Nothing compares to the traumatic life of Sinéad

(and why did she run away from Prince?)

Sinéad O’Connor became a superstar in 1990 thanks to Nothing Compares 2 U, a song written by Prince but made unforgettable by the young Irish woman who sang it. If the musical alchemy was electric, the pair’s personal chemistry was toxic.

They met twice. After the second occasion, writes O’Connor, ‘I never wanted to see that devil again’. Having summoned her to his spooky LA retreat, Prince told her off for swearing, sneaked an object ‘designed to hurt’ inside his pillow during a pillow fight and followed her in his car when she eventually ran from the building, fearing for her safety.

It’s just one traumatic encounter in a life filled with them. Although she died when O’Connor was 18, her mother’s misdeeds hover over the book like a haunting. Returning from school, O’Connor pretends to have lost her hockey stick, ‘ because I know my mother will hit me with it all summer if I bring it home’.

The mental and physical abuse she suffered within a highly dysfunctional domestic set- up movingly contextualises O’Connor’s recurring mental health struggles, intensely personal songs, as well as the 1992 incident that ‘derailed’ her career: ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II live on American TV in protest at the Catholic Church covering up child abuse. ‘ I’m a punk,’ she explains. ‘Not a pop star.’

If all this sounds like hard work for the reader, it isn’t. O’Connor is both funny and forgiving, and her rage and grief are free from selfpity. The path from Dublin to London and fame is recounted in brief, vivid episodes. She hangs out with Rastafarian crime lords in New York clubs, talks candidly about drugs – she hated cocaine and heroin, but ‘ weed I’ve liked too much’ – and remembers the early days of touring with earthy fondness: ‘It was nothing but sex.’

Indeed, her complex love life takes up rather a lot of space. ‘I have four children by four different fathers, only one of whom I married, and I married three other men, none of whom are the fathers of my children.’ An affair with Peter Gabriel is dismissed with hilarious bluntness. Later, she recalls how she and Daniel Day-Lewis ‘were getting very friendly until I blew the friendship by losing my temper with him one night in a crazy way’.

On this and other occasions, the reader is left to fill in the blanks. Despite its title, Rememberings is not the whole story. Much has been either forgotten or omitted. In 2015 O’Connor suffered a ‘total breakdown’ following surgery for a radical hysterectomy. This affected her memory – everything after 1992 is a jumble – as well as her career: when she left hospital she had only £8,000 in the bank.

A new record and tour are in the works, which is welcome news. Making music, it’s clear, has saved her. ‘If anyone wants to truly know me,’ she writes, ‘ the best way is through the songs.’

While that may be true, Rememberings brings the complicated woman who wrote them a little closer.