.”

While she worried about sharing Wild West Village with her family, the experience turned out to be incredibly cathartic. Jemima has spoken out about how reading it made her regret the way she treated her sister growing up, while Domino instantly proclaimed the book “brilliant.” Now, the only relationship Kirke has left to contend with is hers with the West Village.

“I was sitting at Tartine the other day and I looked out the window and I saw that one whole street had just been turned into a singular brownstone. And I was like, ‘Why are you here? Just move to Connecticut,’” she says as we walk past the restaurant’s Bank Street corner. “You’re erasing the importance and the identity of this place when you decide that you need three brownstones to live here.” But thanks to Kirke, the world will now always have Wild West Village to serve as a testament to the neighborhood’s true identity — no matter how many mega-brownstones are built in its wake.

Photos: Celeste Sloman

Hair and Makeup: Regina Harris