One night before either of them got famous, Kathleen Hanna and her friend Kurt Cobain got drunk and trashed the bedroom of his Olympia, Wash., apartment. At one point, Hanna took a marker and wrote “Kurt is the keeper of the kennel … Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on the wall. She’s not sure what she meant, exactly, she admits in her new memoir, “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk.” She’d seen Teen Spirit deodorant in a store earlier and thought it sounded funny. When Cobain later called and asked if he could appropriate the phrase for his band, Nirvana, she absent-mindedly said yes.

For Hanna, the success of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” changed everything, and nothing. It made Nirvana the biggest band in the world, but Hanna, frontwoman of the underground punk band Bikini Kill and reluctant leader of the Riot Grrrl movement that birthed it, remained largely as she was.

Life in Bikini Kill was a constant physical, emotional and financial struggle. Hanna took a second job as a stripper named Sage at a gentleman’s club near Embassy Row in D.C. to get her tour van out of hock. She lived in constant fear of discovery: Stripping wasn’t very punk rock. One night, a pitiless hipster played “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the jukebox for her to dance to. It was meant to humiliate her, and it did. “I’m sure it was hilarious,” she writes. “I was taking my clothes off to a song I’d written the title to. Kurt was on his way to being a multimillionaire while I was jiggling my a— in a broke-down strip club. Hahaha.”

“Rebel Girl” is an unblinking, purple bruise of a memoir charting Hanna’s tumultuous childhood, her younger years astride the ungovernable force that was Riot Grrrl and her fraught adulthood beyond.

It’s stoic and empathetic in equal measure, particularly in its accounting of Hanna’s girlhood. She grew up in “a home full of creepy tension punctuated by random crises,” with an abusive, alcoholic father who acted so inappropriately with her that Hanna later realized his behavior constituted a form of incest. She escaped to the Evergreen State College in Olympia, where she would soon help launch the DIY collision of feminism, political activism, music and art that would become known as Riot Grrrl.

In Riot Grrrl, she found community. In punk rock, Hanna, a former theater kid, found confidence. “Performing for an audience was changing me,” she writes. “I began entering rooms like a warrior instead of a victim.”

The best parts of “Rebel Girl” detail Hanna’s difficulties navigating a world she and her peers had to make for themselves. In the early ‘90s, it wasn’t just novel for women to front punk bands, it was novel for women to watch punk bands. In their early days, Bikini Kill would summon women toward the stage with the now-famous rallying cry “Girls to the front.” But by the band’s middle years, the mood had darkened. “I wasn’t just saying ‘Girls to the front’ so girls could see us play anymore — we needed them to protect us from guys who wanted to beat us up,” writes Hanna, who once narrowly escaped an audience member swinging a chain at her head.

Although they never sold many albums, Bikini Kill’s fame grew in Nirvana’s slipstream. In 1993, “Rebel Girl,” their ferocious, funny ode to female friendship, became an underground hit — and an unofficial movement anthem. They were followed by paparazzi on their first European tour, and someone sold a candid bathing suit photo of the band to Newsweek. Because much of “Rebel Girl” involves well-meaning people making things unnecessarily difficult for themselves, Bikini Kill decided not to talk to the press, though ancient footage does exist of Hanna giving an interview while wearing a ski mask.

She watched in alarm as cheerier, more compliant versions of Riot Grrrls invaded pop culture: They showed up on the sitcom “Roseanne,” in the form of the Spice Girls and in glossy magazines Hanna couldn’t afford to buy.

Meanwhile, the movement soured. Famously uninterested in intersectionality, beset by scene tourists and what Hanna calls “bullies disguised as progressives,” Riot Grrrl began to eat itself. Even “Girls to the front” had outlived its usefulness; Hanna worried the phrase might alienate trans women. “And what about trans men, nonbinary folks, and BIPOC men? I didn’t want to tell them to go stand in the back.”

Hanna’s female peers resented her for leading a movement that wasn’t supposed to have leaders. Many men saw Bikini Kill as uppity man-haters and separatists. Courtney Love, her finger on the zeitgeist as always, hit Hanna in the face the first time they met. She received no jail time.

A niche celebrity with neither money nor layers of people to insulate her, Hanna felt exposed. “I couldn’t sit at a coffee shop without someone dropping a zine they’d written about how much they hated me down on the table,” she writes. “I’d spent my whole life being treated like a rag doll by men and now fellow punks were following suit. I wasn’t a person anymore; I was ‘Queen Riot Grrrl.’”

“Rebel Girl” can sometimes feel like an unceasing parade of indignities and outrages. Hanna is repeatedly insulted and threatened, mauled, stalked and harassed. She is sexually assaulted several times, once by a close friend.

In her memoir’s final third, Hanna endures the wrenching end of Bikini Kill (they have since reunited several times) and a punishing bout with a debilitating mystery illness that turned out to be Lyme disease — and it’s still the book’s cheeriest section.

When Hanna recounts falling ridiculously in love with Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz after the two grew close on tour, the previously unsentimental “Rebel Girl” turns goofy and sweet, warmth practically radiating off its pages. Hanna, whom Bikini Kill had not made rich, worked an overnight data-entry job to be able to afford bus tickets to visit Horovitz, then in his peak mainstream rock-star era, in New York. Their relationship and eventual marriage almost certainly represented a major shift in altitude for Hanna, though the otherwise candid “Rebel Girl” hardly mentions it.

Hanna also forms and reforms two groups, the Julie Ruin (born from an early lo-fi project) and electro-rock band Le Tigre, with whom she achieves the kind of modest major-label success that would have been unthinkable even a few years earlier.

Last year, Le Tigre reunited for their first tour since 2005; Bikini Kill will tour this summer.

“Singing gave me a career I was once too damaged to enjoy but now find thrilling,” Hanna writes. “Singing has never stopped being the tiny tornado I most want to be in.”