Crusading Warrior

To Throw Away Unopened by Viv Albertine

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Some books give you everything: laughs, insight, heartbreak, historical context, coupled with a strong desire to share several glasses of wine with the author and to talk into the small hours. So it was for me and Viv Albertine's astonishing memoir 'To Throw Away Unopened'. I got to the end, elated from all that she had shared, honoured that she had been bold enough to share it and sad that the last page meant the ride was at an end.

Viv Albertine is best known as one of the pioneering members of a punk band called The Slits. Never having been a fan of punk - tender, conventional teenager that I was, its anarchic spirit terrified me - I had not heard of her. Only now, with that old gem of a gift called hindsight, can I look back and see the job punk was doing - breaking down ancient taboos and barriers, opening up spaces for women like Viv - and me - to run into and start to be ourselves instead of some version of womanhood that the preceding centuries had devised for us. So, thank you Viv Albertine, for that alone, quite apart from this profound and ultimately joyful account of coming to terms with the loss of your mother.

Except 'to Throw Away Unopened' is about so much more than Viv Albertine losing her beloved parent. Her mother dies, yes, but in the process lights a fuse that throws into question Albertine's perception and understanding of her entire life. The book takes us back in time as Albertine chases down this fuse, tackling and unravelling all the muddles and mysteries that fall across her path as she goes. Her love for her mother is huge and rock solid, but as she explores all the difficult memories of immense childhood hardship - lack of money, lack of food, the toxic atmosphere between her parents - even this is thrown into doubt. Was her father in fact the cruel and unloving man she had always been told? Was her mother selfless or selfish? Why and when did the rift start between her and her sister? Was it the product of the circumstances or something more sinister?

Albertine is fearless in the facts she digs out and the way in which she scrutinises them. From her own fragmented recollections to actual boxes of old letters and photographs, no stone, real or conceptual, is left unturned. The book builds towards a shocking crux of a violent showdown between herself and her sister at their dying mother's bedside. Here the core of the truth Albertine has been probing finally erupts, a lanced boil of pain and ugliness, constituting a scene almost as hard to read as it must have been to endure.

Viv Albertine is nothing less than a warrior crusading for the truth - about herself, as much as the rest of the world - and boy, does she find it. The unfaltering precision and openness of her writing ensures that we travel every step of the way with her, and leaves us wanting more.




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