One morning when she was about 7 years old, Neko Case stood on her front porch, closed her eyes and wished with all her might to see a horse.

It was a tall order. She and her parents lived in the coastal city of Bellingham, Washington, and none of their neighbors were equestrians. But, as the musician recalls in her new memoir, “The Harder I Fight the More I Love You,” she “clench-focused as hard as I could,” and when she opened her eyes something incredible had happened: Two gorgeous horses, ridden by two girls, came clomping directly toward her. In the midst of a difficult childhood, this stands out as one fleeting moment when she believed irrefutably in miracles, fairy tales and the possibility that good things could happen to her.

“At 52 years old,” she writes, “I can still see the horses clear as day.”

A cult-favorite singer- songwriter with a gale-force voice and a spiky, irreverent personality, Case has been releasing acclaimed solo and collaborative albums for nearly three decades, and has built an adoring fan base. But readers don’t need to be familiar with her music to be moved by her raw, unflinching memoir — out now — which chronicles her impoverished and at times surreal upbringing as well as her long journey toward self-confidence. It’s a book that mixes defiant humor with an unsentimental resilience that recalls Cheryl Strayed.

“I wasn’t going to go tabloid,” Case said with a dry shrug during a recent interview. “I never had sex with famous people, so.”

Still, the book depicts Case’s early life as a minefield of emotional trauma. In a separate interview, A.C. Newman, her longtime bandmate in the power-pop group the New Pornographers, recalled a mutual friend once marveling of Case, “For her to achieve what she’s done, considering where she came from, it’s like winning a marathon with one leg.”

Case, now 54, has been splitting her time between New York and her Vermont home because of another project she’s working on: She is collaborating on the songs for a musical adaptation of “Thelma & Louise” that she hopes is bound for Broadway in the next year or two. “I was the target audience for that movie,” Case said of the 1991 hit. “I was exactly the right age. I saw it trillions of times.”

Callie Khouri, who wrote the film’s Oscar-winning screenplay and is also writing the musical’s book, was a fan of Case’s music and selected her personally to work on the musical. “Her music has such scope, sonically and lyrically,” Khouri said in an interview. “She’s such a righteous, true-north artist and person.”

Case is plain-spoken about the financial realities of being a working musician; she said she wrote the book mainly because she needed another source of income while the pandemic kept her from touring. Later this year, she will also release her first new album in seven years, which she described as an explicit rebuttal to what she sees as the digital era’s dehumanization of her industry. She intentionally employed more musicians than usual; some tracks feature an entire orchestra.

“I wanted everything to be played by real people,” she said, “to show how we fill space differently.”

Fans of her off-kilter, country-tinged albums like the Grammy-nominated 2009 release, “Middle Cyclone,” are unlikely to be surprised that Case writes uncommonly vivid and lyrical prose. Her mother’s pale-green station wagon, for instance, looks like “a nauseous basking shark.” The grasses of northern Washington house “grasshoppers the size of staplers with underwings like striped blushing flamenco skirts.” On a class trip, when her father packed an inadequate lunch (a few sad slices of cheese), a teacher’s aide gave her a pitying look, and the young Case “dragged that shame around like a wet wool cape.”

The most startling revelations in the book are about Case’s mother. The musician writes that when she was in second grade and her parents were separated, her father picked her up from school one day, burst into tears and told her that her mother had died of cancer. She was stunned.

An emotionally somnambulant year and a half later, her father just as suddenly announced that her mother was alive and, actually, they were on their way to see her just then. When mother and daughter were reunited, Case writes, her parents informed her that her mother had been sick with a potentially fatal disease and fled to Hawaii for treatment so her daughter would not have to see her suffer. Case was too young and vulnerable to question the story.

“I forgave her with such desperate haste, I didn’t even have time to be mad,” she writes.

Her mother flickered in and out of her life for the next several decades, but even when they were living under the same roof, Case came to experience her mother like “a deer, always just out of reach,” she writes.

After a final, failed attempt at reconnection when Case was in her late 30s — her mother moved in with her when she was living in Tucson, Arizona, and suddenly left without a word — Case cut ties with her mother for good. Shortly after, as she writes in the book, she had a revelation: Perhaps her mother had never been sick at all. The thought was at once crushing and profoundly liberating.

“There was much I could have forgiven,” she writes. “But it was the grift of her that ground that down — that love held out to dance before me, always snatched back just as I reached out my arms for it.” (Attempts to reach Case’s mother for comment were unsuccessful.)

Case now knows that she did not actually make those horses appear all those years ago by magic. That doesn’t mean they weren’t important, though.

“As time went on, I began to understand in a new way the appearance of the horses when I was a kid,” she writes. “Not as something that would swoop in and fix me, but as a force pushing me to keep orienting myself toward the cinnamon scent of what was right and good for me.”

“It was like an engine that was running so hard all the time,” Case said of her drive, and that constant thrust of creative momentum. “I was always running away from things, too, like I just very much did not want to be in my old life.

“The momentum was so great in me that I didn’t ever stop to try and understand it,” she added. “So maybe that’s what kept it going.”