Book Review: Rememberings, by Sinéad O'Connor
Nothing compares to you. Rest In Peace, Sinéad Marie Bernadette, aka Shuhada' Sadaqat.
Sandycove, 2021, 288 pages
From the acclaimed, controversial singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor comes a revelatory memoir of her fraught childhood, musical triumphs, fearless activism, and of the enduring power of song.
Blessed with a singular voice and a fiery temperament, Sinéad O’Connor rose to massive fame in the late 1980s and 1990s with a string of gold records. By the time she was 20, she was world famous - living a rock-star life out loud. From her trademark shaved head to her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live when she tore up Pope John Paul II’s photograph, Sinéad has fascinated and outraged millions.
In Rememberings, O’Connor recounts her painful tale of growing up in Dublin in a dysfunctional, abusive household. Inspired by a brother’s Bob Dylan records, she escaped into music. She relates her early forays with local Irish bands; we see Sinéad completing her first album while eight months pregnant, hanging with Rastas in the East Village, and soaring to unimaginable popularity with her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2U”.
Intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and told in a singular form true to her unconventional career, Sinéad’s memoir is a remarkable chronicle of an enduring and influential artist.
I was never a big fan of Sinéad O'Connor during the height of her popularity, even though I was an 80s kid and she was just a couple of years older than me. I was vaguely aware of her various shenanigans (I think I actually watched that infamous live SNL episode in 1992), but until she passed away a few weeks ago, she was just another pop star whose music videos I'd been watching since MTV actually showed music videos.
Upon her death, I relistened to a few of her albums and.... wow. She really did have a voice.
Her most famous song, of course, the one that launched her into stardom, was her cover of Prince's Nothing Compares 2 U. Her face and her voice are ethereal.
But I never loved NC2U. My favorite song of hers is Troy.
And that brought me to her memoir, Rememberings, published in 2021. I rarely read memoirs, especially by pop stars, but despite never being one of her big fans, something about Sinéad O'Connor's life and passing touched me.
I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Sinéad herself. She is raw, funny, contradictory, vulnerable, vulgar, a little bit crazy, and I am pretty certain she actually wrote this book herself, she didn't have a ghostwriter do it.
Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor
Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
- Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor was born in 1966 in Dublin, and her childhood was certainly worthy of a Frank McCourt novel. She seemed to have a good relationship with her father, but her mother was violent, abusive, and almost certainly suffering from severe mental illness. This is one of many tragic threads running through Rememberings; she talks about truly horrific abuse she experienced at her mother's hands, the anger and resentment she felt, the trauma she lived with for the rest of her life, and yet clearly it is her mother whose love and affection she never stopped longing for. Both in the foreword and the afterword, Sinéad addresses her parents directly, telling them they did their best and absolving them of responsibility for her own issues. (Her mother, Johanna Marie O'Grady, died in a car crash when Sinéad was 18.)
It's a wonder the two of them had enough sex to produce four children considering how much they hated each other.
She had several siblings. Her family was, in her own words, "fucked up." Her older brother, Joseph O'Connor, is a successful novelist. In Rememberings, she calls Joseph brilliant and says she loves him very much, and also that they can't stand each other and they haven't really spoken since her childhood. She apparently was on somewhat better terms with her other siblings, but her entire life was a sad trainwreck of estrangements and failed relationships.
At age 15, having run away from her mother and being too much of a truant for her father, she got sent to one of Ireland's Magdalene laundries. It's not entirely clear from her memoir what the arrangement was, but apparently her father had some influence over her status, and she was allowed to take outside classes, and met a friendly nun who bought her a guitar upon learning of her affinity for music. But she also describes being sent to one of the "secret" wings, after an episode of misbehavior, where she had to spend the night with elderly women suffering from dementia who'd spent their entire lives in the asylum and would never leave. It was like hell, as she describes it, and yet she speaks kindly of the nun who sent her there, saying that she was sending Sinéad a message, showing her what her future would be like if she didn't straighten up. This contradiction appears repeatedly throughout the book; Sinéad loves and hates authority figures, religion, and people who take advantage of and abuse her.
It was evident from an early age that she had a gift for music. She talks of singing at every opportunity. In the late 80s she began hanging around the Irish music scene, began singing with a few bands, and eventually got signed up to a record label.
Sinéad O'Connor loved music. She hated the music industry. In this book, she rails against the Church, against abusers, against racism and sexism, against the oppression of Ireland, but most of all, about the music industry and how they tried to screw her over repeatedly.
The first of her four children was born in 1987, just as Sinéad was releasing her first album, The Lion and the Cobra. The suits wanted her to have an abortion. They also wanted her to pretty up and wear dresses.
This was her response:
Sinéad O'Connor was always more punk than pop, saw herself as an activist and a protest singer, not a rock star, and was uncomfortable with the trappings of rockstardom and fame. (She does talk a lot about fucking like a rockstar - a lot.) One of the things that struck me, reading through this memoir, is that she really does seem like always the same person even as she rises to fame and fortune. Her stories of running around on the streets, meeting interesting and weird characters in hole-in-the-wall shops and grunge bars, exchanging life stories with random strangers, hardly change as she becomes a celebrity. We just start hearing more famous names dropped during her escapades.
Old Fluffycuffs
Sinéad tells quite a few stories about her meetings with other celebrities: she was "weekend pussy" for Peter Gabriel (and ended up writing a song about it), and got to meet Muhammad Ali and Johnny Depp and of course a Who's Who of 80s and 90s rock stars. She did a cover for Dolly Parton. The lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers claimed they hooked up (and wrote a song about it); she claims they never did.
But her strangest tale involves Prince, whom she dubs "Old Fluffycuffs" (and refers to as Himself throughout this story).
After her cover of No One Compares 2 U, Prince summoned her (literally) to his mansion. The entire evening plays out like a horror-comedy; according to her, Prince scolded her for swearing in her interviews, insisted on pronouncing her name as "Shine-aid" stalked her around his mansion, tried to make her eat soup, had a terrified Igor-like manservant, and she ended up literally fleeing on foot out the door and down the highway, only to be chased by Prince in his car.
There are several points in Rememberings where I wondered how reliable a narrator she is. She was clearly a bit nuts and a bit of a drama-seeker, and while I don't think she was lying about anything from her perspective, some stories just seemed so weird.
"Fight the Real Enemy"
The most infamous episode in O'Connor's career was her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live.
She performed an a capella version of Bob Marley's War and then held up a photo of Pope John Paul II and tore it up, saying "Fight the real enemy!"
SNL, as the name implies, is a live show. So she did this on live national television, to a stunned audience. As she describes it, she went backstage afterwards and found it deserted. She was an instant pariah. Outside, she was pelted with eggs. Two weeks later, she was booed in Madison Square Garden performing at a tribute to Bob Dylan. (She has some choice words about Dylan and his unwillingness to defend her.)
Her protest nearly ended her career; the international outrage was immense. This was years before widespread publication and acknowledgment of the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandals. She was not sorry at all and still considered it one of the most brilliant things she'd ever done, not just because she was protesting abuse in the Catholic Church, but also because it "reset" her image. The suits were trying to turn her into a pop star, and she didn't want to be a pop star.
As she describes it, she'd been carrying that particular picture of the Pope around for years. She'd taken it off her mother's wall when she died, and she had always known she was going to destroy it, she didn't know when the right moment would be. When she arrived at the SNL studios and decided this was the right time, she actually held up a picture of a Brazilian street child (as she put it, "someone no one actually cared about") during rehearsal, and told the cameraman to make sure to zoom in on the picture.
It was kind of brilliant. If you watch the video of the actual live performance, you can practically hear the intake of breath from the crew and the audience, as they realize what's happening.
Dr. Fucking Phil
I admit that watching some of Sinéad's interviews, I find her... annoying. She has that jaded too-cool-for-this-gig attitude, the world-weary cynicism of a teenager who knows everything. Yet in her memoir, she seems a lot more real, her feelings genuine, and her emotions... all over the place.
She was clearly someone drawn to drama (by her own admission, she would always run towards a fight, not away from one). She was an attention-seeker. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she suffered from depression, and she was admitted to hospitals multiple times for suicidal depression. She had a long history of mental illness.
In Rememberings, there is a big gap between 1992 and 2015, although she didn't exactly disappear during that time. As she describes it, she'd literally written the book up to 1992, and then she was admitted to a hospital in Ireland for a radical hysterectomy. She claims she was not advised of the effects it would have, or even consulted about whether she wanted her ovaries removed. As a result she claims she was driven even more insane and essentially lost a huge chunk of her memory.
So the next major episode she tells us about is her appearance on the 2017 season premiere of the American television show Dr. Phil.
Yes, that guy. Fucking Dr. Phil.
Sinéad's description of what happened will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Dr. Phil. His version is that she reached out to him for help. Her version is that his staff called her, while she was already in a psychiatric hospital for her latest suicide attempt. She was desperate and believed that Dr. Phil could and would help her. She also (by her own admission) saw it as a vacation from her semi-confinement and an opportunity to smoke and do weed. (She complains that American hospitals, unlike Irish ones, don't let you smoke.)
Naturally, she ends up being exploited, then sent to another hospital which Dr. Phil is supposedly paying for, but it's unclear if this was actually the case. She felt she was being abused and not actually getting any help; they accused her of wanting "rock star treatment," which she vehemently denies. The whole thing was yet another unfortunate trainwreck which, regardless of the full truth, clearly did her no good.
Schismatic, Rasta, Psychic, Muslim
Sinéad O'Connor had a long and strange relationship with religion. She seemed to love-hate the Church the same way she love-hated her mother. At one point, she says "I would have been a priest if I didn't have a vagina." In 1999, she was ordained as "Mother Bernadette Mary" by the Independent Catholic Church, a schismatic sect.
She also talks about falling in with a Rastafarian group and having many long theological conversations with them of the sort that can only be properly had with copious amounts of weed.
She speaks throughout the book about her belief in the supernatural; she believes in ghosts, she believes a guardian angel literally moved objects around to protect her daughter, she goes to a fortune teller to find out if her mother is all right. (The fortune teller tells her: "I don't do that. What you need is a medium.")
So, what to make of her conversion to Islam in 2018? She renamed herself Shuhada' Sadaqat (but kept Sinéad O'Connor as her stage name).
She jokes in the book about people saying she looks like one of Emperor Palpatine's guards.
She speaks of her conversion (or "reversion" as Muslims call it) only at the end of the book. She seems to have had a genuine religious experience. But then, all of her religious experiences were genuine. Do I think her conversion was genuine? Yes. But I also think that had she lived longer, she would have inevitably experienced some new revelation, attempted in some other way to fill whatever was missing in her life.
The Ending
I felt sorry for Sinéad O'Connor by the end of this book. I kind of admired her, but mostly I felt sorry for her, though she'd have hated for anyone to feel sorry for her.
Most of her life was chaotic and she is not always a reliable narrator of it. At various times, she claimed she was lesbian, bisexual, and asexual. She changed her legal name to "Magda Davitt", before changing it again to Shuhada' Sadaqat. She had four children by four different fathers. She was married four times (only once to one of the fathers of her children). She loved her children and waxes adoringly about them; reading between the lines, she also probably had a troubled relationship with them. Although she might not have been abusive and violent like her mother, she definitely had some of her mother's issues. She lost custody of at least one of her children.
Near the end of the book, she gives a discography that is actually pretty interesting, talking about each of her albums, and each of the songs in them, and what they meant to her.
She then writes a letter to her parents, which in light of what happened after the book's publication, was both sad and prescient, in which she assures them that she was damaged and would have been crazy even if they had been perfect parents, and that they should not blame themselves for anything.
Finally, there is an epilog from 2020, about being confined during the Covid pandemic, a screed about Donald Trump, and her plans for her next album and how she plans to go on tour.
RIP, Sinéad, aka Shuhada' Sadaqat
In 2022, O'Connor's 17-year-old son Shane escaped from suicide watch in a mental hospital, and committed suicide. She was devastated, and even posted on Twitter that she was going to kill herself, before deleting the posts.
On July 23, 2023, Shuhada' Sadaqat née Sinéad O'Connor was found dead in her London apartment at the age of 56.
If you read the many, many news reports and tributes, you will noticeably not see anywhere that an official cause of death has been stated. Only that "no foul play is suspected."
While of course we can't know for certain, and may never know for certain, it doesn't take a lot of deduction to guess the most likely explanation.
It is a sad final epilogue that unfortunately seems entirely consistent with what she wrote in her memoir only months before her son's death, and a few years before her own.
I think Rememberings was touching and real and should be appreciated by anyone who ever listened to one of her songs, or who watched her tear up the Pope's photo on Saturday Night Live, or watched that disastrous Dr. Phil interview.
My complete list of book reviews.
Sandycove, 2021, 288 pages
From the acclaimed, controversial singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor comes a revelatory memoir of her fraught childhood, musical triumphs, fearless activism, and of the enduring power of song.
Blessed with a singular voice and a fiery temperament, Sinéad O’Connor rose to massive fame in the late 1980s and 1990s with a string of gold records. By the time she was 20, she was world famous - living a rock-star life out loud. From her trademark shaved head to her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live when she tore up Pope John Paul II’s photograph, Sinéad has fascinated and outraged millions.
In Rememberings, O’Connor recounts her painful tale of growing up in Dublin in a dysfunctional, abusive household. Inspired by a brother’s Bob Dylan records, she escaped into music. She relates her early forays with local Irish bands; we see Sinéad completing her first album while eight months pregnant, hanging with Rastas in the East Village, and soaring to unimaginable popularity with her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2U”.
Intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and told in a singular form true to her unconventional career, Sinéad’s memoir is a remarkable chronicle of an enduring and influential artist.
I was never a big fan of Sinéad O'Connor during the height of her popularity, even though I was an 80s kid and she was just a couple of years older than me. I was vaguely aware of her various shenanigans (I think I actually watched that infamous live SNL episode in 1992), but until she passed away a few weeks ago, she was just another pop star whose music videos I'd been watching since MTV actually showed music videos.
Upon her death, I relistened to a few of her albums and.... wow. She really did have a voice.
Her most famous song, of course, the one that launched her into stardom, was her cover of Prince's Nothing Compares 2 U. Her face and her voice are ethereal.
Click to viewBut I never loved NC2U. My favorite song of hers is Troy.
And that brought me to her memoir, Rememberings, published in 2021. I rarely read memoirs, especially by pop stars, but despite never being one of her big fans, something about Sinéad O'Connor's life and passing touched me.
I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Sinéad herself. She is raw, funny, contradictory, vulnerable, vulgar, a little bit crazy, and I am pretty certain she actually wrote this book herself, she didn't have a ghostwriter do it.
Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor
Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
- Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor was born in 1966 in Dublin, and her childhood was certainly worthy of a Frank McCourt novel. She seemed to have a good relationship with her father, but her mother was violent, abusive, and almost certainly suffering from severe mental illness. This is one of many tragic threads running through Rememberings; she talks about truly horrific abuse she experienced at her mother's hands, the anger and resentment she felt, the trauma she lived with for the rest of her life, and yet clearly it is her mother whose love and affection she never stopped longing for. Both in the foreword and the afterword, Sinéad addresses her parents directly, telling them they did their best and absolving them of responsibility for her own issues. (Her mother, Johanna Marie O'Grady, died in a car crash when Sinéad was 18.)
It's a wonder the two of them had enough sex to produce four children considering how much they hated each other.
She had several siblings. Her family was, in her own words, "fucked up." Her older brother, Joseph O'Connor, is a successful novelist. In Rememberings, she calls Joseph brilliant and says she loves him very much, and also that they can't stand each other and they haven't really spoken since her childhood. She apparently was on somewhat better terms with her other siblings, but her entire life was a sad trainwreck of estrangements and failed relationships.
At age 15, having run away from her mother and being too much of a truant for her father, she got sent to one of Ireland's Magdalene laundries. It's not entirely clear from her memoir what the arrangement was, but apparently her father had some influence over her status, and she was allowed to take outside classes, and met a friendly nun who bought her a guitar upon learning of her affinity for music. But she also describes being sent to one of the "secret" wings, after an episode of misbehavior, where she had to spend the night with elderly women suffering from dementia who'd spent their entire lives in the asylum and would never leave. It was like hell, as she describes it, and yet she speaks kindly of the nun who sent her there, saying that she was sending Sinéad a message, showing her what her future would be like if she didn't straighten up. This contradiction appears repeatedly throughout the book; Sinéad loves and hates authority figures, religion, and people who take advantage of and abuse her.
It was evident from an early age that she had a gift for music. She talks of singing at every opportunity. In the late 80s she began hanging around the Irish music scene, began singing with a few bands, and eventually got signed up to a record label.
Sinéad O'Connor loved music. She hated the music industry. In this book, she rails against the Church, against abusers, against racism and sexism, against the oppression of Ireland, but most of all, about the music industry and how they tried to screw her over repeatedly.
The first of her four children was born in 1987, just as Sinéad was releasing her first album, The Lion and the Cobra. The suits wanted her to have an abortion. They also wanted her to pretty up and wear dresses.
This was her response:
Sinéad O'Connor was always more punk than pop, saw herself as an activist and a protest singer, not a rock star, and was uncomfortable with the trappings of rockstardom and fame. (She does talk a lot about fucking like a rockstar - a lot.) One of the things that struck me, reading through this memoir, is that she really does seem like always the same person even as she rises to fame and fortune. Her stories of running around on the streets, meeting interesting and weird characters in hole-in-the-wall shops and grunge bars, exchanging life stories with random strangers, hardly change as she becomes a celebrity. We just start hearing more famous names dropped during her escapades.
Old Fluffycuffs
Sinéad tells quite a few stories about her meetings with other celebrities: she was "weekend pussy" for Peter Gabriel (and ended up writing a song about it), and got to meet Muhammad Ali and Johnny Depp and of course a Who's Who of 80s and 90s rock stars. She did a cover for Dolly Parton. The lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers claimed they hooked up (and wrote a song about it); she claims they never did.
But her strangest tale involves Prince, whom she dubs "Old Fluffycuffs" (and refers to as Himself throughout this story).
After her cover of No One Compares 2 U, Prince summoned her (literally) to his mansion. The entire evening plays out like a horror-comedy; according to her, Prince scolded her for swearing in her interviews, insisted on pronouncing her name as "Shine-aid" stalked her around his mansion, tried to make her eat soup, had a terrified Igor-like manservant, and she ended up literally fleeing on foot out the door and down the highway, only to be chased by Prince in his car.
There are several points in Rememberings where I wondered how reliable a narrator she is. She was clearly a bit nuts and a bit of a drama-seeker, and while I don't think she was lying about anything from her perspective, some stories just seemed so weird.
"Fight the Real Enemy"
The most infamous episode in O'Connor's career was her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live.
She performed an a capella version of Bob Marley's War and then held up a photo of Pope John Paul II and tore it up, saying "Fight the real enemy!"
SNL, as the name implies, is a live show. So she did this on live national television, to a stunned audience. As she describes it, she went backstage afterwards and found it deserted. She was an instant pariah. Outside, she was pelted with eggs. Two weeks later, she was booed in Madison Square Garden performing at a tribute to Bob Dylan. (She has some choice words about Dylan and his unwillingness to defend her.)
Her protest nearly ended her career; the international outrage was immense. This was years before widespread publication and acknowledgment of the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandals. She was not sorry at all and still considered it one of the most brilliant things she'd ever done, not just because she was protesting abuse in the Catholic Church, but also because it "reset" her image. The suits were trying to turn her into a pop star, and she didn't want to be a pop star.
As she describes it, she'd been carrying that particular picture of the Pope around for years. She'd taken it off her mother's wall when she died, and she had always known she was going to destroy it, she didn't know when the right moment would be. When she arrived at the SNL studios and decided this was the right time, she actually held up a picture of a Brazilian street child (as she put it, "someone no one actually cared about") during rehearsal, and told the cameraman to make sure to zoom in on the picture.
It was kind of brilliant. If you watch the video of the actual live performance, you can practically hear the intake of breath from the crew and the audience, as they realize what's happening.
Dr. Fucking Phil
I admit that watching some of Sinéad's interviews, I find her... annoying. She has that jaded too-cool-for-this-gig attitude, the world-weary cynicism of a teenager who knows everything. Yet in her memoir, she seems a lot more real, her feelings genuine, and her emotions... all over the place.
She was clearly someone drawn to drama (by her own admission, she would always run towards a fight, not away from one). She was an attention-seeker. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she suffered from depression, and she was admitted to hospitals multiple times for suicidal depression. She had a long history of mental illness.
In Rememberings, there is a big gap between 1992 and 2015, although she didn't exactly disappear during that time. As she describes it, she'd literally written the book up to 1992, and then she was admitted to a hospital in Ireland for a radical hysterectomy. She claims she was not advised of the effects it would have, or even consulted about whether she wanted her ovaries removed. As a result she claims she was driven even more insane and essentially lost a huge chunk of her memory.
So the next major episode she tells us about is her appearance on the 2017 season premiere of the American television show Dr. Phil.
Yes, that guy. Fucking Dr. Phil.
Sinéad's description of what happened will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Dr. Phil. His version is that she reached out to him for help. Her version is that his staff called her, while she was already in a psychiatric hospital for her latest suicide attempt. She was desperate and believed that Dr. Phil could and would help her. She also (by her own admission) saw it as a vacation from her semi-confinement and an opportunity to smoke and do weed. (She complains that American hospitals, unlike Irish ones, don't let you smoke.)
Naturally, she ends up being exploited, then sent to another hospital which Dr. Phil is supposedly paying for, but it's unclear if this was actually the case. She felt she was being abused and not actually getting any help; they accused her of wanting "rock star treatment," which she vehemently denies. The whole thing was yet another unfortunate trainwreck which, regardless of the full truth, clearly did her no good.
Schismatic, Rasta, Psychic, Muslim
Sinéad O'Connor had a long and strange relationship with religion. She seemed to love-hate the Church the same way she love-hated her mother. At one point, she says "I would have been a priest if I didn't have a vagina." In 1999, she was ordained as "Mother Bernadette Mary" by the Independent Catholic Church, a schismatic sect.
She also talks about falling in with a Rastafarian group and having many long theological conversations with them of the sort that can only be properly had with copious amounts of weed.
She speaks throughout the book about her belief in the supernatural; she believes in ghosts, she believes a guardian angel literally moved objects around to protect her daughter, she goes to a fortune teller to find out if her mother is all right. (The fortune teller tells her: "I don't do that. What you need is a medium.")
So, what to make of her conversion to Islam in 2018? She renamed herself Shuhada' Sadaqat (but kept Sinéad O'Connor as her stage name).
She jokes in the book about people saying she looks like one of Emperor Palpatine's guards.
She speaks of her conversion (or "reversion" as Muslims call it) only at the end of the book. She seems to have had a genuine religious experience. But then, all of her religious experiences were genuine. Do I think her conversion was genuine? Yes. But I also think that had she lived longer, she would have inevitably experienced some new revelation, attempted in some other way to fill whatever was missing in her life.
The Ending
I felt sorry for Sinéad O'Connor by the end of this book. I kind of admired her, but mostly I felt sorry for her, though she'd have hated for anyone to feel sorry for her.
Most of her life was chaotic and she is not always a reliable narrator of it. At various times, she claimed she was lesbian, bisexual, and asexual. She changed her legal name to "Magda Davitt", before changing it again to Shuhada' Sadaqat. She had four children by four different fathers. She was married four times (only once to one of the fathers of her children). She loved her children and waxes adoringly about them; reading between the lines, she also probably had a troubled relationship with them. Although she might not have been abusive and violent like her mother, she definitely had some of her mother's issues. She lost custody of at least one of her children.
Near the end of the book, she gives a discography that is actually pretty interesting, talking about each of her albums, and each of the songs in them, and what they meant to her.
She then writes a letter to her parents, which in light of what happened after the book's publication, was both sad and prescient, in which she assures them that she was damaged and would have been crazy even if they had been perfect parents, and that they should not blame themselves for anything.
Finally, there is an epilog from 2020, about being confined during the Covid pandemic, a screed about Donald Trump, and her plans for her next album and how she plans to go on tour.
RIP, Sinéad, aka Shuhada' Sadaqat
In 2022, O'Connor's 17-year-old son Shane escaped from suicide watch in a mental hospital, and committed suicide. She was devastated, and even posted on Twitter that she was going to kill herself, before deleting the posts.
On July 23, 2023, Shuhada' Sadaqat née Sinéad O'Connor was found dead in her London apartment at the age of 56.
If you read the many, many news reports and tributes, you will noticeably not see anywhere that an official cause of death has been stated. Only that "no foul play is suspected."
While of course we can't know for certain, and may never know for certain, it doesn't take a lot of deduction to guess the most likely explanation.
It is a sad final epilogue that unfortunately seems entirely consistent with what she wrote in her memoir only months before her son's death, and a few years before her own.
I think Rememberings was touching and real and should be appreciated by anyone who ever listened to one of her songs, or who watched her tear up the Pope's photo on Saturday Night Live, or watched that disastrous Dr. Phil interview.
My complete list of book reviews.