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.
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