Rememberings

by Sinéad O'Connor

I was very young when my career kicked off. I never had or took the time to “find myself.” But I think you’ll see in this book a girl who does find herself, not by success in the music industry but by taking the opportunity to sensibly and truly lose her marbles. The thing being that after losing them, one finds them and plays the game better.

If I hope for anything as an artist, it’s that I inspire certain people to be who they really are. My audiences seem to be people who have been given a hard time for being who they are.

Play me very softly, gently, gently, only barely, because I am a very tender thing, and the ghosts are very sore.

People don’t talk, so their feelings fly into musical things. It said, The ghosts are things people don’t want to remember.

But it isn’t ribbons I want, I want songs to take me away to that other world. I don’t like reality. I don’t wanna find myself back in it after three minutes and have to hang around in it until the next chance comes to have it vanish.

In the evenings, he and my grandma go out on their own together for a glass of porter because they’re in love.

I see from the album cover he’s as beautiful as if God blew a breath from Lebanon and it became a man.

He said people didn’t often recognize what God loved, and he said they sometimes didn’t love what God loved.

Suddenly, there Jesus was in my mind, on a little stony hill, on His cross.

Lots of stuff about the war up north too, on the news. I’m really scared when I hear about bombs and fire and old people bleeding and everyone screaming and tanks and soldiers and people throwing things and even little kids watching in the streets.

OKAY, I DID a bad thing. But I didn’t know it was bad, so it isn’t a sin. That’s what the Bible says, anyway. If I were to do it again now that I know it’s a sin, it would be a sin. As long as I never do it again, I’m grand.

You get a tin and badges and you go around to people’s houses and ask for money and then the money gets used for good things. They said there was gonna be a prize for whoever collected the most money by the following Sunday and the prize was a silver Cross writing pen.

I told him I was a thief and God could see me.

I’M STARING AT the reflection of my eyes in the window of the back seat of my father’s car. I’m thinking it will always be the same two eyes looking at me all my life.

He’s addicted to working. He gets away with leaving my stepmother to deal with us savages because he’s a man.

I love Yeats’s poems, they’re like music but they open up a different sky, the one that’s inside me. I’m not scared of that sky because it has boundaries.

There isn’t a scary spinning universe outside me; there’s a misted olden-days sitting room inside me, with a huge gray marble fireplace. Yeats is out of his mind there, writing “Easter, 1916,” about the tragic uprising by Irish Republicans against the British. Nobody is fucking laughing now is what I wrote on my test in answer to the question What was the poet saying?

WHEN YOU DRIVE in the gates of High Park to An Grianán, there’s a massive full-color statue of Jesus in His red and white robes. He has His arms wide open in welcome. I feel sorry for Him—He must be freezing. And I wonder why He always looks like He came from Kerry instead of Bethlehem. Surely His skin and eyes should be browner.

I already know singing is a thing that will take me away from people.

How she is different from me is that she has red hair and self-esteem.

In reality, my granny had impressed upon me several times that a woman must never reveal her cash stash to any male relative.

Planes only fly past Ireland on their way to somewhere else. Unless they’re Irish planes carrying Irish people into and out of the country for amounts of money that increase toward Christmas, the very time anyone who’s had the intelligence to leave needs to come back for fear of being a bad son or daughter.

his eyes have spun round on his face like the snake’s in The Jungle Book because he’s always on the class A drugs. But he’s not a snaky person; he’s an innocent. That’s why he can’t bear the world.

In the showbiz parts of Los Angeles, the white walls have beautiful dark pink flowers. The Mexicans live elsewhere. So do the African-Americans. The only time you see those people, they’re cleaning someone’s house. In the New York office of my record company, the color of the employees’ skin is darkest in the basement, which is the mail room. Their skins get lighter as the floors go up. As do the stations the employees have their radios tuned to. Two floors from the top, “no females” becomes the scenario also. Unless they’re in secretarial roles.

Nobody loved us. Not even God. Sure, even our mothers and fathers couldn’t stand us.

Intensely angry old people (with very pointy noses) operating the steamrollers. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so funny.

After all, there is no point setting out on a healing journey if you’re not going to find yourself healed.

Truth to tell, it’s very hard for me to get angry about my mother. It’s the way I’ve survived. I’ve convinced myself she didn’t know what she was doing. People will do that, but of course, I’ve misplaced that anger and it might be more mature for me to accept it.

But how do you tell the story of a war? It’s good if you can make it look like you’re talking about the relationship between a man and a woman.

These are sad songs, of course, because nobody in Ireland ever writes a happy fucking song.

Many weirdos wander up my drive. Rarely does an angel.

Because to be a good Catholic, you had to think you were a piece of shit. That was the idea. The less you thought of yourself, the more God would think of you.

I’ve done only one holy thing in my life and that was sing.

What will they do with this monster when they can? History has cleverly made socialism the worst word one can utter in America. Perhaps, though, a terrible beauty might be born.