RaveThe Sunday TimesLike her songs, it is looping, digressive and unpredictable. There are multiple books wriggling inside its cover: a family history, a meditation on grief, tracts on female beauty and on anger. There’s even a guide to middle-aged dating, with Albertine detailing her encounters with dysfunctional men like a Vivienne Westwood-clad Nora Ephron ... She might be writing about the mundane, but her take on it never is ... Albertine’s writing is not indulgently cathartic but fierce, direct, unashamed. She masks nothing. The result is a book that does for the family memoir what its predecessor did for the rock autobiography: scythes through the myths, the distortions, the adornments and finds the rich, distinctive stories beneath.
