Many musicians who decide to become authors after their long and boisterous music careers usually sell books based on their reputations as musicians alone. 
As a reader and an avid music listener, I am drawn to the memoirs of musicians that I listen to the most or that I have a preconceived notion of. This is usually because I am interested in learning about these musician’s lives outside of how they portray themselves through the music they make. However, my introduction to former musician Viv Albertine was not through her music with her legendary punk band The Slits, but rather was the result of reading her fantastic new memoir To Throw Away Unopened.
I had read about Albertine as a feminist influence to many of my favorite female-led, Pacific Northwest bands like Bikini Kill, Sleater Kinney, and Dear Nora, but I really didn’t know who she was. But when I happened upon her new memoir, I decided to give it a try. After that, there was no turning back.
The former punk-rocker holds nothing back in this memoir built around her life after divorce, surviving cancer, and living the day to day life as a musician. I was immediately drawn to her painfully dry and honest writing style as she delineated the realities of failed relationships, dating as an older woman, surviving cancer, and having trouble raising a daughter properly after having been brought up in an objectively dysfunctional family herself. Albertine progresses through these shortcomings and lessons learned with a strikingly raw and realistic voice that is hard to deny. Eventually, the story centers around the death of her beloved mother Kath, who raised both Albertine and her sister Pascale after the departure of their foul-playing father Lucien.
Albertine’s attempt to overcome the death of her mother revolves around her trying to understand the childhood she experienced and the rocky split between her parents in the 1960s. Her search for those answers gets interesting when she finds the diaries of both of her parents, one found in a bag marked “To Throw Away Unopened.” Instead of doing so, Albertine wields these journals as weapons in her struggle to understand the truth of her past. With these descriptive and sometimes clashing new accounts of her parents’ failing marriage and family life, Albertine begins to piece together a more accurate version of the truth she experienced as a child, and many of her questions begin to be answered.
What unfolds after the story of her youth begins to unravel is a compelling and quick read about the realities of life that people often choose to ignore. Albertine puts those emotional parts of her life on display, and the result is an extremely relatable and honest memoir written for those who wouldn’t throw the bag away unopened. If you fit yourself into that category, I highly suggest picking up a copy of this beautifully compelling memoir.
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