Meet the folks
Brilliantly candid memoir from the youngest of the Wa in wrightMcGarrigl es. By JamesMcN air.
Stories I Might Regret Telling You: A Memoir ★★★★ Martha Wainwright SIMON & SCHUSTER. £20
AS SEASONED WAINWRIGHT & McGarrigle watchers will know, the clan’s airing of its dirty laundry via song has long been a thing. Martha Wainwright’s candid memoir ups the ante from its title down, however. Her lean, vivid prose and tendency to be hardest on herself bring you onside, but discomfiting events are rife. A year into chemo for sarcoma cancer, Wainwright’s mother Kate McGarrigle flies to London to see Martha sing Kurt Weill. Domiciled chez Martha, she is repeatedly awoken by her daughter and pals dancing to Laurie Anderson’s O Superman in their underwear while high on MDMA. “Kate [eventually] appeared with an expression that said, ‘Don’t fuck with me, I’m dying’” writes Wainwright, opining her mother was more worried than angry. “She knew she’d be leaving me for good soon, and here I was, still a mess.”
‘Messy’ is perhaps the defining adjective of Wainwright’s life, but her story is an extremely complex one beautifully told. As the baptised-in-song child of Kate and Loudon Wainwright III – and the kid sister of piano wunderkind Rufus – fate had a plan for her. Or as she puts it: “Once you’re in the circus, it’s hard to get out.” If she initially lacks confidence, it figures. She must contend with her father’s seeming indifference to her, a mother describing her as “the definition of mediocrity”, and the humbling experience of subsisting on the sales of her CDs she makes at Rufus’s gigs while she’s still unsigned – until her 2005 EP, Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole, establishes her own unflinching voice, and her career gains traction and acclaim.
We read of her heroin use (smoking, not injecting) while living in NYC. Of her bisexual flings and of her 2007 marriage to Brad Albetta, and how their wedding reception was part-fuelled by “some really good blow”. Encounters with Leonard Cohen and The Band’s Garth Hudson are distilled to their essence in a few exquisitely deployed sentences. Meanwhile, the tensions in her nuclear family burn on. All’s fair in love, recrimination and genetics – and instantly forgotten the moment any configuration of Wainwrights and/or McGarrigles unites in song, which is often.
Wainwright’s serial honesty also extends to her methodology here, the book taking seven years to complete, and securing her two separate advances, one of which she gave back. “I’ve burnt copies and used the backs of pages as scrap paper on which to teach my kids addition and subtraction” she writes. “An early draft was used as evidence against me in my divorce case.”
Happy with new partner Nico, brought closer to brother Rufus by their mother’s passing in 2010, and having weathered legal and custodial battles with Brad Albetta over their children, Wainwright seems strong by the book’s end, a working mother with a hard-won understanding of her parents’ strengths and failings, and “why I almost wasn’t born”. She’s responsible now too. Most of the time, anyway. “Once in a while I still find myself in a taxi cab at six in the morning, laughing my tits off.”
“Once you are in the circus, it’s hard to get out.” MARTHA WAINWRIGHT