Sinéad O’Connor knows exactly who she is: a review of Souvenirs

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I was 16 in October 1992, when Sinéad O’Connor appeared on the stage of Saturday Night Live dressed in a white lace dress reminiscent of the one Catholic girls wear in our first communions, sang a capella of Bob Marley’s “war”, then tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II shouting: “Fight the war” real enemy ”, leaving the audience in stunned silence. I was horrified. I couldn’t help but feel the same kind of awe that I might feel for a classmate shouting the f-word during a mass at school. Yet I had always thought of the Pope as a benevolent Polish grandfather. I couldn’t imagine what he had done to elicit such a response.

Watching the clip almost 30 years later, knowing what I know about child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and John Paul II’s complicity in protecting abusive clergy, I think it should have been pretty clear against what O’Connor was protesting by the way she substituted “child abuse” and “child” in place of the original lyrics. But his rage was not only institutional, it was also personal. The photo she tore up hung on the wall in her late mother’s bedroom. “It represented lies, liars and abuse,” she wrote in her memoir, Memories, and the abuse she was protesting was, in large part, hers.

Memories is building around this pivotal moment in her early career, so by the time we reach it we know the horrors she experienced at the hands of her mentally ill mother, who often forced her to strip and then dress her up. beat with a broomstick. She also locked her in her room, left her alone at home, and starved her. At the age of 14, O’Connor was sent to An Grianán, an Irish institution for troubled girls adjacent to the famous Magdalene laundries for ‘fallen women’, where she herself learned to play the guitar.

When her mother passed away, O’Connor took the photo on the bedroom wall and took it with her wherever she went, always intending to destroy it in an act of public protest. Looking back, it’s chilling to review the shame and insults that O’Connor suffered after she did so, including public threats of physical violence made by a cultural Catholic icon no less than Frank Sinatra, unimaginable at the time of Me Too. But in the early ’90s, a woman speaking out boldly against institutional and personal violations was called “insane” and swept from the limelight thanks to a Grammy-winning album and a number one hit, a version of “Nothing Compares” by Prince. 2 U. “When she walks backstage after the SNL performance, “all doors have been closed.” Literally. People are hiding from her.

And that should have been the end of his career. She went from chart-topping star to show biz pariah overnight. But those of us who were captivated by her personality and singular voice – and in awe of her obvious courage, even if we are unsure of her source or purpose – followed her as she produced. album after album, reinventing itself, changing religion and even name. several times. The stain of SNL, and later, a very public mental health crisis remains. This is even the occasion of this book: O’Connor doesn’t want anyone else to tell his story.

Memories is structured roughly like “before SNL” and after SNL. Still, she insists the response to her protest got her back on track: ‘Everyone wants a pop star,’ she writes, ‘but I’m a protest singer.’

In the years that followed, she also proved to be a prophet. She sounded the alarm bells in the Catholic Church decades before most of us would listen to her. She writes that she had no desire for glory, only to “keep the contract I made with God before making one with the music world.” After SNL, she had the freedom to be who she is: “imperfect.” Be crazy, even.

And yes, she is mentally ill. She writes without varnish or shame about her breakdowns and hospitalizations. We so often demand that victims of abuse be sane and perfect to be believed and trustworthy. O’Connor’s story is about being both mentally ill and a truth teller. Memories clarifies that if her name is Sinéad O’Connor or Magda Davitt or Shuhada Sadaqat, the woman knows exactly who she is, and it is not one or the other; it is both and.

O’Connor is well aware that she is not always sympathetic and that she is prone to bad behavior. She is also aware of the many ways in which the people and systems that should have protected her – her parents, the church, the health care system, and even, among them all, American talk show host Dr.Phil – l ‘failed or betrayed. And yet, there is no trace of rawness in his words.

In the audio version of Memories, which she reads delightfully herself, you can hear the emotion in her voice as she talks about those she loves, including those she has hurt and those who have hurt her. She writes with emotion on each of her four children in their particularity, on her ex-husband, her parents, her siblings and half-brothers. You can also hear the low-key fun and dark humor with which she recounts childhood antics and some of the most incredible moments of her adulthood, including a bizarre episode at Prince’s House in Los Angeles that included “Old Fluffy Cuffs” trying to intimidate him by insisting that she. . . eat soup.

O’Connor warns in the introduction that she is not Shakespeare. Corn Memories reveals that she is a gifted storyteller as well as a soft-hearted contrarian with a knack for putting her finger in the eyes of the powerful. There, no surprise. Readers might be surprised to find out that she is also a sincerely religious person – and I mean religious. Describing her as “spiritual” doesn’t quite reflect how she stubbornly explored various religious practices and sought wisdom within different traditions.

His writing is full of biblical allusions; the songs from his eighth album, Theology, were all scriptural. She is perhaps one of the most famous non-practicing Catholics, but in a first chapter she writes with conviction about the miracles of Lourdes, which she herself experienced as a girl, and about the fact of ‘to be comforted by Jesus during his own abuses. She claims that she probably became a singer because she couldn’t become a Catholic priest. But she also learned from Rastafarians and Kabbalists and anyone who had a conversation with her on a sidewalk or in a juice bar. Now she says she is at home in Islam; she has been wearing the hijab on her iconic shaved head since 2018.

O’Connor is back in Ireland now, chain smoking cigarettes on her porch and also training to be a health worker, wishing she could have done it before the pandemic struck so she could s ‘care for the dying – when she’s not on tour. She says she always wanted to do something beautiful for God, and yet she writes, “I have only done one holy thing in my life and that was to sing. . . . I hope it is true that God loves a singer.

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