FROM where she is Kim Gordon can almost see the ocean.

It's a sunny, high-contrast February day in Los Angeles, the city she grew up in and likes above all others. The view is bright. The view is clear.

Would that I, 5123 miles away (approximately) in Scotland, could say the same.

It's a Thursday night, Falkirk time, when I phone her. She doesn't seem to have been expecting my call but she's happy to talk. Up to a point.

That point is the problem. The context of our conversation is a book she has written, Girl In A Band. An account of her life and her music, of growing up in Los Angeles, becoming an artist, joining said band (the highly influential if not mega-successful noise rock outfit Sonic Youth, if you didn't know) in New York at the start of the 1980s, and becoming an alternative rock icon in the process. It's very good. Candid and raw. Here you'll find her account of what it's like having a brother who's "sadistic, arrogant, almost unbearably articulate" and, it becomes clear to everyone but her parents, showing symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia (by the 1970s he would regularly be sent to the local psychiatric ward). Here, too, you'll find an unvarnished, blood-drawing account of the end of her marriage to fellow Sonic Youther Thurston Moore, "just another cliche of middle-aged relationship failure - a male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life". (The book begins with the band's last ever concert at the end of a tour that came after the dissolution of their 27-year marriage.)

There are also sharp side glances at everyone who came within her orbit, from Madonna to Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love (suffice to say, she's not keen on Courtney: "No-one ever questions the disorder behind her tarantula LA glamour - sociopathy, narcissism - because it's good rock and roll, good entertainment! ... I have a low tolerance for manipulative, egomaniacal behaviour).

But that openness on the page is not matched in conversation. On the phone, every time I raise some of the more personal stuff in the book she retreats to muttered "I don't knows", uneasy silences and short, passive-aggressive answers. On growing up in LA's end-of-hippy-days up with her brother Keller who, she says in print, constantly tormented her, she offers nothing more than "it was painful".

On Courtney: "The only reason I talk about her is because I want people to know what happened in her relationship to the Riot Grrrl movement . That's all really." (Love punched Bikini Kill's front woman Kathleen Hanna in the face on the first night of the Lollapalooza tour in 1995.)

And as for her ex-husband whom she married in 1984, she says only: "I kind of wrote about it in the book so I don't want to talk about it."

Is this snotty rock and roll behaviour, an F-you to the nosey journalist? Maybe not. Maybe talking about this stuff is just difficult. Maybe it still hurts.

Or it may simply be she has been surprised by the response to the book. For the first time, she says, people are interested in her and maybe she's not ready for that. At one point I ask her if there's any trepidation now that the memoir is coming out. "A little bit, I guess. I hadn't thought that much about it. About what it would be like. I don't really know the publishing business. The machinery of the publishing business. I only know being ignored by the record industry. It's a new thing. It's probably the most conventional thing I've ever done. It's a little overwhelming."

The temptation then is to cast her as a rabbit in the headlights, hypnotised at what's coming down the tracks. All that attention barrelling towards her.

In some senses that chimes with the undertow of the book itself. The distance between the image of the cool, aloof alternative rock star and the reality. "Onstage," she writes, "people have told me, I'm opaque or mysterious or enigmatic or even cold. But more than any of those things, I'm extremely shy and sensitive."

It does rather raise the question why she decided to write the book in the first place. "Well, a number of reasons. It hadn't occurred to me do to a memoir but people started asking. It sometimes seems life jumps in front of you so you get on with it. And I had a motive, trying to figure out how I got to be where I am. Looking back on my life and writing is a way to think for me. And so it seemed like a good thing to do ... to get some perspective."

Was it fun to do? She laughs. "Parts of it were. Writing about LA. I like writing." She pauses, rewrites that last answer. "I've got a hate/love kind of thing."

You do wonder how you process the end of such a long marriage and artistic collaboration and pin it to the page, though. "I guess I like risk-taking. I wanted to make something constructive out of the experience.

"And the break-up was just part of the story so I kind of had to put it in as part of the story."

The line everyone is quoting about the end of her relationship with Moore is the one about "the co-dependent woman, the narcissistic man, stale words lifted from therapy that I nonetheless think about a lot these days". But just as telling is the point where she says she became a surrogate mother for Moore. "Yeah," she says, almost engaging. "That's a two-way thing, you know."

Maybe we should talk about other things. Maybe we should talk about gender. Because Girl In A Band is very insightful on the different demands made on women in the music industry and in life in general. She writes with guarded approval of Madonna whose track, Into The Groove, Sonic Youth would cover under their Ciccone Youth banner. "To me she seemed joyful, celebrating her own body," Gordon writes. But as she then points out, where Madonna led, the pornification of female sexuality quickly followed.

So the question to ask is if there is still anything positive to come out of women being open about their sexuality in a pop context when it is so easily commodified? "Yeah, I don't know. I think there are performers who use it more interestingly than others. I like Iggy Azalea. I think she does it really well."

Girls, she writes in the book, grow up with a desire to please. Is it possible to grow out of that though, I ask? "Yeah," she laughs again. "That would be nice. The other night all these people came into our dressing room at the end of our show and people were partying. I didn't know who anyone was. I suddenly looked up and this guy was taking pictures and I was like, 'Uuh, can you leave? What are you doing here?' I guess I wouldn't have done that before."

Art - both visual art and musical performance - has always been a form of escape from the chaos of life for her. Has it ever failed her? "No, not really. Early on when I was in New York it was a struggle. I felt such an outsider. I didn't really know how to find a gallery and I had no money. But I never really thought I wouldn't do it and I never really thought of doing anything else."

Art and music are different pleasures, she says. "I guess I seem to need both. I always thought that was such a conflict for such a long time and wanted to keep them separate. Now they are merging a little more and I realise they're just different means of expression.

"Music is more performative. It's more immediate. Art is more conceptual, more of an intellectual process. I think music is more of a physical, visceral and emotional experience."

And maybe a male experience. She writes that she joined Sonic Youth because she wanted to be part of a "male dynamic". What was so attractive about that?

"I loved music but maybe it was just because I had such a sh*** relationship with my brother so I was seeking out a better brother relationship with guys ... or something."

We talk a bit more. About New York and Los Angeles, about Soundcloud, but our time is almost up. You wonder now how she looks back on her time in Sonic Youth. Has all the emotional turbulence that surrounded the end of her marriage tainted the memory of her artistic collaboration with her ex-husband? "Umm, for most of it not. Maybe the end. The last couple of records. But most of it, no."

She still has her art, and now, on the evidence of Girl In A Band, her writing. Will she write more? "Possibly, I'm just trying to get through this. I realise now why people only do one book."

I leave her to the sunlight. It has its advantages. It casts bigger shadows to hide in.

Girl In A Band by Kim Gordon is published by Faber, £14.99.