On 4 April 1966, when Viv Albertine was 11 years old, her father, Lucien, wrote the following entry in his diary: “When Viviane went out this afternoon with a friend she dolled herself up with scent and lipstick… I said she was much too young. She was shocked when I tried to advise her and adopted a rude attitude.” The following February, he made note of an embarrassing encounter with a neighbour, who reported seeing Viviane with “a bad lot” in the local Wimpy: “The way your daughter dresses in miniskirts and fancy socks and the rest of it, she’ll end up on drugs or in trouble.”
Her father’s diary, which Albertine discovered after his death, is one of the few threads of connection she now has with the man who left her life soon afterwards. By turns poignant and self-pitying, his entries punctuate one part of her compelling new memoir, To Throw Away Unopened. They reveal among other things that, even at 11 years old, Albertine was possessed of the defiant attitude that would later help to define her both as a musician in the most subversive punk group of all, the Slits, and as a late-flowering memoir writer still fuelled by a sense of anger and outsiderness even in her 60s.
“Oh my God, I still have that attitude,” she says, laughing, when I mention this, “I’m still angry at so much – class, gender, society, the way we are constantly mentally coerced into behaving a certain way without us even knowing it. I feel so oppressed by the weight of it all that I just want to blow a hole in it all.” She pauses for a breath as if to still her emotions, and continues calmly. “Some people will say that I’m bitter and twisted, but so what? I’m 63 and I’ve been an outsider as far back as junior school. When you’ve fought and fought to keep positive and to keep creative even though there was not a space to be creative, well, you show me any human who is not angry after 60 years of that.”
Like her debut, the wonderfully titled Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music Music, Music. Boys, Boys Boys, which described her journey into punk and beyond, this new volume is essentially a chronicle of outsiderness. It is driven by a relentless honesty about herself and the dysfunctional family dynamic she was born into, which she lays bare with an almost forensic eye. It explores her upbringing in a working-class family in Muswell Hill in the 1960s, her parents’ breakup, her mother’s central role in shaping her fiercely independent outlook and her fraught relationship with her younger sister, from whom she is now estranged. Her conversational style of writing is lullingly deceptive, allowing the revelations, when they come, to explode like well-placed time bombs in the narrative. At one point, after her mother’s death, she discovers that her mum was keeping a diary at the same time as her dad. Both of them, unbeknown to the other, were amassing evidence for their looming divorce proceedings. It’s that sort of twisted story, but the conflicting parental diary entries are only the half of it.
“I think it is essentially about rage and being an outsider,” she says. “Female rage is not often acknowledged – never mind written about – so one of the questions I’m asking is: ‘Are you allowed to be this angry as you grow older as a woman?’ But I’m also trying to trace where my anger came from. Who made me the person that is still so raw and angry? I think that it’s empowering to ask that question. I really hope it resonates with women. I want to say to younger women especially that it’s OK to be an outsider, it’s OK to admit to your rage. You’re not the only person walking down the street feeling angry inside.”
In person, Albertine is calm and charming, while simultaneously evincing a kind of low-level hum of nervous intensity. Dressed in a striped top and leather jacket, she looks much younger than her age, and still retains some of the combative energy that she once emitted as guitarist of the Slits – the all-girl group that literally stopped traffic when they stepped out in their jumble-sale finery during the punk wars of the late 1970s. We meet in a room at Faber & Faber, and having crossed paths a few times over the years, have a natter about some mutual acquaintances from back in the day. Some of her closest contemporaries have not made it this far: Ari Up, lead vocalist and most out-there member of the Slits, died in October 2010; the equally singular Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex in April 2011. Albertine has had her own brush with mortality in the form of a cervical cancer diagnosis six weeks after she gave birth to her daughter, Vida, in 1999. “I’m not 100% well, but I manage it,” she says, when I ask after her health. “My nerves are still shot from the chemo and radiotherapy, but I’m finally in a place where I am making sensible decisions that are good for me. I live a smaller life now because I have to be careful to avoid stress.”
Is her searingly honest writing style not stressful in itself? “No, not compared to going on stage anyway,” she says, smiling. She tells me that she is done with making music. “I’m just not interested in playing any more. I came to that decision the night my mum died. I don’t worship musicians. I don’t worship rock’n’roll. I don’t miss it. I see music as a vehicle like writing or film-making, but I don’t think it’s a very relevant medium for me at the moment. And anyway, if I need to do it again for whatever reason, I’ll just pick it up and get by and bluff it.”
Albertine’s first book began with a chapter entitled Masturbation (Never did it. Never wanted to do it), a statement of intent that set the confessional-confrontational tone of much of what was to follow. It was an insider’s account of what it was like to be caught up in the white heat of the punk moment and, more revealingly, how difficult it was to live a so-called normal life in the wake of such a briefly liberating cultural upheaval. I tell her that I witnessed the Slits on stage several times back then, drawn to the anarchic otherness of their music and their utter disregard for the protocol of performance – Ari Up once famously had a pee on stage. It was the shock of the new writ large and it confused a lot of people – much more so than the recognisably rockist thrust of the Sex Pistols or the Clash.
When Albertine first saw the Slits play, which was months before she joined them, she understood their implications immediately. “Boys listen to music differently, they bone up. I didn’t know how to listen to music so I wouldn’t actually have known if they were out of tune or not playing in time. It really didn’t matter to me. It wasn’t the point.” It suddenly seems so long ago, I say, light years away from today’s more gentrified pop culture. “It does,” she says nodding, “and I miss that unprofessionalism so much. Now, everyone has gone to music school and they all play brilliantly and you think, Why are they even playing live? It’s all so bloody middle class now.”
In the Slits, Albertine found not just a self-styled punk sisterhood of sorts but a kind of surrogate family – with all that implies in terms of loyalties, rivalries and tensions. “It was exciting but it was extreme,” she says, “and Ari was really extreme, but she worked on stage and she worked musically. Outside of those two places, it was tough and exhausting. We lived together day and night, all sleeping on each other’s floors, all going out together on to the streets. It was so dangerous to be a punk and female. And the way we looked and acted made it more dangerous.” They were often spat at and verbally abused. Ari was stabbed on two separate occasions by angry men. “We had to be together because it was too risky not to. That took its toll. We fell apart because of the pressures we got as women, for sure. A male band would have lasted much longer.”
In writing the first book, Albertine also found herself thinking about the emotional and psychological demons that drove many of punk’s key figures as much as their shared cultural disaffection. ‘There was a lot of passion and self-belief running through punk, of course,” she says now, “but many of the people who were drawn to it were also struggling with personality disorders, with the fallout of things that had gone wrong at home. I now think everyone in punk was on some sort of spectrum, actually.” Would she include herself in that description? “I would,” she says without hesitation. “I think my family were mentally unhealthy and that made me more of an outsider. I was, for better or worse, brought up to be raw and passionate and demonstrative, which does not fit in English society very well, but it fitted in punk. I fitted in, then. I’ve tried to fit in in various ways ever since, getting married and all that, but I got squashed.”
She points out, too, that all the Slits came from families where fathers were not present. “We couldn’t have been who we were – as loud and as mad and as provocative and shocking – if we’d had dads around all the time, even dads we loved. In those days fathers got the best chair, the biggest piece of meat and all that. The very atmosphere around the man was that he was the boss of the house, though my father failed awfully at that. A traditional father would have been worried about us going out dressed like that and behaving like that. We could not have lived the wild lives we lived.”
Was it too much, I ask, being a Slit? “Sometimes. Even Ari with all her energy admitted that later and, believe me, nothing stopped Ari. Her energy was unbelievable. It was on the edge of chaos a lot of the time so the exhilaration was when we played together and played well. The rest of the time it was, what’s going to happen? Are we gonna get thrown off the plane cos Ari’s too loud or taken into customs or thrown out of the hotel or arrested? We felt at the time we were battling but it was an exuberant battle – the four of us against the world. We were a gang and we absolutely believed in what we were doing and what we were changing for girls, and we believed in our music utterly. Otherwise, we could not have done it. We knew we were new, that we were a first, but it was a fight. Always.”
To Throw Away Unopened is a painstaking – and painful – dissection of her own familial fallout, of the things that had gone wrong at home that, for better or worse, continue to define her as an outsider. As I read it, I kept thinking about some starkly truthful lines by Philip Larkin: “An only life can take so long to climb/Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never…”
It is a book, I think, that will resonate, like punk did, with anyone from a similar working-class background who is still angry with the ways in which the world had become even more weighted against them in terms of education and self-expression. Conversely, it may shock and appal anyone who doesn’t share or even understand the depth of that anger – particularly when it is expressed by a woman in her 60s.
“Oh, I’ve already had interviewers say to me, ‘You’re not a nice person and no one in the book is nice,’” she says. “One man even told me that he wished he hadn’t asked to review it. He said, ‘You’ve chosen honesty over happiness, you’ve chosen misery, you don’t see the good in anyone.’ On and on.” She raises her eyes heavenwards. “He actually said, ‘I read the whole book as a rebuke to me.’ He somehow took it personally.” I tell her that this says more about his privilege than her passion. She smiles, but still seems rattled by the magnitude of such a misreading.
As both memoirs make clear, Albertine inherited her spirit of defiant independence from her mother, Kathleen, who raised her and her younger sister, Pascale, after her father left. While he remains an almost ghostly presence throughout, a foreigner of French-Corsican origin marooned in an unwelcoming postwar London, her mother’s presence is palpable throughout. And it is her mother’s death, aged 93, that is the pivotal moment of the book. To make sense of who she is now, Albertine says, she had to delve into her parents’ lives as well as her own.
Albertine found her mother’s diaries while clearing out her flat after her death. They were concealed in an old Aer Lingus flight bag with the words “To Throw Away Unopened” written in Tipp-Ex on the front. Her defiant daughter read that as an invitation to do the very opposite, hence the book’s title. This act alone could be read by some as an acknowledgment of the betrayals – of privacy, respect and the familial ties that bind – that writing a memoir entails. “I’m loth to call myself an artist,” Albertine says, when I broach this subject, “but how can you even attempt to be an artist if you compromise when you are making a piece of work? In my case, I am dealing with family dynamics, and that means I have to tell the truth about family dynamics. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
She later concedes that the act of writing is itself a kind of compromise. “I strive for honesty, but I do think it’s impossible in a way. As a writer, you make decisions all the time to shape the book which may mean leaving something out that is important. Plus, it’s my point of view so it’s biased. I’m aiming for the truth and nothing but, though really it’s nowhere near that.”
Perhaps the most honest, certainly the most viscerally unsettling, passage in the book concerns a violent incident that precipitates the final breakdown of her relationship with her sister. To describe it, and its spectacularly inappropriate context, would be a spoiler of inexcusable proportions, but suffice to say it is a truly shocking evocation of the kind of volcanic violence that can only erupt after decades of sibling rivalry and suppressed rage. I tell her it stopped me in my tracks. “I know, I know,” she says, nodding, “but I have friends who have read the book and then contacted me to tell me similar stories. I could hear the relief in their voices. This stuff happens all the time in families, it just isn’t written about or even talked about.”
Her sister now lives in Australia, which, I say, is as far away as it is possible to go from Muswell Hill, where their sibling rivalry first began all those years ago. This is removing oneself from the ties that bind on a grand scale. “Yes,” nods Albertine. “I really thought I was the rebel, but really she took the most dramatic route out. I realised while writing the book that my sister sussed early on that she was going to be squashed if she stayed. She was so much cleverer than me.”
One wonders what Pascale will make of the book. “Well, I’ve changed all identifying details. Plus, she lives a whole different life now. She won’t get in touch with me, she won’t read it, she probably won’t even know it’s out.” Did writing about their toxic relationship help shed light on her sister’s actions or, indeed, her own? “Looking back, I think my mother and father set us against each other from when we were very young – you’re on my side and you’re on my side. We were made adversaries, really, we were groomed to be like that and it is hard to know how you can ever undo that. I do think the dynamic between sisters has to be the worst in the world when it goes wrong.”
Does she think they could ever reach a point where they could sit down and have it out in a civilised way? “No,” she says quietly. “Not any more. We’ve gone round and round in that circle of abuse where it’s OK for a bit and then it gets nasty again. And anyway, I’m so raw and so damaged, not just from that but from other things in my life, the relationships that have hurt me, my illness, the chemotherapy and all of that stuff. I’m not saying this as a victim, because I probably have a huge part in all of it, but I simply can’t take emotional stress any more.”
To Throw Away Unopened could well have been called How to Be Alone. Albertine is done, she tells me, with boys as well as music. As both her books attest, she does seem to have had a run of bad luck on the boyfriend front. “It’s not a run,” she exclaims, “it’s a fucking lifetime. I’ve been dating since I was 13. All I can think to do now is to stop having relationships. I cannot go through that any more.” Has the book made her understand her father more? “Yes, but understanding is not the same as forgiving. I do feel warmer towards all of my family now, compassionate. I don’t feel anger towards any of them. I think they are better than most, my family, which is not to say I could live with them.”
At 63, then, she has finally had enough of trying to fit in and, on one level, her book is an argument for living against – against the often suffocating constrictions of mainstream conformity, class and gender bias and, whisper it quietly, family loyalty. “One of the questions I am asking is, Is it OK to walk away from a family member, to cut off entirely?” It is a question, though, that she seems to have already answered. I ask her finally what she has learned about herself through writing in such a self-revealing way. She pauses for a moment, then says: “I know that I want to stay an outsider now. I hate the very thought that I would ever not be an outsider.” I think she can rest easy on that front.
• To Throw Away Unopened is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
