Rememberings is Sinéad O’Connor’s memoir. I don’t listen to many audiobooks. When I do, it is because it is narrated by the author. This one was and to great effect. Sinéad had an evocative voice. I find much of her most powerful music has extremely simple lyrics that become multifaceted when they come through her sound. She has an evocative writing voice, too. Difficult, deep truths simply put.
She wrote her book in two spans of time in her life and chronologically, starting with her childhood. This is particularly brave because that childhood was full of malevolent abuse by her mother. She tells her life from birth up to the early 90s. The way she describes finding music as a child is redolent and fundamental. I wanted to shout, “Did you hear that?!” with excitement at my windshield. (At times, I did.) Sinéad describes the beginnings of her career up to and including the whole story of her performance on SNL. You know the one, she tore the photograph of the Pope (a photo that hung in her mother’s house and which she carried with her for years intending to tear apart when the right moment came) and became a tiny, mighty pariah in a moment. She shares it all with us including what she experienced in front of the half booing, half cheering crowd at that unforgettable Bob Dylan celebration a short time later.
These experiences that I’ve known about only in a general sense took on incredible meaning when she tells us in her own words of her own motives. Something particularly powerful to me is how she dispels the idea she’s any sort of prophet as people later called her when the abuse of the Catholic church was finally made mainstream news. She wasn’t telling us something that was unknown or predicting the future, she was trying to call mainstream attention to what was being covered in smaller newspapers in Ireland. She was not a martyr because she was a prophet. She didn’t know something before it was known. We made her a martyr to refuse the truth. Calling her a prophet so many years later is disingenuous and refuses accountability for our choice to vilify her and the abuse survivors she was taking up for. But I digress…
The memoir changes after that both in tone and focus. She explains that she wrote up through the Bob Dylan crowd before having a hysterectomy in 2016. Describing several years of extreme physical and mental trauma, psych hospitalizations, and abuse that followed because no hormone replacement was even mentioned let alone offered by her doctors; she was thrown unprepared into menopause. During this time, the book writing was paused.
The portion of her memoir was recorded is still quite poignant but is noticeably altered in style and focus. Her voice changes. It is still undeniably Sinéad but a changed woman.
Firstly, she tells us that she can no longer remember very much of her history. The record she had already put down about her life up to and just after the SNL photo moment is clear and detailed. After her hysterectomy and the trauma that followed, she simply can’t remember anymore. She leaves the years right after half that crowd booed her off while the other cheered mostly to our imaginations. Trauma simply took those memories.
So, she focuses in the second portion of the book on the experiences of making her albums and what they meant to her. She also talks about motherhood beautifully. Writes a summary of each of her children that reads like a love letter to each one. I found it beautiful to hear a woman who was never ‘mothered,’ and in fact, disdained by her mother, talk about how much being a one herself means to her. She doesn’t talk about being a good one. In fact, she assumes she lacked. When she writes about motherhood, it is gratefulness to the magical beings that made her a mom that comes through.
This shift in tone from explaining the past and opening up about trauma to a more contemporary sharing of what matters to her as she is writing the book are part of that change of voice that happens. It gave me a sense that the book itself is imbued with the experience of Sinéad in that moment such that we experience Sinéad, too. We feel what those years between working on this memoir did to her. Rememberings tells of a life spent brutally committed to being and to being understood… as her truest self. It is no surprising magic then that it functions as a snapshot of that commitment in action. Reading her memoir, or listening to her read it, we witness the two different but related authors who wrote it. That’s the ferocious “I will be known” of Sinéad O’Connor and it’s a gorgeous experience she left us with her book as well as with her music.
Five stars.
-HR
A note on names: In 2018, Sinéad O’Connor changed her name while converting to Islam. Her Muslim name when she died was Shuhada’ Sadaqat. My use of her other name through this review is one I thought about. There is the interest of consistency, but, what my decision came down to was that she published this memoir. She did it after embracing Islam and she chose to publish under O’Connor.
Purchase links:
I listened to this as a library rental through the Libby App. I suggest starting there for any paper, digital, or audio read because it is free and it is good to do.
For purchase on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Go5da5z4MMZzKut1HROaN?si=7781deb6a2ef42e0
As an eBook:
Hard Return 