Sinead O'Connor explains why she was 'crazy'

NEW YORK • Sinead O'Connor is alone, which is how she prefers to be.

She has been riding out the pandemic in a tiny village on an Irish mountaintop, watching murder shows, buying fairy-garden trinkets online and mainlining American news on CNN.

On a recent afternoon, with a navy hijab arranged over her shaved head and in her all-glass conservatory, she looked as if she had been hermetically sealed into her own little world.

"I'm lucky," she said, "because I enjoy my own company."

But she is, no matter how hard she tries to fight it, irresistible.

In the early 1990s, she became so famous that the very dimensions of her skull seemed inscribed in the public consciousness.

If you remember two things about her, it is that she vaulted to fame with that enduring close-up in the video for her version of Nothing Compares 2 U - and then, that she stared down a Saturday Night Live camera, tore up a photo of then Pope John Paul II and killed her career.

But she does not see it that way. In fact, the opposite feels true.

Now she has written a memoir, Rememberings, that recasts the story from her perspective.

"I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career," she writes, "and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track."

O'Connor saw herself as a protest-singing punk. When she ascended to the top of the pop charts, she was trapped. "The media was making me out to be crazy because I wasn't acting like a pop star was supposed to act," she said.

"Crazy" is a word that does some dirty cultural work.

Calling someone crazy is the ultimate silencing technique. It robs a person of her very subjectivity.

By the time O'Connor appeared on SNL in October 1992, she had already been branded as insane - for boycotting the Grammy Awards where she was up for Record of the Year (they recognised only "material gain", she said) and refusing to play The Star-Spangled Banner before her concerts (because national anthems "have nothing to do with music in general").

But now her reputation felt at permanent risk.

"I'm not sorry I did it. It was brilliant," she said of her protest against abuse in the Catholic Church.

"But it was very traumatising," she added. "It was open season on treating me like a crazy b***h."

Soon after the show, O'Connor appeared at a Bob Dylan tribute concert, and when the crowd booed, she was so taken aback, she initially thought they were making fun of her outfit.

Actor Joe Pesci threatened to smack her in an SNL monologue and later, on that same stage, singer Madonna mocked her in a gently condescending fashion, play-scowling and ripping up a photograph of tabloid-star sex offender Joey Buttafuoco.

The Washington Times named her "the face of pure hatred" and singer Frank Sinatra called her "one stupid broad".

Now, O'Connor's memoir arrives at a time when the culture seems eager to reassess these old judgments.

The top comment on a YouTube rip of O'Connor's Behind The Music episode is: "Can we all just say she was right."

Few cultural castaways have been more vindicated by the passage of time: child sexual abuse, and its cover-up within the Catholic Church, is no longer an open secret.

Former pope John Paul II finally acknowledged the church's role in 2001, nearly a decade after O'Connor's act of defiance.

Some artistes are skilled at shocking in a way designed to sell more records, and others at tempering their political rage into palatable music. But "Sinead is not the tempering type", said her friend Bob Geldof, the musician and activist.

O'Connor's statement on SNL was more personal than most knew. In the book, she details how her mother physically abused her throughout her childhood.

"I won the prize in kindergarten for being able to curl up into the smallest ball, but my teacher never knew why I could do it so well," she wrote.

O'Connor was 18 when her mother died. On that day, she took down the one photograph on her mum's bedroom wall: the image of the pope. O'Connor carefully saved the photo, waiting for the right moment to destroy it.

"Child abuse is an identity crisis and fame is an identity crisis, so I went straight from one identity crisis into another," she said.

And when she tried to call attention to child abuse through her fame, she was vilified.

"People would say that she's fragile," Geldof said. "No, no, no. Many people would have collapsed under the weight of being Sinead O'Connor, had it not been Sinead."

Instead, O'Connor felt freed.

"I could just be me. Do what I love. Be imperfect. Be mad, even," she wrote in the book. "I'm not a pop star. I'm just a troubled soul who needs to scream into mikes now and then."

O'Connor still shaves her head, herself, about every 10 days.

"I just don't feel like me when I have hair," she said.

She usually wears a hijab over it now. She converted to Islam several years ago and started going by the name Shuhada Sadaqat.

She wrote the first part of her memoir in 2015, but after having a hysterectomy and "a total breakdown", as she put it in the book, it took time for her to revisit the project.

She spent six years in and out of mental health facilities and she now has some clarity about how her mind works: Chiefly, that she has complex post-traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder.

A couple of years ago, Irish producer David Holmes approached O'Connor, star-struck at an event, and asked if she would make a record with him about healing.

"She is just an incredibly complex individual and she should never be judged," said Holmes.

Their seven-track album No Veteran Dies Alone is due out later this year.

O'Connor's ethereal sound has acquired an appealingly raw undercurrent. When she sings on the title track - "There are two mes, the one that you see/and the real me, who I'm not supposed to be" - her pull is undeniable.

As Holmes put it: "She's got that voice, it's like a friend."

O'Connor is happy being on her own, with her garden, her iPads and her "imaginary boyfriend", Taye Diggs, to keep her company via episodes of Murder In The First. "I haven't been terribly successful at being a girlfriend or wife," she said. "I'm a bit of a handful, let's face it."

But a few months ago, when she moved into her blissfully remote cottage, she found that several other single women lived alone nearby.

Soon, a couple of them had come by offering bread and scones, and she found herself with a crew of girlfriends for the first time since she was a teenager. "We bury bodies for each other," she said.

The trouble of releasing a memoir is that it has forced O'Connor to relive her past, and that can be a traumatic experience, even if it does spur a cultural reckoning.

"Down the mountain, as I call it, nobody can forget about Sinead O'Connor," she said.

But up in the village, nobody cares, "which is beautiful for me", she said. "It's lovely having friends."

NYTIMES