From the acclaimed, controversial singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor comes a new memoir of her fraught childhood, musical triumphs, struggles with illness, and of the enduring power of song.
... [a] moving, bawdy, open-wound of a book ... If there’s one thing pop-star memoirs teach us, it’s that fame is pretty much the same for everyone, regardless how they got there: It’s alienating and tedious and terrifying ... a near-unrecognizable version of Prince...like most everything else in this ripper of a memoir...rings true ... There are surprising revelations ... O'Connor's...long overdue for the kind of cultural reconsideration, the collective atonement, that Britney got. We were wrong about her. But O’Connor has little interest in our pity, and even less in being liked.
This is all Sinéad, so deftly written, so fundamentally in and of her own voice...that it’s almost a song in and of itself, giving us the backstory, context, truth, trimmings and transmission, of what makes her such a revolutionary, singular, incomparable artist ... O’Connor has always been an adventurous genre- and tone-shifter, carving out new territory for herself to explore. With Rememberings, she announces herself, intended or not, as a writer one yearns for more work from, if that’s not too selfish a request. People have always demanded things of O’Connor, and there’s a beautiful satisfaction in how Rememberings details, with humility, an artistic life lived on one’s own terms ... The most brilliant chapter runs to just about a page, titled It Aint Necessarily So. O’Connor deconstructs the given narrative America in particular subsumed around the SNL incident, with incredible, eye-widening clarity ... Rememberings shirks the cliches of music memoirs. It’s not so much about a career as it is about a life. Yes, there’s pain, but it’s also brimming with brilliant punchlines, barbs and thigh-slapping moments of hilarity.
... a memoir that, keeping company with its remarkable author, manages to be both fractured and fierce ... Vindications, then, could have been an alternative title for this book, an autobiography that settles scores with almost Morrissey-like zeal, yet maintains an appealing I’d-say-it-to-their-face honesty ... her voice comes through clearly—funny and uncowed. There are heartfelt passages on guardian angels and spiritual manifestations, but there is also robust discourse on tour bus lavatory etiquette and on-the-road sex. If it’s revealing, it’s not uncontrolled: as a singer she knows when to grow loud and when to drop to a lyrical whisper ... The book does lose shape towards the end: a victim, she says, of her weed-smoked memory and mental health issues. Yet there is still illuminating discussion ... O’Connor gets you onside so completely with her direct narrative, you feel you could be in the same room as her. Because of that, you feel genuine warmth towards those who are kind to her ... Rememberings stands as a hard-fought, self-built monument to someone who did it her way.
