To Throw Away Unopened (eBook)

Songwriter and musician Viv Albertine was the guitarist in cult female punk band The Slits. She was a key player in British counter-culture before her career in TV and film Directing. Her first solo album The Vermilion Border was released in 2012, and her memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys was a Sunday Times, Mojo, Rough Trade, and NME Book of the Year in 2014, as well as being shortlisted for the National Book Awards.

lt;b>Genuinely startling ... There are multiple books wriggling inside its cover: a family history, a meditation on grief, tracts on female beauty and on anger ... Albertine's writing is not indulgently cathartic but fierce, direct, unashamed. She masks nothing. The result is a book that does for the family memoir what is predecessor did for the rock autobiography: scythes through the myths, the distortions, the adornments and finds the rich, distinctive stories underneath.

'Truth is splintered,' Viv Albertine tells us. It's through this splintering, I suspect, that she's able to lay hold of so very many truths. I don't know any other writer who's even half this honest - it's this unsparing frankness that gives the book its lush power. Reading it I felt I was really out there on the ledge with her.

A chronicle of outsiderness ... 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 ... Her conversational style of writing is lullingly deceptive, allowing the revelations, when they come, to explode like well-placedtime bombs in the narrative ... Searingly honest ... A painstaking - and painful - dissection of her own familial fallout ... Viscerally unsettling.

I'm smitten with Viv Albertine's beautiful, tough, ribald, unsparing memoir. It's so rare to encounter writing this frank and fearless about love, violence, loneliness, mess of all kinds ... To Throw Away Unopened is a book for all ages and experiences.

Genuinely startling ... There are multiple books wriggling inside its cover: a family history, a meditation on grief, tracts on female beauty and on anger ... Albertine's writing is not indulgently cathartic but fierce, direct, unashamed. She masks nothing. The result is a book that does for the family memoir what is predecessor did for the rock autobiography: scythes through the myths, the distortions, the adornments and finds the rich, distinctive stories underneath.

I loved Viv Albertine's new book. There's such raw honesty and compelling intensity in her work. This is the true story of mothers and daughters: love, rage and absolutely no sentimentality. And about, too, being a woman in the world.

To Throw Away Unopened is crackling with anger, and brimming with insight into the dirty business of art, family and being a woman in a hostile world.

Viv Albertine captures the texture, habits, and tics of working class life in long-ago mid-century London. But, pivoting on a duet of startling end-of-life revelations, To Throw Away Unopened also shows us the power and possibility of change. In any medium, Viv Albertine is a visionary cultural force.

I loved Viv Albetine's new book. There's such raw honesty and compelling intensity in her work. This is the true story of mothers and daughters: love, rage and absolutely no sentimentality. And about, too, being a woman in the world.