Brix Smith Start

Brix Smith Start built a career across guitar, songwriting, broadcasting, and fashion entrepreneurship after moving from America to Britain. The Rise, The Fall, and The Rise recounts her childhood in the Hollywood Hills, move to 1980s Manchester, years in the post-punk band the Fall, and later reinvention in television and retail. Her account places creative work beside the personal pressures surrounding it, including her marriage to bandleader Mark E. Smith and the group's difficult internal culture. Faber & Faber first published the memoir in 2016, with a paperback following in 2017. Smith Start later led her own band and returned to recording with Brix & the Extricated. The title's repeated movement upward captures the book's structure more accurately than a straightforward celebrity chronology would. She writes about setbacks as changes in agency, showing how a musician once defined through a famous band learned to claim authorship across performance, business, fashion, and memoir.