"To Throw Away Unopened" by Viv Albertine

I’d certainly recommend Viv Albertine’s second book “To Throw Away Unopened” despite the fact that she often takes a statistically infinitesimal sample of men to extrapolate (sometimes inadvertent) generalisations about how all men behave. Like her book about punk rock her honesty about herself is almost embarrassing, but this is the thing that makes the story of her dysfunctional family so interesting. Both parents wrote diaries over the same period leading up to their divorce and Viv only read them after they had died. She began to question her own memories of events reading her abusive father’s diary but then realised he was telling a lot of lies whilst reading her mother’s version of events. My favourite part is on page 192 when she recounts the tale of a “posh twat” taking up two seats on a bus and demanded he let her sit down as there were no other seats left. Their minor altercation got to the point where he stopped the bus with the emergency button and called the police but the bus driver and other passengers ganged up on him and he made a total arse of himself. Another bit I was amused by was when she heard an old Neil Young song from the 1970 but mistook it for a wonderful new music sung by a woman and was disappointed. Why should Neil Young’s gender or the age of the song matter? Neil Young certainly seems like a much nicer man than any of the men Viv has been involved with in her story, and stands as a pretty good example of a man who probably isn’t the way Viv sees men. Then again, maybe it was the fact that the mystery song was recorded in 1970 that she found disappointing. Chorlton library has a copy you can borrow and they’re selling it at Piccadilly Records.