![]() ![]() ![]() In the book, she recounts her mother’s physical and sexual abuse, including the times she ordered O’Connor to strip naked, lie on the floor with her arms and legs splayed open, then hit her repeatedly in her private parts. The bitch dies and there’s 250 grand in the bank! When my mother died, we were living like she had no money. When her parents split up, she says, her father (a structural engineer turned barrister) became only the second man in Ireland awarded custody of his children and a campaigner for the right to divorce. The family were middle-class, fairly well off, practising Catholics and dysfunctional. O’Connor grew up in Glenageary, County Dublin, the third of five children born to Marie and John. I don’t mind when it turns into black night, but once the hours of dusk come, I get very anxious.” That is when I officially lost my mind and became afraid of the size of the sky.” This particular incident shaped much of her life, she tells me. “I knelt on the ground in front of the gable wall and wailed up to the landing window to get her to let us into the house when it got dark. She describes her fear on the day her father left, and her mother moved her and her siblings into the garden hut and locked them out of the house. In Rememberings, she captures the way she saw the world when she was young. ‘I was born with a huge faith and it never left.’ Photograph: Linda Brownlee/The Guardian For three hours, she talks and talks – eloquent, indiscreet, potty-mouthed, poignant, conspiratorial. She’s 54 now, her cheeks more rounded but her eyes still bright. She’s at home in Wicklow when we speak, decked out in grey – grey jumper, grey hijab (she changed her off-stage name to Shuhada Sadaqat when she became a Muslim in 2018), grey cropped skinhead and grey fag ash. The writing, particularly when recounting her childhood, is lyrical, funny and anguished, and the revelations come thick and fast. The book is a series of beautifully observed vignettes rather than a conventional autobiography: she takes us from the abuse to the kleptomania, reform school, pop stardom, pope-baiting, heresy, apostasy, breakups, breakdowns, kids, marriages and celebrity shags that have shaped her life. For the first time, she has written about the childhood abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother. The book, Rememberings, has been a long time in the making. (She viewed the apology as wholly inadequate, calling the Vatican “a nest of devils and a haven for criminals”.) But in 2010 Pope Benedict XVI issued an apology to the victims of decades of sex abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland, expressing his “shame and remorse” for their “sinful and criminal acts”. Two weeks later she was booed off stage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert, and her records were publicly smashed. At the time many people dismissed her as a loopy self-publicist. In 1992, she had torn up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live as a protest at child sex abuse in the Catholic church. Last time we met, 11 years ago, O’Connor was a Catholic priest (she had been ordained by a breakaway church in 1999) who had just been vindicated. And she is often proved right, long after the event. O’Connor is an enormously empathic figure hers is a vulnerability we can all relate to. It’s not just her eagerness to stick two fingers up at convention that makes her endlessly fascinating. When she was told Nothing Compares 2 U was at No 1 she wept – and not out of happiness. O’Connor must be one of pop’s most reluctant stars. There have been gorgeous, relatively poppy albums, such as Universal Mother, but even that featured a spoken-word polemic on why the Irish famine was not actually a famine, and compared the country to an abused child. ![]() Her albums have often been cussedly uncommercial – traditional Irish songs on Sean-Nós Nua, roots reggae covers on Throw Down Your Arms. Perhaps O’Connor was always destined to be best known for simply being herself: the angelic skinhead who swore like a trooper and shocked the world with allegations of child sex abuse a woman who played out her own mental health crises in public who became a Catholic priest and then “reverted” to Islam who had four children by four different men, when all these things were unheard of or taboo. Sinéad O’Connor singing Nothing Compares 2 U
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