BAKERSFIELD, Calif. -- Fist-in-your-face fiction may have hit the literary mainstream decades ago via the Beat Generation, but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for new gender perspectives and love stories set in the gritty dives of American subculture.

Stephanie Kuehnert’s MTV Books novel, “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” reflects on female misadventures and coming of age in the male-dominated music underground of the 1980s and 1990s. It’s an ode to music scenes, anti-mainstream culture and girl rock bands.

Yet “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” isn’t just about love, music or teen angst crushed amongst a whirl of rocker sweat and guitar riffs. The novel’s core seeks answers to a failed mother-daughter relationship. That idea of failed parenthood explores ideals wrapped around the uncertainty of the underground punk music scene, where musicians traverse the American landscape through scene hangouts in a darker, grittier side of frustrated, dislocated youth culture. That culture includes women who are the scene’s leaders, but whose angst may be the victim of a partially loveless society.

Through a narrative that hauntingly captures disfranchised youth, “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” deeply explores women’s issues such as rape victim isolationism and the exploration of psychoses based on women being sucked into a rock scene that seems to suggest that even if you’re in a rock band, it still must submit to the harsh world of male-powered testosterone-driven music.

Instead of a deadbeat dad running away from home, Kuehnert’s story is a strange reversal of early counterculture novels like Jack Kerouac’s “Town and the City” and “Maggie Cassady.” In those novels, small-town mindsets entrap most inhabitants, while few pull away into a magnetic counterculture or the enchantment of big cities. Lives are torn apart, relationships broken, and in the case of Kuehnert’s novel, a father’s utopian views of small town life and big city music are just a cover-up for failure to move on, and a failure to provide a realistic view of abandonment for Emily, the teenage rock-hungry protagonist in the story.

And that’s without Kuehnert even being a fan of early counterculture literature. Apparently she’s been a literary sort of rebel herself. “Actually other than Burroughs I've never been big into the Beats. My father loved them so I rebelled and stayed away.”

Yet Kuehnerts novel exhibits glimmers from matriarchs of the Beat generation. The straight-forward prose at times catapults like Diane DiPrima’s “Memoirs of a Beatnik” and echoes Carolyn Cassady’s Beat-muse memoirs. Her book also exhibits the darkness of Jan Kerouac’s haunting “Baby Driver” (daughter of Jack Kerouac). Though a fictitious tale, whether a lover of punk, post-punk, or women in bands, one can’t help but find solace in a character like Emily, who on one simple level, shares an appreciation for disastrous guitar riffs and echoing tributes to bands like Sonic Youth who made their mark in the 1990s.

When asked if she ever thought to soften Emily’s hard-edged character, Kuehnert said, “I never had the urge to make Emily anything but Emily. I'm a very character driven writer so I let my characters guide me.”

Though not as dark and dismal or drug-seeped as Lisa Crystal Carver’s punk memoir, “Drugs Are Nice,” Kuehnert’s novel is still another ode to gender-specific punk treatises that describe women as integral to music scene undergrounds, not just as part of a double-standard of groupie vs. rock star sex objects, but as creators themselves in a rock world still dominated by men.

Stephanie Kuehnert is hosting the "RockNRead" at the Virgin Megastore in Hollywood this Sunday, July 13. Bakersfield will be represented by bands Norfolk and Dirty Spanglish and local author N.L. Belardes. The event was created by Kuehnert and young adult fiction author of “Frenemies,” Alexa Young.

Young said, "I spent the first six years of my professional life in the music industry, and music plays a fairly large role in "Frenemies" as well. So, the idea of bringing bands and authors together on one stage was a natural fit for both of us and we quickly began brainstorming how we could make that happen."

“I really wanted to do an event with music and books since those are basically my two favorite things,” Kuehnert said.

Kuehnert next hopes to take her celebration of literature and music to her hometown of Chicago.

Buzz Bands: Bako Talent At The RockNRead!