“This book has been a thorn in my side for almost seven years,” writes singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright near the close of her engrossing memoir, an account produced through the lonely tumult of a custody battle, in the wake of grief, then galvanised by new hope. “I’ve burned copies and used the backs of pages as scrap paper on which I taught my kids addition and subtraction,” she continues. “An early draft was used as evidence against me in my divorce case.”
Much like her album of last year, Love Will Be Reborn, which processes some of the same material, very little feels off-limits in this slim but jam-packed book, full of very good times in the circus that is a performer’s life as well as very bad times. Wainwright is, of course, a singer-songwriter of great acuity and candour with six solo studio albums under her belt, with a surname that is both gift and bind. She was born into an extended family of artists who have a habit of skewering one another in song and print. Her late mother, the Canadian folk artist Kate McGarrigle’s song Go Leave is about her ex-husband, the US singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, whose When You Leave also ponders the fallout of his departure on their then young children, Martha and her brother, Rufus, also a singer-songwriter. Well before the stars of social media, you could argue the Wainwright-McGarrigles have long provided a much more genteel, bohemian sort of dysfunctional showbiz dynasty to boggle at. Their extended clan forms part of a wider folk and entertainment pantheon that stretches from Montreal to LA via London and New York, so there are also walk-on parts in this book for everyone from Emmylou Harris, friendly with Wainwright’s mother, to Pete Doherty, wasted at Glastonbury, via US TV’s Jimmy Fallon, a long-time pal of Martha’s.
