by Houghton Mifflin Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
First published 2021
Sinéad O'Connor opens her life story in the chaos of her Dublin childhood home, where abuse shaped her early years until music offered an escape route. She traces her path from discovering Bob Dylan through her brother's record collection to performing with local Irish bands as a teenager. O'Connor describes recording her debut album while eight months pregnant, then watching her cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2U" launch her to global stardom by age twenty. She recounts the wild years that followed, from hanging out with Rastas in New York's East Village to the infamous 1992 Saturday Night Live moment when she tore up the Pope's photograph on television. Throughout, O'Connor connects her fierce activism and controversial public moments to the pain and passion that drove her music. This memoir reveals how a girl with an extraordinary voice and uncompromising spirit survived family trauma to become one of music's most fearless and polarizing figures.
Genres: autobiography, biography-memoir, music, activism
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, intimate
Tropes: coming-of-age, overcoming-adversity
Setting: Dublin, New York
Period: 1980s, 1990s
304 pages · Hardcover · Dey Street Books
Content warnings: abuse