Even though Sinéad O’Connor told her life story in 2021′s Rememberings – a warm, witty, bracingly self-aware and direct autobiography – you can rest assured there will be more books on and about the singer who all too tragically, and too soon, died on July 26th, 2023. There will also, perhaps inevitably, be a disparity between the high drama of her life and what O’Connor herself was like when she was away from the glare of spotlights.
Despite Ariane Sherine hoping that her book will “document how courageous, genuine, resilient and revolutionary she was”, this newsgathering biography reads like a bullet-point list of O’Connor’s mistakes, with most receiving entries so brief that calling them chapters is illogical. This litany of mayhem includes titles such as Support for the IRA, A Run-In with Madonna, A Fist Fight with Prince, Her First Suicide Attempt, The Love Rivalry and Fourth Child, and Struggling with Grief. There is negligible context to these snippets, which, although well-researched, offer little insight (one enlightening exception, however, is Telegraph music writer Neil McCormick recalling a visit to O’Connor’s Co Wicklow home in 2014).
In sharp contrast, Sinéad O’Connor: The Last Interview and Other Conversations offers respite from Sherine’s tabloid-like presentation. With a wise introduction by US singer Kristin Hersh, the book features nine interviews with O’Connor, two with Irish newspapers (this paper, and the Irish Independent), one UK music paper (NME), and the remainder with American outlets (Rolling Stone, Spin, Inside Entertainment magazines, Texas radio station KUTX, and ABC’s The View television chatshow).
What comes across strongly, especially in the mostly Q&A-format interviews, is O’Connor’s assured voice, which in each chronological conversation (from The Irish Times in 1986 to The View in 2021) is a model of often lacerating honesty. From statements such as “I am a constant reminder to people that they are in pain” (Spin, 1991) to talking about Prince (“I told him how he could take a long walk down a short pier”, The View), what emerges is a more rounded picture of a woman who was far too often stereotyped and scorned.
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