“This is to announce my retirement from touring and from working in the record business. I’ve gotten older and I’m tired. So it’s time for me to hang up my nipple tassels, having truly given my all. NVDA in 2022 will be my last release. And there’ll be no more touring or promo.” It was a shock for Sinéad O'Connor fans when the singer announced in June 2021 that she would stop touring and withdraw from the music business. All planned concerts had to be cancelled, No Veteran Dies Alone planned for January 2022 would be her last album. O'Connor (54) made the announcement on Twitter, a few days after she published her memoir. That memoir is called Rememberings, a candid book in which she spares few people from her environment and least of all herself. With a book like this on which she had worked for years, you would expect that the singer who has struggled with psychological disorders for years would be a little better. But it's very coherent with the book, actually. Her life has had lots of ups and downs, and the book is a testament of this. O'Connor struggles with mental problems. As a child she was beaten by her mother and when she was 11 she was hit by a train door. It gives her a complex post-traumatic stress disorder and after a while she is also diagnosed with borderline disorder. In 2015, she undergoes a hysterectomy – her uterus is excised – which causes a mental crisis. Two years later, she collapses in front of the public. She has extensively discussed this in her recently released autobiography Rememberings.
The book doesn't cover her whole life, but mainly goes back to her early years in music. Since a mental breakdown in 2015, much of her memory has been wiped out. All things considered, her book runs until 1992, where she got stuck six years ago. She only briefly describes the albums she made after that. She doesn't reveal much about her private life either. The result that the book has a very messy structure, and might be even disappointing for some people, but not for me.
In the book, she describes many crucial events in her life in short chapters. Some anecdotes about her visit to Prince at his home that is pretty disturbing, about the the tearing up of a 1992 photo of Pope John Paul II in the much-viewed American TV show Saturday Night Live. Of course those come up in every review of this book, but I was more touched by the other stuff. The bang of a train door that, she now knows, inflicted permanent mental damage on her. The physical abuse by her mother, with whom she had a love-hate relationship and died when Sinéad was 18 years old. Her first steps in the music business shortly afterwards, when she is advised to terminate her pregnancy. In concise, sometimes harsh, often witty terms, she writes the story of a singer who is always at odds with everyone.
She has a uncommon view on life that I admire though, like when she says: 'I have four children from four different men. I was married to one of them, none of the other three men I married fathered any of my children.” And that's fine. I think I would have liked having her as a mother. O'Connor, who converted to Islam in 2018, completed her book at St. Patrick's Hospital, the largest Ireland's psychiatric hospital where she was admitted five years ago. A combination of ptsd, borderline and bipolar disorders is the diagnosis.
If you want to understand who O'Connor is and what her motivations are, this book lays it out bare for you to examine. It's very rare for an artist to be so honest and to reveal her vulnerabilities, but this book made me understand her more and it endeared me to her. She's a good person who needs to be understood. This book is the first step in that understanding.
