The singer’s jaw‑dropping account of her troubled childhood and rocky fame is patchy but no less truthful for it
Celebrity memoirs often come with a ghost writer. There isn’t one here – there are only ghosts, the ones the young Sinéad O’Connor hears in the piano at her grandmother’s house and the others with which she has wrestled for a lifetime. No matter how public her business, or how much people think they know about the
Irish singer’s triumphs and travails, this is an artist who never ceases to surprise.
O’Connor has spent her career, it seems, coping with the after-effects of childhood trauma and then another lifetime coping with more trauma piled atop it – fame, infamy, pariah status, a 2015 hysterectomy, a questionable 2017 US TV interview. You’d be forgiven for thinking that O’Connor might require not just a ghost writer but a nurse and maybe even an imam on call (she converted to Islam in 2018).