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, Wash., 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,” the young Case “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, 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, sitting in a booth at the Cosmic Diner in Manhattan on a recent, chilly Saturday morning. “I never had sex with famous people, so.”

Still, the book depicts Case’s early life as a minefield of emotional trauma. In a phone 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.”