Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters, by Allyson McCabe, Texas University Press, 209 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-1477325704
The Real Sinéad O’Connor, by Ariane Sherine, Pen & Sword Books, 179 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-1036108236
Sinéad O’Connor’s Universal Mother, by Adele Bertei, Bloomsbury, 98 pp, £10.99, ISBN: 979-8765106914
Sinéad O’Connor was only twenty-four years old when people started writing books about her. In 1991, two rock critics, Dermott Hayes and Jimmy Guterman, separately released unauthorised biographies of the singer, leading her to complain, understandably, that she was too young for that kind of treatment. Thirty years later, it was her own turn. She published her memoir Rememberings in 2021 with Penguin, and then, suddenly and tragically, she died of natural causes in July 2023, found unresponsive in her flat in Herne Hill, London. Reading Rememberings now, the saddest part comes in the foreword, when she describes the book as her ‘first memoir’. ‘My intention,’ she wrote, ‘is to live a long life and keep diaries this time so I won’t forget.’
Rememberings is a powerful and disarming read, somehow searingly insightful and playfully elusive at the same time. It casts fresh light on incidents in O’Connor’s life that were known but had not yet been so personally and vividly told, like her abusive encounter with Prince in his Beverly Hills mansion in 1990, or her experience as a teenager in An Grianán training centre in Drumcondra, a ‘reformatory’ school run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, who also operated the adjacent Magdalene Laundry. At the same time, even by the standards of most autobiographical writing, Rememberings is a deeply selective account: it omits enormous swathes of the stances, beliefs, actions and controversies that shaped O’Connor’s life and reception between 1986 and 2023. Reading it will give you only the vaguest of pictures of her relationship with republicanism, religion or feminism, for instance, and only partially tell the stories of many important people in her life, like her former manager Fachtna Ó Ceallaigh, her ex-husband John Reynolds or her lifelong friend and one-time PA Ciara O’Flanagan. This, of course, was O’Connor’s prerogative, and she made no secret of it. ‘I can’t remember any more than I have given my publisher,’ she wrote. ‘Except for that which is private or that I wish to forget.’ She blamed her hazy memory on her long addiction to weed, but also made no bones about leaving things out.
This means that, while Rememberings contends with the trappings of narrative and structure familiar to any memoir, it follows these through in unusual ways. O’Connor split her life into two phases. The first: everything up to the end of October 1992, especially her astonishing appearance on NBC’s television show Saturday Night Live, when she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II. The second: everything that came after that. The memoir itself, however, falls into three sections. Part One offers impressionistic scenes and snatches of memory from her childhood. Part Two traces her rise to global stardom, beginning with her record deal in London in 1985 and culminating with what she called ‘the pope chapters’. Part Three changes tack, and offers short commentaries on her albums, EPs and singles before partially resuming the autobiographical story in 2015, the year she had a radical hysterectomy. Taken on its own merits, this selectivity is unimportant: Rememberings matters more because of its vitality and intimacy than what its contents amount to. But since O’Connor’s death, the meoir has been transformed into a last testament of sorts, charged with a gravitas that she never intended. This is how it now looms over her legacy.
In the flurry of literature and comment since 2021, a relatively settled version of O’Connor’s life has taken shape, the kind reproduced in books like Allyson McCabe’s Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters and Ariane Sherine’s The Real Sinéad O’Connor. First is her childhood (1966-’85). Second is her rise to fame (1985-’92). Third is most of her career (1993-2015). And fourth is what could be called her ‘comeback’ (2015-’23). But these are never equally weighted: her rise to fame dominates most accounts, and is, for instance, the sole focus of Kathryn Ferguson’s documentary Nothing Compares (2022). Even in larger versions, her SNL appearance is often framed as a kind of culminating point of her career more generally, which is why it comes at around the halfway mark of McCabe’s and Sherine’s books. (Even Adele Bertei’s Sinéad O’Connor’s Universal Mother, which focuses on her 1994 LP, includes a chapter about SNL as a preamble.) At first, this seems like an obvious chronological move to make, but it is also indicative of how little critical attention has been paid to most of O’Connor’s career since 1993. Not much is usually said about this period that goes beyond brief overviews of the albums and familiar headlines concerning Miley Cyrus and Dr Phil. This is also true of Rememberings, raising all sorts of questions about the influence that her memoir has had on how we think about her life and music more generally.
O’Connor was born on December 8th, 1966 in Dublin to John (‘Seán’) and Marie O’Connor, and grew up initially in Glenageary in a middle class household. But as is well known, O’Connor’s parents split up in 1975, and unusually for the time, her father was given custody of her and her three siblings. Arguably, from the age of eight until the end of her life, O’Connor never settled anywhere. She moved between her parents’ homes until she was a teenager. At the age of fifteen, she was consigned to An Grianán, one component of what the historian James M Smith has called Ireland’s misogynistic ‘architecture of containment’. She was sent to boarding school in Waterford after that, dropped out before her final state exams, and moved back to the capital. Though she took lessons in what was then the Dublin College of Music, she was really trying to make it in a rock band. She had performed briefly with In Tua Nua in 1983, and formed Ton Ton Macoute with Columb Farrelly after she put an ad for musicians in Hot Press in 1984. And in 1985, at the age of eighteen, she moved to London, not long after her mother died in a car crash. At this point, she was on the cusp of a solo record deal with Ensign Records, the same label that had signed the Boomtown Rats in the 1970s.
The various forms of abuse that O’Connor suffered in her youth provide the context to this rootlessness. Her parents’ separation would have been discomfiting enough in a land without divorce, and added to that was not simply her teenage incarceration in An Grianán, but also more fundamentally the repeated ways that her mother abused her when she was a child. This abuse, which was verbal, psychological, physical and sexual in nature, resulted in lifelong complex trauma for O’Connor that not only was never resolved, but was perpetuated by clinical misdiagnoses later in life.
O’Connor spoke about An Grianán as early as April 1988, when she told Rolling Stone magazine that she had never ‘experience[d] such panic and terror and agony over anything’. ‘If you were bad, they sent you upstairs to sleep in the old folks’ home,’ she said. ‘You’re there in the pitch black. You can smell the shit and the puke and everything, and these old women are moaning in their sleep.’ She was slower to reveal details of how her mother had mistreated her, but in December 1990 told American outlets like the Los Angeles Times and Esquire that she had gone into school with black eyes and bruises, and had been beaten by her mother with ‘everything. Hockey sticks. Carpet sweeps. My father’s tennis racket. Any implement. Dishes. You know, anything.’ This was information that O’Connor largely withheld from the Irish media, but it began to circulate widely with the promotion and publication of Dermott Hayes’s biography from April of that year.
The explicitly sexual dimension to the abuse she suffered came out later, but by October 1996, there was no longer any ambiguity. She appeared on a BBC programme on child abuse entitled ‘Childwatch Plus 10’, and spoke in especially graphic detail about what her mother inflicted upon her. ‘I experienced a situation on quite a consistent and regular basis whereby I was made to take my clothes off, for example,’ she said, ‘and I was made to kneel on the floor and open my legs while my mother spat on my vagina and kicked me in it and kicked me in my womb. And she would sit on my stomach with her hands behind her back punching me in the area of my womb in particular and she would say that her intention was to burst my womb.’
The shocked reception to the horrifying details of O’Connor’s childhood in the aftermath of Rememberings and, latterly, her death, is indicative of a new wave of sympathy and support for the singer. In one sense the shock is surprising, since much of this information has been public knowledge for over thirty years. In another, it is depressingly predictable, given the subsumption of this information within the larger exploitative machinery of celebrity media. ‘Everything I thought I knew about her,’ McCabe admits, ‘was determined by nonstop tabloid headlines.’ How many people can honestly say that their experience was any different? Broadly speaking, McCabe, Sherine and Bertei all seek to offer correctives to this problem. Where the media have sought to attack, these authors seek to empathise. In doing so they all see themselves in O’Connor. Like O’Connor, Sherine was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and has attempted suicide. Like O’Connor, McCabe ‘ran wild’ as a teenager and had problems with authority. O’Connor’s spent time in a reformatory school, Bertei in a Magdalene laundry. And all three are survivors of child abuse, just as O’Connor was. There is therefore a level of identification between author and subject that is especially powerful in each of these books, and that is to their strength. For McCabe and Bertei, this kind of empathy is the entire point: McCabe rejects ‘the idea that THE TRUTH can be established through the steady accumulation of testimony’, and Bertei proudly declares that her book will be written off by misogynists as ‘feminist doggerel’. Even Sherine, who nominally seeks to keep herself at a distance in order to find the ‘real’ Sinéad O’Connor, makes it clear in the afterword that her entire decision to write about the singer came down to how closely she felt their life experiences mirrored each other’s.
We are, it seems, rediscovering O’Connor for our own times. This has its trade-offs. McCabe’s book includes important critiques of sexism and racism within US music media, such as Rolling Stone, SPIN and MTV, with an eye on the treatment of stars like Tina Turner, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson. O’Connor sometimes gets lost in these discussions, and while the context is useful, it is not clear why the digressions are so lengthy nor, for instance, why we need an entire chapter on Prince’s background. The impression is that McCabe has her own axes to grind. Something similar happens in Sherine’s book, which features 104 chapters over the course of 147 pages. Many of these are no longer than a single paragraph that highlights a short news feature, like ‘Saving Shane MacGowan (2000)’, ‘Live at the Sugar Club (2008)’, or ‘Suicide Attempt (2015)’. This has the benefit of tracing O’Connor through each year of her career, but its punchy, headline-like structure reinscribes the kind of sensationalist way in which she was so often represented in the tabloids instead of drawing connections between the larger themes of her life. In a different way O’Connor disappears here, too.
McCabe, Sherine and Bertei all work with a similar set of materials at their disposal, which revolves around Rememberings, readily available online media content, and interviews with people who knew O’Connor. The influence of Rememberings is apparent on each of them, not only in terms of structure but also as a resource for O’Connor’s childhood. Much of Bertei’s book is supported by detailed comments from O’Connor’s first husband, John Reynolds, who was involved in the making of the album Universal Mother, and Sherine interviewed music journalists including Simon Hattenstone, Caroline Sullivan and Neil McCormick to flesh out some of her chapters. Sherine, in effect, has interviewed music journalists to talk about their own past interviews with O’Connor. There is a sense of diminishing returns with these, and if the back of the dust jacket is anything to go by, their purpose was at least in part to generate ‘new content’ to push the book. That seems plausible because the magazine features, talk show appearances and social media posts that all of these books draw from are easily searchable online. Even landmark early interviews with SPIN and Hot Press have been republished by those magazines on their websites.
There is, then, something of an availability bias here in terms of the kind of sources that are used to arrange O’Connor’s narrative, and this leads to a tendency to go over old ground rather than to explore some of the aspects to her life and work that are in desperate need of scrutiny. This availability bias is, perhaps, also partly responsible for the number of factual errors. Most of these are small or trivial, like McCabe’s assertion that O’Connor repeated the word ‘evil’ when tearing up the pope’s picture on SNL, or Sherine’s claim that O’Connor was born in Glenageary (she was born off Baggot Street). Others are more suspect. Sherine states, for instance, that O’Connor’s first suicide attempt was in 1999, and Bertei claims that news coverage of child abuse in the Catholic Church began to circulate in Ireland only four years after O’Connor performed on SNL. O’Connor, though, spoke openly in 1994 about her suicide attempt at the previous year’s MTV Music Awards in Los Angeles, when she tried to overdose on sleeping tablets and vodka, and there was mainstream broadsheet coverage of child abuse scandals in the church in Irish newspapers in the summer before her SNL appearance. More difficult to excuse is Bertei’s claim that O’Connor was a ‘working-class Irish woman’, which is the kind of error that calls the factual reliability of the entire book into question.
At the risk of sounding too harsh, I should add that none of these books is intended as a comprehensive or authoritative biography. Rather, these authors offer portraits of O’Connor that above all emphasise her contemporary importance, something that comes through in their affection and, at times, sheer awe for the singer. What emerges is a much more assertive version of Sinéad O’Connor than she herself offered us in Rememberings, and that is a good thing. ‘She never stopped singing and speaking truths to the public, using her celebrity as a platform to call out injustice,’ writes Bertei, ‘proving that she was a force to be reckoned with and was willing to sacrifice celebrity on the altar of truth.’ For McCabe, O’Connor ‘had no interest in being an entertainer or pushing units. As far as O’Connor was concerned, the world was suffering from spiritual deprivation, and the only antidote was truth-telling, no matter the cost to her or her career.’ The books also share a strong interest in O’Connor’s mental health, which occupies each author at an important culminating point in their narratives, especially around her radical hysterectomy in 2015, her appearance on Dr Phil in 2017, her subsequent cries for help on social media and the death by suicide of her son Shane in 2022. And so, even though McCabe, Sherine and Bertei have written quite different books, what they share is the story of a bold protest singer’s tale of struggle and resilience, whose outspoken activism and misunderstood battles with her mental health make her a feminist icon worthy of celebration today.
This is a powerful message in so many ways, given the ongoing mental health epidemic and social injustices that plague Western societies under neoliberal capitalism. It is also a version of Sinéad O’Connor that is unquestionably of our current moment, an avatar for our present-day anxieties, desires and needs. But O’Connor was also much more complicated than that, and we have only scratched the surface of her social significance as a historical figure. This is particularly true in an Irish context, and there is a distinctly US-centric bent to the version of O’Connor’s life that has set in. This rears its head most obviously in some of the ways that the idea of Ireland figures in these books. Bertei’s book is especially uncomfortable in this respect, and is laced with the kind of mystical and exoticising conceptions of ‘Irishness’ that have long been critiqued.
There are less obvious points of omission too. You won’t, for instance, find out very much about O’Connor’s ordination as a priest in the ‘Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church’ in 1999, and you won’t learn anything about her involvement in the X Case protest in Dublin in February 1992, nor the time she swore on live television at the IRMA awards a year earlier, when she told the young people of Ireland to ‘express your-fucking-selves’. In Ireland, all of these generated media storms similar to the well-known American controversies that these authors remind us of, such as her refusal to have the US national anthem played before her gig in New Jersey in August 1990. They even rivalled the blowback to her SNL appearance, at least in terms of initial publicity. In fact, O’Connor once said that the worst kind of professional abuse she ever received was from the Irish media.
At the same time, there is perhaps no more fraught way of building a picture of O’Connor than to carefully select a series of quotes of things she ‘once’ said, because her views were so rich and changeable, and so frequently aired. McCabe’s book is the most nuanced of the three in taking stock of this complexity, and she offers a good example of this: O’Connor’s antiracism, well documented early in her career in her public support for hip hop and her solidarity with censored artists like Public Enemy. When she appeared on Arsenio Hall’s talk show in 1991, he asked her about her song ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’ from her second LP, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. The song condemns racism and police brutality in Britain, highlighting the case of Colin Roach, whose death in London in 1983 the police claimed was by suicide although there was wide suspicion of a cover-up. In response, O’Connor joked about wanting to release the song as a single with a photo of herself half-naked on the cover, as a kind of erotic invitation to Black men.
‘What was happening here?’ asks McCabe. ‘Why was she suddenly sexualizing the interview?’ McCabe thoughtfully sits with these questions rather than trying to answer them definitively. There are many analogous moments we could point to, like when O’Connor briefly and falsely came out as a lesbian in June 2000, or her ‘misogynist Facebook rant’ (McCabe’s words) against Kim Kardashian’s appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone in 2015, or her declaration, on converting to Islam in 2018, that ‘white people’ were ‘disgusting’ (O’Connor’s words). One way to make sense of these comments would be to ground them in the singer’s presence as a genuine provocateur within the mainstream mediascape, one that resists a straightforward politics of social justice, whether we like it or not.
This, however, is a difficult task to square with that of celebrating and reclaiming O’Connor as a feminist icon. Indeed, O’Connor’s stance on the very label of feminism is often passed over a little too easily. Bertei, for instance, says that O’Connor ‘shied away from’ feminism early in her career. It would be more accurate to say that she consistently disavowed the term: in October 1986, she claimed that she wasn’t ‘influenced by feminism’, in February 1999 she complained that feminism had ‘done a lot of damage to men’, and as late as 2014 she told The Guardian that she didn’t think of herself as a feminist. That doesn’t mean that we can’t think of her as one, and if anything, our thinking is enriched by comments like these.
O’Connor’s hair is the bodily equivalent to this kind of simplification. Much is always made of her decision, prompted initially by Fachtna Ó Ceallaigh, to shave her head, which she has most often described as a rejection of the music industry’s objectification of women. This is the O’Connor we see on the cover of The Lion and the Cobra (1987). But O’Connor’s hairstyles were far from one-dimensional in the years that followed, and throughout the 1990s she experimented frequently. During the X Case protest in Dublin in February 1992, for instance, she had a jet black, short-back-and-sides style, and around the time of her ordination in 1999 a pixie haircut. She liked to wear wigs from time to time, not just as a disguise in everyday life but also occasionally for major television appearances. The most obvious example, though, is the suedehead cut she debuted at the start of 1990, captured in the music video for ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. This is a particularly good example because of how, at the time, it was part of a larger PR makeover: O’Connor actively denounced her previous ‘aggressive’ image and proclaimed herself to be a happily domesticated, newly married housewife. This didn’t last, of course, but that doesn’t make it irrelevant or insincere. It is also an important reminder that there is no direct line between the shaved head of The Lion and the Cobra and that of her SNL appearance in October 1992, let alone of her later years.
Many other major themes of O’Connor’s life are only lightly touched upon in these books, or left for another day. What of O’Connor’s conception of family? She married four times, had four children (each with a different partner), and became caught up in public feuds with her father and her brother Joseph about their problems as a family. She professed a longing for stability, at times desperately, while also frequently rejecting it. What about her relationship with Irish republicanism? In the late years of ‘The Troubles’, she manoeuvred between outright support for republican armed resistance to calls for the IRA to accept a ceasefire. She protested the Warrington bombings in 1993 with the song ‘Make Me a Channel of Your Peace’ at a rally in Dublin and on the Late Late Show, and she pulled out of the West Belfast Festival in 1999 over Sinn Féin’s attempts to censor her. But she also called for Margaret Thatcher and Ian Paisley to be shot in 1988, and in 1996 referred to Orange Order marches in Catholic areas as ‘like marching past the house of a family whose daughter you have raped, and chanting: “Hooray, we raped your daughter on this day”.’
Each of these themes was a driving force in her life, always characterised by an unresolved tension of some kind. But none has been more overlooked, or was more central to how O’Connor saw the world, than her faith. O’Connor’s belief in God remained strong through her life, and her relationship with Catholicism went so much deeper than her decision to rip up her mother’s picture of the pope on live television. In fact, much of her career can be understood as a mission to repurpose Catholicism in terms more suitable for the emerging, socially liberal Western order, one whose hegemony was in place by the twenty-first century, but was not yet secure in 1985 in Ireland, when O’Connor left for London. It is interesting, in that respect, that she finally abandoned Catholicism for Islam in October 2018, only a month after bodily autonomy finally became a legal reality for women in Ireland.
In an interview with the broadcaster Marian Finucane in March 1992, O’Connor described her fascination with the image of the Virgin Mary, which she thought of as ‘loving, and peaceful, and womanly, in a really good way, but not the kind of “pure” way’ that the Catholic Church had in mind. ‘The way they see it is all wrong, all wrong,’ she continued. ‘I mean, you know, it’s like any of those things, they’re all a mirror. You just see yourself in everything, you know what I mean?’ The same point might be made, mutatis mutandis, of the idea of Sinéad O’Connor in the popular imagination today. This is a valiant starting point as we retrieve her from the decades of tabloid vilification that she endured, as McCabe, Sherine and Bertei all do, as long as we do not mistake it for the sum of her parts. We are only beginning to put these together, a daunting task given her evolving stances on society and spirituality, politics and morality, and how these are entangled with the enormous amount of music she made that has yet to be considered in depth. In the long term, our understanding of O’Connor may only get so far without approaches that are informed by psychology, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, given the extent of her childhood trauma. But in the short term, we might begin by working both with and against the grain of received narratives, and that includes Rememberings. When it comes to Sinéad O’Connor, there are no simple answers. Better to steep ourselves in her clarities and her contradictions, in all their brilliance and difficulty, and see where they take us.
28/10/2025
Adam Behan is a postdoctoral research fellow at Maynooth University. He is writing a book about the history of popular music and liberalism in Ireland.
