I don’t know if Sinéad O’Connor has a folder on her laptop labelled “Vindications” but, if so, one would imagine it has exceeded any conceivable storage space. Rememberings is the singer’s first memoir, and while in it she expresses a tremendous amount of admiration for the books of her brother, Joseph O’Connor, there is no mimicry here, of a family member of otherwise.
This is all Sinéad, so deftly written, so fundamentally in and of her own voice (its singing version encapsulated by Anita Baker describing it here as “cavernous”), 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.
At the outset, O’Connor outlines two distinctive voices in the book, one leading up to the tearing of the pope’s picture on Saturday Night Life in 1992, and one afterwards. This is because, as she explains, “it took me four years to write anything after ‘the pope chapters’ (the night before and the night of SNL), years during which I lived in and out of mental-health institutions sorting out my reasons for not being present”.
That shift in tone – from an unmoored child and teenager writing about her creative progression in the present tense, to a self-reflecting woman traversing the rocky terrain of mental strain – is only perceptible after the fact.
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.
Among the turmoil and pain of her upbringing, and a stint in a reform school, O’Connor’s tales of busking and stealing, poring over her mother’s record collection, and eventually busting out of Dublin, is a story of someone willing herself into being, someone who used to carry around an empty guitar case to look cool, and ended up being the cool person people would attempt to emulate – although good luck to anyone who ever tried.
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. Want to feel sorry for her? Tough. Her honest and rational framing that it was in fact having a number one record that derailed her career, and tearing up a picture of the pope put her back on the right track, completely usurps and undercuts any lingering pity or writing-off that casual observers may have.
Hysterical shouting-down
America still clutches its pearls when artists don’t conform. Even today, the likes of Cardi B and Lil Nas X are attacked for embracing their sexual selves in a way that is still viewed by network news hysteria as inappropriately transgressive. That’s not to say that such ridiculous controversies do not brew elsewhere, but O’Connor’s career was less under threat outside of the US, in places where punk ain’t dead.
Her perseverance was not a given. Many, many others would have crumpled under the hysterical shouting-down. Yet, throughout, the songs were grips to hold on to. O’Connor’s voice commands attention, but often less focus is placed on her songwriting. Thankfully there’s a chapter on each of her albums, casually detailing how such masterworks were made. She also touches on her microphone technique, one of her great and under-interrogated musical powers, using distance and movement much as Clara Rockmore mastered the theremin.
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. Yes, other famous people pop up in places (in a world of bizarre Prince anecdotes, O’Connor details a horrifying night in his presence) but they’re not included for namedropping juice.
Instead, what is offered is a document of a deeply spiritual exploration of life. Repeatedly, her gravitation towards and appreciation for Rastafarian spiritualism and culture, along with her deep attachment to reggae, and scripture, rise up. Ghosts, hauntings, ethereal beings, angels and callings are all here as well, relayed with authenticity, clarity and honesty.
It’s incredibly liberating to read how O’Connor undercut fame at moments of various hugeness, be that prioritising hang-out time with Rastafarians at a juice bar in New York, or returning to Dublin in 1993 to take group vocal lessons with Frank Merriman. She admits, in various ways, that she’s not the easiest person in the world to deal with. But who cares? As she dropped in the comments section of her own interview in the New York Times: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
O’Connor’s life, like those of so many girls and women in Ireland and elsewhere, was honed and hemmed by the spiked pillar of Ireland’s theocracy – misogyny. This imposed hatred and shame beat down and away those perceived to deviate from the narrow, constricting tracks made available to women and girls especially as the only avenues their lives were permitted to travel along. O’Connor’s artistry compelled her to go off-road. There was no choice. Forever attached to Ireland and Irishness, O’Connor left and returned, left and returned.
‘Songs are ghosts’
For decades now, she continues to accumulate new fans, deeper appreciations, more thorough explorations of her catalogue, and the growing love of expanding crowds who greet her transmissions with a sort of invisible but emphatic air-punch. O’Connor’s songs are of her, but through them others feel seen. As she writes (in the present tense) about developing her debut record: “I’m lonely but I’m writing songs for my first album, and songs are a lonely person’s occupation; songs are ghosts. When my album comes out I’ll be a travelling ‘ghost-delivery woman’. There’ll be a lifetime of goodbyes. I can’t have a problem with that.”
One also forgets how young O’Connor was at the outset of her remarkable trajectory, and how so many of her compositions came from a well of teenage genius. “I was very young when my career kicked off,” O’Connor writes. “I never had or took the time to ‘find myself’. But I think you’ll see in this book a girl who does find herself, not by success in the music industry but by taking the opportunity to sensibly and truly lose her marbles. The thing being that after losing them, one finds them and plays the game better. I am an older woman now with a different voice.”
In stepping back from Rememberings as an artwork, we can see O’Connor as both a bodily territory that misogyny, conservatism and general squareness attempted to attack, colonise and oppress; but also an instructive example of an active and ongoing living process of liberation from all that. Such righteous resistance was not without personal cost. But the real value here for readers is the uplifting realisation that no matter how inhospitable environments often were to O’Connor’s personal and artistic habitat, she still moved through a country, a world and a toxic industry with one overarching characteristic informing every breath and action: integrity.
Inspiring, liberating, hilarious and fascinating – Rememberings is many things, not least a manual for any artist seeking to reaffirm or rediscover that integrity matters as much as connection, and that deeper and higher spiritual callings and intentions will give rise to an infinitely more meaningful legacy than the parody-pursuit of fame or material success.
All along, Sinéad O’Connor was not lost. She was on a horizon far ahead, telling us stories from the future, willing everyone to examine their surroundings and, for God’s sake, to catch up. Better late than never.
