OConnor - Rememberings

Copyright 2021 by Universal Mother, Inc.

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: OConnor, Sinad, author.

Title: Rememberings / Sinad OConnor.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020057679 (print) | LCCN 2020057680 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358423881 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358450375 | ISBN 9780358450535 | ISBN 9780358447092 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: OConnor, Sinad. | SingersIrelandBiography. | Rock MusiciansIrelandBiography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies

Classification: LCC ML 420. O 297 A 3 2021 (print) | LCC ML 420. O 297 (ebook) | DDC 782.42166/092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057679

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057680

Endpaper design by Mark Robinson

Cover design by Mark Robinson

Front photograph Herb Ritts / Trunk Archive

Lyrics from Bob Dylans To Ramona copyright 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Special Rider Music.

Endpaper photographs copyright Kate Garner. Used by permission of Bolt Agency, London.

v2.0521

Dedicated with love to all staff and patients
at St. Patricks University Hospital, Dublin
to my father, John OConnor,
and to David Rosenthal, Bob Dylan, and Jeff Rosen

Qui cantat, bis orat.

I CANT REMEMBER any more than I have given my publisher. Except for that which is private or that I wish to forget. The totality indeed of what I do not recall would fill ten thousand libraries, so its probably just as well I dont remember.

Chiefly I dont remember because I wasnt really present until about six months ago. And as I write this, Im fifty-four years of age. There are many reasons I wasnt present. You can glean them here. Or most of them.

I was actually present before my first album came out. And then I went somewhere else inside myself. And I began to smoke weed. I never finally stopped until mid-2020. So, yeah, I aint been quite here, and its hard to recollect what you werent present at.

Making music is hard to write about. I was present then. In the place deep inside myself that only I know. But if you could talk about music you wouldnt need music, so perhaps the things I talk about here are not always music. But they are the sum of what I can recollect and tell from my youth until now.

I have left some people out because I know they prefer privacy and others because I want them to be pissed when they look for their names in the book and dont find them.

That I wasnt present explains why there are two very distinctly different voices in this book, one leading up to the tearing of the popes picture in 1992 and a new one afterward. This is because 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. Afterward, a new voice began speaking. And I hope this is acceptable to the reader. (Its pretty much the best I can do.)

I see the first voice as a ghosts and the next as a living womans. Both are equally important. There was a symbolic death and rebirth. And you can hear it. I am, in fact, rather proud of it.

Now, I aint gonna be winning the Booker Prize anytime soon. And I aint Bob Dylan or Shakespeare or even in the class of my amazing brother Joseph as a writer. But Ive told my story as I remember it and tried to tell it the way I speak. I imagined a certain person I was talking to as I was writing or talking the chapters. Never gonna tell you who that was, though.

I was very young when my career kicked off. I never had or took the time to find myself. But I think youll 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. So this is only my first memoir. My intention is to live a long life and keep diaries this time so I wont forget. However, it was necessary for me to let the child inside me speak because she needed to speak. And because I did, she is older now and chooses to remain about seventeen.

Please know that I have deep and infinite love and compassion for both my parents, who did their very best in what was a very difficult time for Ireland and for Irish people. And my father remains my idol, having borne more pain than any human being I know and having borne it so heroically. We are a family made of soldier DNA. There are military great- and great-great-uncles. And this has stood to both my father and myself.

I especially hope that by letting the child speak I do not cause offense or upset to anyone in my family. I havent discussed anyones experiences but my own. And I apologize in advance if anything Ive written does cause upset. It was not my intention.

My intention was to put all the pieces of the jigsaw that was me out on the floor and see if I could put it together. To be understood was my desire. Along with that was my desire not to have the ignorant tell my story when Im gone. Which was what would have happened had I not told it myself.

If I hope for anything as an artist, its that I inspire certain people to be who they really are. My audiences seem to be people who have been given a hard time for being who they are. It aint easy being greenmaybe they dont know they are the reason I get to be who I really am. Onstage, I can always be who I really am.

Offstage, not so much. I never made sense to anyone, even myself, unless I was singing.

But I hope this book makes sense.

If not, maybe try singing it and see if that helps.

BEFORE WE BEGIN, for the purposes of clarity, here is the architecture of my family and when I was with whom.

My mother, Marie, and father, John, married in 1960 and set up home in Crumlin, Dublin, where they had been raised. Three years later my brother Joe was born and they moved to middle-class Glenageary, far away on the other side of town. Then in 1965 came my sister, imear. Then me fourteen months later, in 1966. Then in 1968, my brother John.

In 1975, my father sensibly left my mother for reasons this book will help you glean. He was given custody of us and we went to live with him and his new love, my (lovely) stepmother, Viola. But me and my little brother stayed only maybe six months because we missed our mother.

At that point I was nine. I stayed with my mother until I was thirteen and then I went, by choice, back to live with my father. I was unable to adjust after what had been going on in my mothers house, so toward the end of my thirteenth year, I went to what is politely called a rehabilitation center for girls with behavioral problems. (I think the whole world knows a refund is owed my father for that, as it clearly didnt work.)