A world without Sinead

Such a talented and interesting person, and a sad one. She dealt with so much pain. And she was so right about the Catholic Church, although she was almost universally condemned for it. I remember getting into arguments in her wake: “How could you go to Catholic school and not know it was going on?”

And it was so much worse in Ireland.

I read her memoir, “Rememberings,” several years ago. She was funny and self-deprecating. (Once, when there was a protest against her for refusing to appear at any venue that played the Star-Spangled Banner before her performance, she put on a wig and sunglasses and mingled with the crowd.) Via the Guardian:

In the book’s foreword, O’Connor says that before she ripped up the picture of the pope, she never had the chance to find herself. “But I think you’ll see in this book a girl who does find herself,” she writes, “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.” While her childhood and rise to fame provide rich material, O’Connor, who is 54, says she can’t remember much of the past 20 years, “because I wasn’t really present until six months ago”.

As such, the final chapters, which sprint through her marriages, children, a traumatic hysterectomy and spells in mental institutions, are episodic. But they remain, like the rest of her book, full of heart, humour and remarkable generosity. The postscript comes in the form of a letter to her father. “Please know that your daughter would have been as nutty as a fuckin’ fruitcake and as crazy as a loon even if she’d had Saint Joseph and the Virgin Mary for parents and grown up in the Little House on the Prairie,” she tells him. “So don’t be kicking the walls unless it’s just for fun.”

Go listen to her music. She was a spectacular and raw songwriter, she’s well worth your time.