CANR
WORK TITLE: To Throw Away Unopened
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 12/1/1954
WEBSITE: http://vivalbertine.com/
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME: CA 373
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 1, 1954, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; immigrated to England, 1958; divorced; children: one daughter.
EDUCATION:Attended Chelsea School of Art, Hornsey Art School, and London College of Communications.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Has worked as musician, filmmaker, exercise instructor, and artist. Founding member of band the Slits.
AWARDS:Rough Trade Book of the Year, New Musical Express Book of the Year, Book of the Year, Mojo magazine, 2014, all for Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Viv Albertine tells the story of her life in the London punk music scene in the 1970s, as well as what came afterward, in the memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys. She was born in Sydney, Australia, but her parents moved the family to London, England, in 1958, when Viv was four. They experienced some degree of poverty and lived in public housing, and her father, who was physically abusive, deserted the family when she was eleven. She became a rebellious teenager who found inspiration in punk rock; the title of her book comes from her mother’s comment about her obsessions. Seeing the Sex Pistols perform set the direction of her career, and it was lead singer John Lydon, known by the stage name Johnny Rotten, who made the greatest impression on her. “It really was like the [dolly zoom] bit in the Hitchcock film where the lens comes in and they track backwards at the same time,” she told London Guardian interviewer Alexis Petridis. “It wasn’t the band, it was John, who was so not out there to entertain you, showing his credentials. If you came from a north London council flat, you hid it onstage, but he was what he was.”
She bought her first guitar at age twenty-one, with a small inheritance from her grandmother, and soon afterward, in 1977, joined the all-women band the Slits. In “Side One” of the book, Albertine chronicles her wild times with the Slits, who were bold and confrontational, onstage and off, carving out a space for assertive women in rock and roll. They developed an idiosyncratic style of music and an equally unusual fashion sense, wearing tattered clothing or dresses turned inside out, and even appearing nude on an album cover. They were thrown out of hotels for bad behavior and hobnobbed with punk royalty, such as Lydon and Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and Mick Jones and Joe Strummer of the Clash. Slits member Tessa Pollitt’s drug overdose precipitated the band’s breakup in 1982, after only two albums, but the band blazed a trail for future generations of female rockers. After the breakup Albertine tried to live a more conventional life, which she details in “Side Two.” This includes marriage and divorce, and the birth of her daughter after multiple and frustrating attempts to become pregnant. She had cervical cancer, unsatisfactory relationships with men, depression and loneliness, and ultimately a successful career as a filmmaker. She also has performed as a solo musician, having declined to join a reunited version of the Slits, and become a sculptor. For several years she did not mention her punk-rock past, even to her daughter, but eventually she began discussing this aspect of her life. Albertine decided to write the memoir after she was contacted by a filmmaker, Vincent Gallo, who told her how much he admired the Slits’ music. She narrates it in the present tense. “I wrote as if I was completely in that moment with only the knowledge I had up to that point,” she told Jenny Bulley in an online interview for music magazine Mojo. “I wrote it like the idiot that I was at the time. That’s when I found my voice.”
Several critics found Albertine’s voice engaging and deeply honest. “What strikes you is the tone and technique of her writing,” remarked Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian. “It’s simple, so it works: she uses the present continuous throughout (with, occasionally, an italicised reflection or commentary from today in brackets), which places you squarely in each moment.” Anita Sethi, writing in London’s Observer, noted that Albertine’s use of the present tense “endows a raw immediacy” to her story, which she relates “with gut-wrenching honesty.” Spectator contributor Ian Thomson described the book as “funny, rude, tender, and superbly written throughout.”
Tracey Thorn, herself a musician inspired by the Slits, praised Albertine’s candor about all aspects of her life. “Viv conveys the sheer rebellious glee of being in a band when you don’t really know what you’re doing,” Thorn observed in the New Statesman, and is equally forthcoming about her unhappier times. The title, Thorn commented, “might suggest a cheerful romp through fashion, pop and romance, yet the book is anything but. The discreet way to describe a memoir like this is to say that it’s very ‘frank’ and, in answer to the question of what to put in and what to leave out, Viv Albertine has decided to leave almost nothing out.” In the end, Thorn reported, Albertine emerges as “a proud feminist punk survivor.” Sethi offered a similar opinion, saying: “This brave and beautiful book is successful, indeed triumphant, in exploring failure and the courage it takes to begin again.”
Petridis reported that even if Albertine’s book “were merely a punk memoir,” it “would still be a great read, packed with incident and striking pen portraits of the scene’s main figures,” then added: “It’s the second half of the book, dealing with Albertine’s life after punk, that elevates it beyond most music memoirs.” Additional positive words came from Booklist critic June Sawyers, who dubbed Albertine’s volume a “fascinating insider’s look at the punk scene from a female perspective.” A Publishers Weekly contributor described it as a “bold, empowering work.” In the California Bookwatch, a commentator summed up the book as “a fine memoir” that “offers a rare female viewpoint of events of the times.”
After the launch party for her memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Albertine learned that her ninety-five-year-old mother Kathleen was dying. Her 2018 book, To Throw Away Unopened: A Memoir, part memoir, part manifesto, pays homage to her mother, relationships between sisters and mothers and daughters, the dissolution of a marriage, ageism, sexism, and feminism in the twentieth century. Evening Standard reviewer Nick Curtis remarked: “Punchy vignettes of the indignities wrought by age, illness and romantic disappointment are underscored by Albertine’s weary, deadpan dryness, and her fierce adoration of her mother Kath and teenage daughter Vida.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews summed up the book saying: “Not the cultural resource that her first memoir was, but still as brave and engaging in the writing.”
Following her mother’s death, Albertine disobeyed the note “To throw away unopened” found among her mother’s diaries which recorded the everyday misery and abuse Albertine’s parents experienced during their tumultuous marriage in the 1960s. “Albertine is devoted to but clear-eyed about Kathleen, just as she believes in herself while acknowledging her own contradictions,” observed Lavinia Greenlaw in New Statesman. Greenlaw added: “This book is emphatically true to [Albertine’s] nature, above all in how it finds its own form.”
In a book that “highlights her skill as a chronicler of the experience of modern adulthood,” according to Financial Times reviewer Helen Barrett, “Anger, and how to manage it decades after egregious events, is the central problem here, and Albertine picks over it meticulously.” Barrett concluded that “All the rigour and rage of her punk heritage make this utterly compelling writing. No sentimental tropes, no bittersweet reconciliations—but perhaps some kind of future.”
Speaking to Michael Hann on the Spectator Online, Albertine revealed: “One of the questions in the book was: how the hell did I turn out to be this person who is so full of anger?” she said. “To me, part of the detective story in the book is realising it was my mother who really schooled me like a little warrior: indoctrinated me, chanted and nagged me in quite a different way to most mothers.” In an interview with Jessica Hopper on the Creative Independent website, Albertine explained how writing has helped her get through the trauma she’s experienced: “Writing certainly helps you understand what happened. I think that’s about as close as a human can get to really making peace with bad things that have happened to us.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Albertine, Viv, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Thomas Dunne Books (New York, NY), 2014.
Albertine, Viv, To Throw Away Unopened: A Memoir, Faber & Faber Social (New York, NY), 2018.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 15, 2014, June Sawyers, review of Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, p. 9.
California Bookwatch, January, 2015, review of Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys.
Guardian (London, England), June 1, 2014, Alexis Petridis, “The Slits’ Viv Albertine on Punk, Violence and Doomed Domesticity”; February 3, 2015, Nicholas Lezard, review of Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2018, review of To Throw Away Unopened.
New Statesman, June 27, 2014, Tracey Thorn, “Proud Punk Survivor,” p. 55; April 20, 2018, Lavinia Greenlaw, review of To Throw Away Unopened, p. 41.
Observer (London, England), February 15, 2015, Anita Sethi, review of Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys.
Publishers Weekly, September 1, 2014, review of Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, p. 58.
Spectator, June 21, 2014, Ian Thomson, “Funny, Rude and Tender,” p. 45.
ONLINE
Creative Independent, https://thecreativeindependent.com/ (April 2, 2018), Jessica Hopper, author interview.
Evening Standard, https://www.standard.co.uk/ (March 22, 2018 ), Nick Curtis, review of To Throw Away Unopened.
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (April 27, 2018), Helen Barrett, review of To Throw Away Unopened.
Mojo Website, http:// www.mojo4music.com/ (December 15, 2014), Jenny Bulley, “Q&A: Viv Albertine: Slits Star on Writing MOJO’s Book of the Year.”
Spectator, https://www.spectator.co.uk/ (April 14, 2018), Michael Hann, author interview.
Viv Albertine Website, http://vivalbertine.com (March 21, 2015).
Viviane Katrina Louise "Viv" Albertine (born 1 December 1954, Sydney, Australia) is a British singer and songwriter, best known as the guitarist for the English punk group The Slits. She lives in Hackney, London.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Michael Putland [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
Viv Albertine
Musician, Author
Viv Albertine joined the seminal all-female British punk group The Slits as a guitarist when she was a teenager. Her 2014 memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys, chronicles her life as a young artist at the tail of the 1970s who was part of establishing what punk was and could be for generations to come. Albertine went on to work as a director, and raise a family in London. Her follow-up, To Throw Away Unopened, confronts aging and sexuality, and unpacks how the familial legacy lingers well into adulthood. Here she discusses the arduous process of writing a book, working as if no one will ever see what you create, and what it means to truly confront yourself on the page.
Conversation
On facing yourself on the page
An interview with musician and author Viv Albertine
Writing, Process, Inspiration, Adversity, Anxiety
From a conversation with Jessica Hopper
April 2, 2018
Highlights on
Download as a PDF
Are you always writing?
After the first book I was totally emotionally wiped out. I thought, “I’m not going to write another book, I can’t go through it again.” Then as the days went by I thought, “I’ve got to start writing a book because I desperately need something in my life that needs me.” It’s funny how a book sits there every day and it needs you to attend to it. Though it was not the most laudable reason for writing a second book, that’s how it started. It was almost a practical thing. You come to a certain age in your life, you’re not needed by anybody. I know it’s a bit odd to say but that’s what motivated me.
I started to write again and when I write, I write, say four hours a day, downstairs in my little studio. I sit there with this thing that needs me for four hours a day. I started and I didn’t look back over my work, I didn’t reread what I’d written the day before, I just wrote forwards solidly for three months until I had a book-length piece of writing. I was quite pleased with myself, but when I did come to read it back, it was not good. That’s sort of pitfall number one in the writing of a book. There are always many, many moments like this in writing a book but every time you come across them it’s like the first time you’ve ever encountered such a terrible obstacle.
You think the writing is excruciating, but the editing is truly the excruciating part. Sometimes they’re neck and neck.
Exactly. This is the way it was, looking back at the 80,000 to 90,000 words or whatever, and thinking, “My god, it’s absolute shit.” And it was crushing. There’s always one or two bits you can salvage. It was a good exercise for me to write forwards like that, unselfconsciously. Then I thought I wanted to try and write fiction mixed with nonfiction; I wanted to write a sort of fictional tale about a middle-aged woman who fantasized about murdering people because she was such an angry person. I wrote the fictional bits about this woman and the nonfictional bits about where I was living in East Hackney and tried to weave them together. It was a bit like psycho-geography mixed with a sort of a domestic-noir. I found the fictional bits harder and harder and harder to write. I started to realize that this middle-aged rage-filled woman was me. I thought, “Why pretend it’s not me?”
That was my second stage of the terrible realization that it was going to be all nonfiction. I had to face the fact that I was this rather unpleasant woman. It’s a very interesting thing to write about rage, which is considered so unfeminine, and the unpleasantness of who I was. I thought, “If I’m unpleasant there must be loads of women who are unpleasant and so frightened to say it and talk about it.” Especially me, when I was brought up in the ’60s and the ’70s, girls where very much still supposed to be appealing and smile all the time. It’s a very hard thing as a woman to actually not smile all the time, to admit to being unpleasant publicly, to having murderous thoughts. All of it. I faced that all down on the page really, so that’s how it came about, the book.
When you’re approaching that work, how do you feel? How do you come to it?
It’s a constant lack of belief, really. When you’re in it, it’s painful! I think you have to have self-doubt. Part of me suspends my knowledge of what the future is going to hold—that it’s going to be published and people are going to read it. I suspend that and I attack the book everyday as if no one’s going to read it, because otherwise I couldn’t be as honest as I feel I have to be to get the truth out. Not glamorize myself or make myself sound nicer than I am. I couldn’t do it if I really had an eye on it being published. I actually put that out of my mind when I write, and face my uglier self on the page.
Also, in doing that, you can’t help but start looking at family and how they helped shape you and the environment and the times and to look so deeply at yourself. Shining such a strong light on yourself is not a pleasant experience. I don’t write a book quickly. I might get the shape of it down in six months, but I’ll spend two years rewriting and reshaping and restructuring. Writing makes you not like yourself very much, I’m afraid. I think anyone would feel the same if they’d looked that deeply into themselves for a couple of years. I’m having to rebuild that now, my acceptance and liking of myself, because I’ve so examined myself from so many angles in such an unflattering way.
Blindly diving in is a different sort of process than what you describe in your previous book, when you wrote about being how at the start of the Slits you’d have these long group meetings in the kitchen plotting every point and idea.
I did start to wonder after the first book, what on earth made me this young woman who dared to pick up a guitar in 1976 when she couldn’t play or sing? And she was very poor, working class, didn’t come from a cultural household, had never had a music lesson in her life. I was so shy and so lacking in self-belief, I couldn’t believe I’d done it, in a way, when I looked back. The boldness of that was so out of it’s time for a young woman in those days, and so out of my class. I traced it back to my mother, she made me an artist. I don’t think she intended to, she intended to make me someone who stood up for myself and someone who questioned authority and someone who was not dominated by men. She intentionally set out to make me not those things because she’d felt so crushed, as many of her generation were.
The unwitting side result of that was that I had the nerve in 1976 to make myself part of that movement that was beginning, that burgeoning movement. I picked up a guitar when I had no role models to follow. A lot of the time when I go around doing talks, the first thing a male interviewer will ask is, “Well, tell us about Johnny Rotten, tell us about Sid Vicious.” I thought, “Oh my god, I’ve lived all those years, all put down in that book, all those struggles, all those fights against the times that I was living in—which were very hard and quite violent to live through—and these men want to put it down to a couple of spotty blokes I knew for 18 months in 1977.”
I was determined to find out what had made me that creative person against all the odds of my background and my gender. I do trace it back to my mother. She set me, not only on the path of being an artist without knowing it, but she set me on the path of being a truth-seeking, no-bullshit artist. In answer to your question, that she made me that person, she indoctrinated me like I was a little soldier she was bringing up. The result was that I became this little rebel against my nature, against my upbringing, against my environment, against my sex.
It seems like when you’re driven to make a thing it seems to present itself with real purpose and urgency. It’s just coming out. You have no choice. The muse shows and you attend to it.
I have no choice. The thing is if I don’t feel that feeling I just take to my bed and do nothing, and that can be for years. That’s the funny thing, I’m either dormant or driven. It has to have purpose and a meaning so strong for me that it works against my laziness and my ennui, my age or my background. It has to be so strong in me that it propels me through all that. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, but I find it very difficult to compromise in any aspect of my life. Writing’s great if you can’t compromise because you don’t have to have a team you work with, you do it on your own. You can do it in your own time, and it doesn’t really cost much to do, material-wise. You still have to be able to afford to eat and live but it’s not as big a layout in terms of materials or equipment. I’m so glad I found it even if it was quite late. I’m glad I found writing because it suits me.
What do you have to have, to write?
A kitchen table is all I need and a computer, really. I like silence, I absolutely could not possibly play music when I write because the sentences and the paragraphs and the chapters… It’s very much a rhythm, and I see them very much like I visualize a song. In a song I might visualize the size of the verses and the chorus and then a bridge. Now, I do the same with writing. I slightly visualize as I’m going along with the rhythm of a sentence. I might take a long time over a sentence, sometimes just to get the rhythm right. Certainly the pacing and the rhythm of the words is important. I want to take people up now, and now it’s time to take them down and now I’m going to hit them with something. It’s all about pacing and timing and rhythm .
At what point in your writing process do you show things to other people?
I have a first reader, Sally Orson Jones. It’s strange because she worked with the Slits back in the ’70s, she was just a young girl around the office. We had a little office because our manager managed us as a pop group and she was like the little office girl. She’s gone on to be an editor, which is great. She’s very, very forgiving, I think. I trust her and I trust she knows where I’m coming from. She’s my first reader. It will still be about a good year, probably, until I would show her anything.
The worst thing is to show someone something before you’re sure where you’re going, because then they can derail you and start putting doubts into your head. By the time I know where I’m going, I know the shape of it, I’ve written the book, and it’s the right length or longer than it should be. That’s when I’ll start showing it. I’ll probably have done two or three rewrites as well before I show it to my first reader. I’ll probably do about—and this is because I feel insecure about how educated I am—I’ll probably do at least 50 complete rewrites and edits of a whole book before I share it.
That’s a lot!
I think if I started writing 20 or 30 years ago I wouldn’t have to do 50 rewrites. I only read fiction when I’m writing nonfiction because I want it to have the pace and the intrigue and the page-turning ability that fiction has. You’ve really just got to be really motivated to turn each page. That’s my number one requirement for myself from the book, that people want to turn the page.
It’s all so new to me. I’ve come to it late. People say, “Oh, it felt so natural.” But it takes years to sound that natural on paper. They say, “Oh, you write like you speak.” But I started off trying to write like I spoke in my first book and I realized it’s a whole different thing. You can’t just put down how you jabber away in real life on the page and have it look nice and natural. It doesn’t. It’s a skill to make it look like you are just talking to someone on the page. It takes a load of editing, a load of rhythmic work. You have to hear it in your head very clearly.
There are diary-esque aspects of your works. Are you a diary keeper?
No, never. I’ve never kept a diary past when I was about 12 years old. From about the age of 13 onwards I’ve lived life so hard. I have been out every day and night doing stuff, exploring, and living a very street-oriented life. And then punk. I never had the time to keep a diary. I always felt diaries are more for people who don’t do stuff. If you’re doing absolutely 100%, doing and living, how can you keep a diary?
I’ve completely relied on my emotional memory, which means much as I try and reach the truth in my work, it’s still totally biased. If all I remember is what’s implanted itself in my memory it’s because it was very painful, or very happy, or very unusual, or very humiliating. Psychologists say that you remember humiliation more than you remember love. It’s something that never leaves you. I think lots of my books are full of that because that’s the things I remember. Not that I’ve led a completely humiliating and embarrassing life, but they are the things that have stayed with me a lot.
I have to make notes. I used to be just like, “Oh, I’ll remember that.” And I actually could. Now I’m forced into a notebook.
I’ve got a terrible memory. I’ve taken drugs in the past, which has messed with my memory. There’s certain things that never leave you, and when you start to write they come back.
Is writing part of processing these things for you?
Definitely. I work it through on the page. People often ask, “Is the writing about little traumas or big traumas—is it cathartic?” I wouldn’t say it’s cathartic in that it expels that trauma or makes you feel okay about that trauma, but writing certainly helps you understand what happened. I think that’s about as close as a human can get to really making peace with bad things that have happened to us.
By the end of the book I didn’t feel anger towards my parents or my sister, all of which were difficult relationships. I understood them. I think if you can understand anyone—whether it’s a criminal or your family, or a lover who’s spurned you—if you can understand where it’s come from, it can’t hurt you the same way anymore.
I don’t write the book from the point of view of someone who’s made peace with the world and understands their family and is all magnanimous. I am a little shit in the book, and things dawn on me in the book. I ask questions of myself and work things out on the page for the reader to see. They see the journey I’m struggling with. I didn’t know whether that was the right thing to do or not, but in the end I went with it. I didn’t know whether to let them see me working things out and my doubts on the page, but I’ve gone with it and thought, “Yeah, let them see that journey that I’m going through, trying to understand why I am like I am.”
No bio
Still raw
Lavinia Greenlaw
New Statesman. 147.5415 (Apr. 20, 2018): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
To Throw Away Unopened
Viv Albertine
Faber Faber, 304pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling]
The title of Viv Albertine's acclaimed first memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, is a phrase her mother intoned when exasperated by her wayward daughter. Designers, difficult gigs and terrible dates continue to punctuate her story but these teenage imperatives could be said to have broadened into stimulation, provocation and connection.
A musician and film-maker, Albertine is best known as a member of the Seventies punk band the Slits. To Throw Away Unopened tests her understanding of herself against the story of her parents' marriage and deaths. The title comes again from her mother, Kathleen, who wrote it in Tippex on an old flight bag that contained legal documents and diaries. Was this an act of protection or evasion? Albertine is devoted to but clear-eyed about Kathleen, just as she believes in herself while acknowledging her own contradictions. She craves her absent sister while being so competitive that they have a violent fight over their mother's deathbed about who should sit next to her. The fierceness of Albertine's love for her own daughter sits beside an awareness of all she has exposed her to, including that fight: "Fifteen years old and she's always with me when I go through these things. These adult things. Never taken aside and looked after."
The book's framework is the night of her mother's death. The evening is splintered into micro-scenes from which no thought, however shameful, is allowed to escape. Each of these precedes a short chapter in which she adds another piece to the puzzle of her childhood and by extension, herself. She writes so associatively that the book lurches from trivial to profound, absolute to dismissive, but the strength of her voice carries the reader through.
Clothes might be shorthand here for compulsive visual attentiveness. The book includes photos of furniture, buildings, vehicles, labels, documents and ornaments but no people. Albertine suggests that objects are more reliable. After her daughter was born, the only thing that interested her apart from the baby was colour. Some months later, she was diagnosed with cancer and endured five months of treatment. When it was over, she craved purple and went out to buy "a lilac vest, a violet cardigan, an aubergine skirt and a purple fleece".
The book's core, though, is the portrait of her parents. Albertine's memories are compromised by the diaries both left behind, grim notes on their mutual misery and each other's savage behaviour. They give some indication of how unsafe the young Viv must have been. No wonder she doesn't hesitate to rewrite the rules. When she forgets to film her daughter's first Christmas, she stages it again. Although her mother asked for funeral wreaths of twigs and leaves, spring flowers were "easier and looked beautiful. Got away with that one." She quotes an Adrian Mitchell poem, but in her own version. It's as if she can't accept something she hasn't fine-tuned (and so made safe) herself.
Her father, Lucien, is described as violent, controlling and absent only for his diaries to reveal the contempt with which he was treated by the rest of the family. Like Kathleen, he is both victim and monster. Albertine tests their accounts against her own memories only to wonder which is now informing the other. She leaves a series of open questions and, perhaps exhausted by a lack of definitive answers, suggests her whole family were on the autism spectrum. I'm more convinced when she says there is something "raw" about them. They are fractured, uncompromising and unmediated. The same might be said of this book.
Albertine focuses on loss of control as her home, mother, daughter, career and body all slip beyond her grasp: she observes moments of humiliation perhaps to prove that it is an emotion to which she will not succumb. The rawness is there, too, in memories that have yet to be constituted. Going home after her mother dies, she gathers small details: frost on pavement, a yellow tennis ball, four parked cars, raindrops on her fingertips. Emotion suddenly flows in a paean to the smells and tastes associated with her mother-tar, kerosene, paraffin, aniseed, cloves, rhubarb, ginger and liquorice.
Kathleen used to ask her, "What on earth do you want a man for?" Albertine's response is diffuse. She says she's interested in what she can learn rather than in sex, but sex is what she prepares for. Her lovers are nicknamed Pig, Terminator and Fox, who is a particular low point: "We sat side by side on his mattress, no bed, while he smoked weed and played the bongos." She has an on-off relationship with the builder, Eryk, who will not remove his underwear or let her see his feet. "Richard-from-the-past" insists she drive all over London ferrying him to and from a date he's failed to organise. She believes in letting a person be who they are, takes responsibility for herself and never talks about trying to change anyone.
There are things we choose not to open because they will solve tensions that have come to define us. Perhaps this is why Kathleen could neither show her children the diaries nor throw them away. She taught Viv to be a fighter and told her that the fight never ends. "What was I fighting for though?" Viv wonders. "Even now I'm not sure. Something so old and so deep, it has no words, no shape, no logic." This book is emphatically true to her nature, above all in how it finds its own form.
Lavinia Greenlaw's books include "The Importance of Music to Girls"(Faber ?& Faber)
Caption: Fractured and uncompromising: Viv Albertine of the Slits explores the complexity of family bonds
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Greenlaw, Lavinia. "Still raw." New Statesman, 20 Apr. 2018, p. 41. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537119464/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=968fd814. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537119464
Albertine, Viv: TO THROW AWAY UNOPENED
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Albertine, Viv TO THROW AWAY UNOPENED Faber & Faber (Adult Nonfiction) $24.95 5, 1 ISBN: 978-0-571-32621-1
In her second memoir, the influential rocker addresses life after punk.
Albertine's publishing debut, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (2014), earned widespread acclaim beyond music circles. Its unflinching honesty and street-wise feminism struck responsive chords as she recounted the formative years of British punk rock and her standard-bearing role in the Slits, a female band that demanded to be taken seriously within punk's male-dominated hierarchy. Now that Albertine's music career appears to be over--or is at least winding down--she has become a writer, with this second book required to follow the breakthrough success of the first. Here, the author dwells little on the music through which most previously knew her--and which she covered so well in her previous book--and more on her roles, mother, daughter, and sister, among others. As Albertine prepared for the book party to launch her memoir, she learned that her 95-year-old mother was on her deathbed, so she rushed with her daughter to be by her side. There, she joined her younger sister, with whom she was once much closer. The two engaged in a horrific battle at their mother's bedside, a hair-pulling, blood-letting fight to the finish between two women in their mid-50s whose years of bottled-up tension was just waiting to explode: " 'You're mad,' said [sister] Pascal. She was right. I was mad. Completely insane. A deranged, murderous, certifiable, raging lunatic." The narrative intersperses short paragraphs detailing the mother's death as the sisters battled between slightly longer reminiscences about growing up together as their family was falling apart and how their mother did her best to keep them estranged from their father. Albertine also quotes at length from her father's diary and her mother's testimony on the dissolution of that marriage, which she discovered after the death of each, and which frequently contradicted each other (and sometimes her own memory). "Truth is splintered," she concludes.
Not the cultural resource that her first memoir was, but still as brave and engaging in the writing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Albertine, Viv: TO THROW AWAY UNOPENED." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959924/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=792b7722. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959924
Punk in middle age — a startling memoir by Slits guitarist Viv Albertine
Brutal self-reflection, family fury and a horrifying climax make for a gripping read
Viv Albertine © Getty
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Helen Barrett
April 27, 2018
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The tension that runs throughout Viv Albertine’s second memoir, To Throw Away Unopened, explodes in one, horrifying climax — a bloody skirmish at her mother’s deathbed. It is almost unbearable reading. But it also highlights her skill as a chronicler of the experience of modern adulthood.For years, Albertine was best known as the guitarist in The Slits, the all-female British punk band of the late 1970s and early 80s, whose truculent stage presence and disorientating, spare sound matched any of their male counterparts for creativity and stage presence.After The Slits folded, she transformed herself into a film-maker, scriptwriter, occasional actor and applied artist. But in 2014 at nearly 60, Albertine embarked on a third act, with a bawdy memoir of working-class youth and adult misery: Clothes Clothes Clothes, Music Music Music, Boys Boys Boys.Here at last was an account of punk from a female perspective. It won multiple awards and sparked a genre, with a rush of memoirs from Albertine’s fellow female musicians: Chrissie Hynde, Grace Jones, Carrie Brownstein. All those accounts were a welcome redress to the received masculine history of popular music. None of them matched Albertine’s for unsparing self-reflection and sophisticated storytelling.With her second book, Albertine breaks more new ground, applying her punk principles to that most un-rock and roll experience: middle age.To Throw Away Unopened mostly leaves music (though not the clothes and the boys) behind, picking up Albertine’s story after the publication of her first book (the doomed launch party is an early scene). This time, the formidable Kathleen takes centre stage.Albertine involves herself in stand-offs that lead to triumph, humiliation and an awful denouementKathleen is 95 and dying. Albertine’s father is already dead. Once a vivacious couple, their married lives were blighted by failure, poverty and dreary expectations of femininity, masculinity and propriety. Now their adult daughter has found her creative nexus and critical acclaim, but in dealing with the practicalities of her parents’ deaths, she is forced to confront family horrors.That means reading her parents’ diaries, which surface among the household debris. The diaries — desperate accounts of everyday misery and abuse — were written during the late 1960s in the final months of the marriage and as legal evidence in their impending divorce. The book’s title is taken from the directive Kathleen daubed on the holdall that contained her diary. Albertine, ever the punk, disobeys her mother’s instruction. As she reminds us, “truth is splintered” — memory can be manipulated, and adults in the depths of despair wreak havoc on children.Anger, and how to manage it decades after egregious events, is the central problem here, and Albertine picks over it meticulously. Kathleen is a confrontational woman and encourages the young Viv and her sister to lay their anger bare at every opportunity: “Mum had pumped me so full of anger I couldn’t throw it off,” she writes.But by the 1980s, Viv has entered the television industry, populated by the Oxbridge-educated upper middle classes, and she concludes Kathleen has got it all wrong: “It was considered much cleverer to smile to people’s faces whilst you stab them in the back. The pain lasts longer for them and you walk away feeling smug and looking refined because you haven’t lost your temper.”Albertine gives Kathleen the “unnecessary aggression conversation”, in which she explains to her mother why fury is better contained. On holiday by the sea they debate the merits of suppression versus expression, huddled in deckchairs behind canvas windbreaks.Inevitably, the old family fury will not stay buried. Kathleen continues in her confrontational style. Albertine involves herself in altercations, skirmishes, scuffles and stand-offs that lead to triumph, humiliation and an awful denouement. She does not hesitate to tip drinks over stage hecklers and her hapless boyfriend. She tears people’s clothing. She argues freely with louts on buses. “Sometimes, you mess with the wrong middle-aged woman,” she deadpans. Then there is the catastrophic scene at her mother’s deathbed.By the end of the memoir, Albertine emerges from grief into something like clarity, though her tendency for brutal self-reflection remains intact. All the rigour and rage of her punk heritage make this utterly compelling writing. No sentimental tropes, no bittersweet reconciliations — but perhaps some kind of future.To Throw Away Unopened, by Viv Albertine, Faber, RRP£14.99, 292 pagesHelen Barrett is the FT’s work and careers editor
Viv Albertine of the Slits on anger, honesty and being an arsey feminist
‘The Slits got threatened with rape on the streets... Now we get threatened with rape online’: Michael Hann talks to one of the original punks about her second book
Michael Hann
Viv Albertine, left, at Alexandra Palace, 1980; and right, today
Michael Hann
14 April 2018
9:00 AM
Viv Albertine, by her own admission, hurls stuff at misbehaving audiences. Specifically, when the rage descends, any nearby full cup or glass is likely to be decanted over the object of her ire. She’s remembering an incident a few years back, at a gig she played in York, when she felt compelled to introduce some persistent talkers to the contents of their pint glasses. ‘There’s such a fine balance there, because you don’t want to sound like a schoolmarm. Johnny Rotten used to walk offstage if there was spitting. The Slits [the groundbreaking punk band for whom Albertine was the guitarist] couldn’t do that because we would have looked like Violet Elizabeth Bott: “We’re not going to play until you thtop thpitting”.’ She laughs, something she does a fair bit, and it’s important to note, because her words alone make her appear fairly terrifying, to men at least.
But back to York, and the talking men. ‘So I was toying with the idea that if I said something to these cunts, am I just gonna look like a schoolmarm? But in the end, I had to shut them up, and I tried to do that in a way that wasn’t schoolmarmish, that shocked them.’
In her new book To Throw Away Unopened, Albertine recalls that incident, and the silence of the audience as a middle-aged woman confronted boozy men who were ruining a show. I’m surprised they didn’t back her up with cheers, because God knows how much we all hate people who talk through performances. ‘Yes,’ she says, surprised the thought had never occurred to her. ‘Why the fuck didn’t they cheer?’ And then she thinks of a reason. ‘Maybe they believed me when I said, “I’ll take it outside with this fucking bottle, mate.”’
Albertine’s first book — Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys — dealt with the externalities of her life: the London punk scene, her time in the Slits between 1977 and 1982, her career and relationships after that. The new one is concerned much more with her family — her mother and father, who split when she was a child, her sister and her daughter. Of the principals, Albertine included, only her daughter escapes without a certain amount of savaging. The readers’ sympathies ebb and flow, as did Albertine’s during the course of writing it, as she discovered more about how her mother and father perceived their marriage very differently.
‘One of the questions in the book was: how the hell did I turn out to be this person who is so full of anger?’ she says. ‘To me, part of the detective story in the book is realising it was my mother who really schooled me like a little warrior: indoctrinated me, chanted and nagged me in quite a different way to most mothers.’
One would walk past Albertine in the street without thinking for a moment she was either one of the original punks, or filled with rage: she doesn’t get a second glance in the Jewish arts centre café in which we meet. Unlike say, John Lydon, she doesn’t look and speak like a caricature of her young self. She speaks precisely, and — this is probably the wrong thing to say — looks frankly brilliant for 63, despite having come through cancer and other vicissitudes. And, as the two books detail, there have been enough vicissitudes to go round, often because of her belief in living as honest a life as possible.
I say that honesty seems an awful lot more important to her than happiness. ‘I didn’t pursue happiness at all,’ she all but snorts. ‘I’ve never pursued it. I wasn’t brought up to pursue it. You’re quite a bit younger than me [I’m 48, not 23] and there was a bit more of that ethos around as you grew up. But when I grew up there was no pursuing happiness; it wasn’t talked about. Both my parents lived through a world war. My grandparents lived through two world wars. And they didn’t go around saying, “Look for happiness”.’
Gosh. We do have very different views of the world.
‘I wonder why, middle-class white man? If you go against everything that is prescribed for you in life, it’s nothing but struggle and not fitting in. And it’s never ending.’
Both books, at times, read like rebukes to those who are happy to conform; to people like me, who are naturally inclined to say yes. ‘Well, our experiences have been so different. I can understand you thinking: “I’m lucky. Society is built around people like me.” So that makes it that much easier to have the space to have a bit of happiness. But I don’t think you should see it as a rebuke.’
Nevertheless, popular culture — especially pop music — is built around the dichotomy between the creative spirit and the nine-to-fiver, and it’s built into the language of pop: the divide between the hip and the square. I explain how certain songs by Ray Davies, Paul Weller and Damon Albarn have always driven me mad — the ones in which our narrator pours scorn on the dead-eyed commuter: hang on, that’s my dad you’re having a pop at! ‘That’s kind of irresponsible,’ Albertine admits. ‘I don’t think I said it in the book, but if my daughter did ask me whether she should love an artistic life or a conventional life, I wouldn’t say, “You go out there and live an artistic life!” because there are huge consequences. It’s all very well for the Kinks and Damon Albarn to sing those songs and sneer at Mr Nine to Five, but again they’re white men, so they didn’t have it very hard.’
I imagine, by now, readers might be rolling their eyes: Oh, there goes the arsey feminist. Well, Albertine is an arsey feminist. And it’s no wonder given her experiences. When she was in the Slits, the group were frequently attacked for daring to be so different to what society expected. And ‘attacked’ isn’t metaphorical: their teenaged singer Ari Up was stabbed twice. ‘They’ — that’s men — ‘would spit at us in the street, and hit us, and threaten us with rape. We literally got threatened with rape in the streets.’ She pauses. ‘Now we get threatened with rape online.’
Still, punk left her with both a legacy and proof that all you need to do to achieve something is to get up and do it, something she thinks young women should bear in mind. A few years ago, we were both judges at a Battle of the Bands contest at the comprehensive school both our daughters attended. Three of us judges offered non-committal praise, regardless of quality. Albertine, to every group of teenagers, said: ‘You! Have! To! Write! Your! Own! Songs!’
‘I couldn’t be as hard on them as I would have liked,’ she says. ‘I would have liked to have been even harder. You’ve got one life: find your voice within it. If I was a young girl coming across someone giving me a poke up the bum like that, I’d have been pleased. Any kind of role model. Any kind of encouragement. Any kind of belief.’
So, Viv Albertine, what makes you angry these days? I think I can guess the answer, and it duly arrives. ‘A pompous man who is talking down to me. I want to kill him. It triggers all the years of it. All that has built up and is coming out in me.’ I look at the table between us. Our glasses are both empty. I’m safe.
To Throw Away Unopened is published by Faber. Here To Be Heard: The Story of the Slits is at selected cinemas across the UK.
To Throw Away Unopened by Viv Albertine - review: what Viv did once the days of fame were over
An odd but compelling hybrid of a memoir, it transpires, says Nick Curtis
NICK CURTIS
Thursday 22 March 2018 11:06
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I approached this book with trepidation.
Back in 2014 Viv Albertine delivered a vivid and quietly furious autobiography, Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys, which brought anyone who was interested up to date on a messy life embracing childhood poverty, cancer, infertility, divorce, quite a lot of awful sex and her four years in the amateurish but culturally significant all-girl punk band The Slits. What more could she have to offer?
An odd but compelling hybrid of a memoir, it transpires. This book starts as an observational account of Albertine trying to construct a new, post-divorce life in Hackney: new flat; new attempts at relationships with awful, useless men; new career as a published author which seems remarkably similar to her hand-to-mouth punk days.
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She throws drinks over disrespectful people and still races to get the upstairs front seat of the 55 bus. Punchy vignettes of the indignities wrought by age, illness and romantic disappointment are underscored by Albertine’s weary, deadpan dryness, and her fierce adoration of her mother Kath and teenage daughter Vida.
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Ordinary People by Diana Evans - review
Gradually, the narrative crystallises around the death at 96 of Kath, a roll-up smoking librarian who brought Viv and her sister Pascale up in north London when their Corsican sailor father Lucien left in the late Sixties.
Kath watched Viv drop out of art school to form her first band with Sid Vicious, put her up through later periods of homelessness, tolerated her late-night phone calls and lentil bakes, only to become the cared-for rather than the carer. Surely she will be the heroine of a matriarchal family saga, with Vida picking up the banner for a new generation?
But families are never that simple. When Lucien died (just in time, Viv notes, for his meagre estate to pay for her divorce lawyer) he left a tranche of papers that put a new slant on the acrimonious family history. The lack of sisterly feeling between Viv and Pascale, fostered by both parents in childhood, comes to a shocking flashpoint over Kath’s deathbed. And Kath leaves a second set of papers behind, disingenuously labelled “To throw away unopened”, which further complicate the story and add a stepbrother into the messy, imperfect mix.
By the end, the author is lonely (people flinch when she tells them that) but resolute, having lived, in Gloria Steinem’s phrase, her mother’s unlived life. If Vida follows the same pattern she will have to become a boringly conformist goody-goody. “On the plus side,” Albertine notes, “there’s being well-educated, retaining most of her brain cells, gender fluidity and skiing.” If that sentence makes you smile, give her book a go.
To Throw Away Unopened by Viv Albertine (Faber, £14.99), buy it now.
Interview
Viv Albertine: ‘I just want to blow a hole in it all’
By Sean O'Hagan
Autobiography and memoir
The Observer
Viv Albertine’s new memoir is a chronicle of outsiderness that goes beyond her years in the Slits to explore class and gender, her parents and sibling rivalry, and why she’s done with men
Sun 1 Apr 2018 09.30 BST
Last modified on Wed 4 Apr 2018 10.50 BST
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Viv Albertine: ‘I’m finally in a place where I am making sensible decisions that are good for me.’ Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer
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n 4 April 1966, when Viv Albertine was 11 years old, her father, Lucien, wrote the following entry in his diary: “When Viviane went out this afternoon with a friend she dolled herself up with scent and lipstick… I said she was much too young. She was shocked when I tried to advise her and adopted a rude attitude.” The following February, he made note of an embarrassing encounter with a neighbour, who reported seeing Viviane with “a bad lot” in the local Wimpy: “The way your daughter dresses in miniskirts and fancy socks and the rest of it, she’ll end up on drugs or in trouble.”
Her father’s diary, which Albertine discovered after his death, is one of the few threads of connection she now has with the man who left her life soon afterwards. By turns poignant and self-pitying, his entries punctuate one part of her compelling new memoir, To Throw Away Unopened. They reveal among other things that, even at 11 years old, Albertine was possessed of the defiant attitude that would later help to define her both as a musician in the most subversive punk group of all, the Slits, and as a late-flowering memoir writer still fuelled by a sense of anger and outsiderness even in her 60s.
“Oh my God, I still have that attitude,” she says, laughing, when I mention this, “I’m still angry at so much – class, gender, society, the way we are constantly mentally coerced into behaving a certain way without us even knowing it. I feel so oppressed by the weight of it all that I just want to blow a hole in it all.” She pauses for a breath as if to still her emotions, and continues calmly. “Some people will say that I’m bitter and twisted, but so what? I’m 63 and I’ve been an outsider as far back as junior school. When you’ve fought and fought to keep positive and to keep creative even though there was not a space to be creative, well, you show me any human who is not angry after 60 years of that.”
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Like her debut, the wonderfully titled Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music Music, Music. Boys, Boys Boys, which described her journey into punk and beyond, this new volume is essentially a chronicle of outsiderness. It is driven by a relentless honesty about herself and the dysfunctional family dynamic she was born into, which she lays bare with an almost forensic eye. It explores her upbringing in a working-class family in Muswell Hill in the 1960s, her parents’ breakup, her mother’s central role in shaping her fiercely independent outlook and her fraught relationship with her younger sister, from whom she is now estranged. Her conversational style of writing is lullingly deceptive, allowing the revelations, when they come, to explode like well-placed time bombs in the narrative. At one point, after her mother’s death, she discovers that her mum was keeping a diary at the same time as her dad. Both of them, unbeknown to the other, were amassing evidence for their looming divorce proceedings. It’s that sort of twisted story, but the conflicting parental diary entries are only the half of it.
I see music as a vehicle like writing or film-making, but I don’t think it’s a very relevant medium for me at the moment
“I think it is essentially about rage and being an outsider,” she says. “Female rage is not often acknowledged – never mind written about – so one of the questions I’m asking is: ‘Are you allowed to be this angry as you grow older as a woman?’ But I’m also trying to trace where my anger came from. Who made me the person that is still so raw and angry? I think that it’s empowering to ask that question. I really hope it resonates with women. I want to say to younger women especially that it’s OK to be an outsider, it’s OK to admit to your rage. You’re not the only person walking down the street feeling angry inside.”
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In person, Albertine is calm and charming, while simultaneously evincing a kind of low-level hum of nervous intensity. Dressed in a striped top and leather jacket, she looks much younger than her age, and still retains some of the combative energy that she once emitted as guitarist of the Slits – the all-girl group that literally stopped traffic when they stepped out in their jumble-sale finery during the punk wars of the late 1970s. We meet in a room at Faber & Faber, and having crossed paths a few times over the years, have a natter about some mutual acquaintances from back in the day. Some of her closest contemporaries have not made it this far: Ari Up, lead vocalist and most out-there member of the Slits, died in October 2010; the equally singular Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex in April 2011. Albertine has had her own brush with mortality in the form of a cervical cancer diagnosis six weeks after she gave birth to her daughter, Vida, in 1999. “I’m not 100% well, but I manage it,” she says, when I ask after her health. “My nerves are still shot from the chemo and radiotherapy, but I’m finally in a place where I am making sensible decisions that are good for me. I live a smaller life now because I have to be careful to avoid stress.”
Is her searingly honest writing style not stressful in itself? “No, not compared to going on stage anyway,” she says, smiling. She tells me that she is done with making music. “I’m just not interested in playing any more. I came to that decision the night my mum died. I don’t worship musicians. I don’t worship rock’n’roll. I don’t miss it. I see music as a vehicle like writing or film-making, but I don’t think it’s a very relevant medium for me at the moment. And anyway, if I need to do it again for whatever reason, I’ll just pick it up and get by and bluff it.”
Albertine’s first book began with a chapter entitled Masturbation (Never did it. Never wanted to do it), a statement of intent that set the confessional-confrontational tone of much of what was to follow. It was an insider’s account of what it was like to be caught up in the white heat of the punk moment and, more revealingly, how difficult it was to live a so-called normal life in the wake of such a briefly liberating cultural upheaval. I tell her that I witnessed the Slits on stage several times back then, drawn to the anarchic otherness of their music and their utter disregard for the protocol of performance – Ari Up once famously had a pee on stage. It was the shock of the new writ large and it confused a lot of people – much more so than the recognisably rockist thrust of the Sex Pistols or the Clash.
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When Albertine first saw the Slits play, which was months before she joined them, she understood their implications immediately. “Boys listen to music differently, they bone up. I didn’t know how to listen to music so I wouldn’t actually have known if they were out of tune or not playing in time. It really didn’t matter to me. It wasn’t the point.” It suddenly seems so long ago, I say, light years away from today’s more gentrified pop culture. “It does,” she says nodding, “and I miss that unprofessionalism so much. Now, everyone has gone to music school and they all play brilliantly and you think, Why are they even playing live? It’s all so bloody middle class now.”
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The Slits in the 70s (left-right): Viv Albertine, Palmolive, Tessa Pollitt and Ari Up. Photograph: Ray Stevenson/Rex Features
In the Slits, Albertine found not just a self-styled punk sisterhood of sorts but a kind of surrogate family – with all that implies in terms of loyalties, rivalries and tensions. “It was exciting but it was extreme,” she says, “and Ari was really extreme, but she worked on stage and she worked musically. Outside of those two places, it was tough and exhausting. We lived together day and night, all sleeping on each other’s floors, all going out together on to the streets. It was so dangerous to be a punk and female. And the way we looked and acted made it more dangerous.” They were often spat at and verbally abused. Ari was stabbed on two separate occasions by angry men. “We had to be together because it was too risky not to. That took its toll. We fell apart because of the pressures we got as women, for sure. A male band would have lasted much longer.”
In writing the first book, Albertine also found herself thinking about the emotional and psychological demons that drove many of punk’s key figures as much as their shared cultural disaffection. ‘There was a lot of passion and self-belief running through punk, of course,” she says now, “but many of the people who were drawn to it were also struggling with personality disorders, with the fallout of things that had gone wrong at home. I now think everyone in punk was on some sort of spectrum, actually.” Would she include herself in that description? “I would,” she says without hesitation. “I think my family were mentally unhealthy and that made me more of an outsider. I was, for better or worse, brought up to be raw and passionate and demonstrative, which does not fit in English society very well, but it fitted in punk. I fitted in, then. I’ve tried to fit in in various ways ever since, getting married and all that, but I got squashed.”
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She points out, too, that all the Slits came from families where fathers were not present. “We couldn’t have been who we were – as loud and as mad and as provocative and shocking – if we’d had dads around all the time, even dads we loved. In those days fathers got the best chair, the biggest piece of meat and all that. The very atmosphere around the man was that he was the boss of the house, though my father failed awfully at that. A traditional father would have been worried about us going out dressed like that and behaving like that. We could not have lived the wild lives we lived.”
Was it too much, I ask, being a Slit? “Sometimes. Even Ari with all her energy admitted that later and, believe me, nothing stopped Ari. Her energy was unbelievable. It was on the edge of chaos a lot of the time so the exhilaration was when we played together and played well. The rest of the time it was, what’s going to happen? Are we gonna get thrown off the plane cos Ari’s too loud or taken into customs or thrown out of the hotel or arrested? We felt at the time we were battling but it was an exuberant battle – the four of us against the world. We were a gang and we absolutely believed in what we were doing and what we were changing for girls, and we believed in our music utterly. Otherwise, we could not have done it. We knew we were new, that we were a first, but it was a fight. Always.”
How can you even attempt to be an artist if you compromise when you are making a piece of work? What’s the point?
To Throw Away Unopened is a painstaking – and painful – dissection of her own familial fallout, of the things that had gone wrong at home that, for better or worse, continue to define her as an outsider. As I read it, I kept thinking about some starkly truthful lines by Philip Larkin: “An only life can take so long to climb/Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never…”
It is a book, I think, that will resonate, like punk did, with anyone from a similar working-class background who is still angry with the ways in which the world had become even more weighted against them in terms of education and self-expression. Conversely, it may shock and appal anyone who doesn’t share or even understand the depth of that anger – particularly when it is expressed by a woman in her 60s.
“Oh, I’ve already had interviewers say to me, ‘You’re not a nice person and no one in the book is nice,’” she says. “One man even told me that he wished he hadn’t asked to review it. He said, ‘You’ve chosen honesty over happiness, you’ve chosen misery, you don’t see the good in anyone.’ On and on.” She raises her eyes heavenwards. “He actually said, ‘I read the whole book as a rebuke to me.’ He somehow took it personally.” I tell her that this says more about his privilege than her passion. She smiles, but still seems rattled by the magnitude of such a misreading.
As both memoirs make clear, Albertine inherited her spirit of defiant independence from her mother, Kathleen, who raised her and her younger sister, Pascale, after her father left. While he remains an almost ghostly presence throughout, a foreigner of French-Corsican origin marooned in an unwelcoming postwar London, her mother’s presence is palpable throughout. And it is her mother’s death, aged 93, that is the pivotal moment of the book. To make sense of who she is now, Albertine says, she had to delve into her parents’ lives as well as her own.
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Albertine found her mother’s diaries while clearing out her flat after her death. They were concealed in an old Aer Lingus flight bag with the words “To Throw Away Unopened” written in Tipp-Ex on the front. Her defiant daughter read that as an invitation to do the very opposite, hence the book’s title. This act alone could be read by some as an acknowledgment of the betrayals – of privacy, respect and the familial ties that bind – that writing a memoir entails. “I’m loth to call myself an artist,” Albertine says, when I broach this subject, “but how can you even attempt to be an artist if you compromise when you are making a piece of work? In my case, I am dealing with family dynamics, and that means I have to tell the truth about family dynamics. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
She later concedes that the act of writing is itself a kind of compromise. “I strive for honesty, but I do think it’s impossible in a way. As a writer, you make decisions all the time to shape the book which may mean leaving something out that is important. Plus, it’s my point of view so it’s biased. I’m aiming for the truth and nothing but, though really it’s nowhere near that.”
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‘We knew we were new’: Viv Albertine on stage with the Slits, Alexandra Palace, 1980. Photograph: David Corio/Redferns
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Perhaps the most honest, certainly the most viscerally unsettling, passage in the book concerns a violent incident that precipitates the final breakdown of her relationship with her sister. To describe it, and its spectacularly inappropriate context, would be a spoiler of inexcusable proportions, but suffice to say it is a truly shocking evocation of the kind of volcanic violence that can only erupt after decades of sibling rivalry and suppressed rage. I tell her it stopped me in my tracks. “I know, I know,” she says, nodding, “but I have friends who have read the book and then contacted me to tell me similar stories. I could hear the relief in their voices. This stuff happens all the time in families, it just isn’t written about or even talked about.”
Her sister now lives in Australia, which, I say, is as far away as it is possible to go from Muswell Hill, where their sibling rivalry first began all those years ago. This is removing oneself from the ties that bind on a grand scale. “Yes,” nods Albertine. “I really thought I was the rebel, but really she took the most dramatic route out. I realised while writing the book that my sister sussed early on that she was going to be squashed if she stayed. She was so much cleverer than me.”
One wonders what Pascale will make of the book. “Well, I’ve changed all identifying details. Plus, she lives a whole different life now. She won’t get in touch with me, she won’t read it, she probably won’t even know it’s out.” Did writing about their toxic relationship help shed light on her sister’s actions or, indeed, her own? “Looking back, I think my mother and father set us against each other from when we were very young – you’re on my side and you’re on my side. We were made adversaries, really, we were groomed to be like that and it is hard to know how you can ever undo that. I do think the dynamic between sisters has to be the worst in the world when it goes wrong.”
Does she think they could ever reach a point where they could sit down and have it out in a civilised way? “No,” she says quietly. “Not any more. We’ve gone round and round in that circle of abuse where it’s OK for a bit and then it gets nasty again. And anyway, I’m so raw and so damaged, not just from that but from other things in my life, the relationships that have hurt me, my illness, the chemotherapy and all of that stuff. I’m not saying this as a victim, because I probably have a huge part in all of it, but I simply can’t take emotional stress any more.”
To Throw Away Unopened could well have been called How to Be Alone. Albertine is done, she tells me, with boys as well as music. As both her books attest, she does seem to have had a run of bad luck on the boyfriend front. “It’s not a run,” she exclaims, “it’s a fucking lifetime. I’ve been dating since I was 13. All I can think to do now is to stop having relationships. I cannot go through that any more.” Has the book made her understand her father more? “Yes, but understanding is not the same as forgiving. I do feel warmer towards all of my family now, compassionate. I don’t feel anger towards any of them. I think they are better than most, my family, which is not to say I could live with them.”
At 63, then, she has finally had enough of trying to fit in and, on one level, her book is an argument for living against – against the often suffocating constrictions of mainstream conformity, class and gender bias and, whisper it quietly, family loyalty. “One of the questions I am asking is, Is it OK to walk away from a family member, to cut off entirely?” It is a question, though, that she seems to have already answered. I ask her finally what she has learned about herself through writing in such a self-revealing way. She pauses for a moment, then says: “I know that I want to stay an outsider now. I hate the very thought that I would ever not be an outsider.” I think she can rest easy on that front.
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