Three years after his death, Prince’s memoir reveals the musician’s most private struggles.
THE ICON’S MEMOIR REVEALS THE TRAUMA THAT HAUNTED HIM IN THE DAYS BEFORE HIS DEATH
In the months before his sudden death in 2016, Prince had been spending a lot of time reflecting on his life — particularly his traumatic early years. Growing up in Minneapolis in the 1960s, the seven-time Grammy winner often heard his parents, jazz singer Mattie Della and songwriter John Lewis Nelson, fighting violently. It was “soul-crushing” to hear, he recalls in Prince: The Beautiful Ones, a memoir the singer had started working on with coauthor Dan Piepenbring. “At some point my mother crashed in2 my bedroom and grabbed me,” he shared in his signature writing style that ignored grammar rules. “She was crying but managed a smile & said, ‘Tell Ur father 2 b nice 2 me.’ She held me up as a buffer so that he wouldn’t fight with her anymore.”
That’s just one of many disturbing revelations to come out of the highly anticipated book. Over the course of 288 pages, the music icon — who died at age 57 after overdosing on the painkiller fentanyl at his Chanhassen, Minn., compound, Paisley Park, on April 21, 2016 — opens up about his parents’ tumultuous relationship, suffering from epileptic seizures as a child and his mother’s hard partying. “It’s a haunting read, because obviously Prince is dead, but we’re hearing from him once more. A lot of it is shocking,” an insider tells In Touch. “We see what a tortured soul he was. But by learning his history — in his own words — you also begin to understand his brilliance more, what made him tick, what drove him to sing like he did.”
HARD TIMES
Considering his early years, it’s easy to see why he carried so much pain. When his mom wasn’t fighting with his dad, she’d be out on the town — using her son’s money. “She would spend up what little $ the family had 4 survival on partying with her friends, then trespass in2 my bedroom, ‘borrow’ my personal $ that I’d gotten from babysitting local kids, & then chastise me 4 even questioning her regarding the broken promise she made 2 pay me back,” he wrote.
At the time, he was also dealing with issues at school. “I was considered strange,” he wrote. And his teachers “had a problem with calling me Prince,” he continued. “They didn’t see it as a name. They thought it wasn’t fit for a name, just like King wouldn’t be. So they used Skipper instead.” The pensive child, who suffered from the neurological disorder epilepsy, had an “overactive” brain, he claimed, which would cause seizures: “The blackouts would occur primarily from overthinking.”
Though the seizures eventually stopped — Prince claimed “an angel came & told me that I’m not gonna b sick anymore” — his mom’s behavior never did. When his parents finally split, Mattie used Prince and younger sibling Tyka as pawns in the divorce. All the drama left him with a lifelong aversion to giving his whole heart to any one person, and he declared that leaving his mom’s home to move in with his dad was “the happiest day of my life.”
That’s a surprising declaration for someone who went on to massive wealth and fame. But Piepenbring reveals that those formative years obviously had a lingering, lifelong impact on him. After Prince’s death, Piepenbring writes, employees discovered that he’d held on to a treasure trove of “photos and mementos from his childhood, many of them from the same years he’d written about in his memoir pages. We were stunned.” For better or worse, adds the insider, “All of Prince’s experiences shaped him to become the person he was.” ◼
Lena Dunham stepped out in LA on Oct. 31 wearing a blue nightgown and slippers while using a cane. Her hand was also bandaged as she slowly and carefully made her way down the sidewalk to a waiting car. “Don’t you get it? I’m going as a con woman leaving a Florida Keys jail after being acquitted of murdering her husband, and now she’s trying to get disability license plates,” the Girls star, 33, joked on Instagram since it was Halloween. But, unfortunately, it wasn’t a costume. “The truth is,” Lena went on to explain, “this is what life is like when I’m struggling most with chronic illness. An Ehlers-Danlos syndrome flare means that I need support from more than just my friends…so thank you, sweet cane!” Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) is a group of inherited disorders that affect connective tissues — primarily skin, joints and blood vessel walls. There is no cure, but the symptoms can often be treated and managed. It’s just one of several health issues Lena has battled. In 2017, she had a hysterectomy after living for many years with endometriosis, a painful medical condition affecting pelvic tissue. She also suffers from fibromyalgia, a chronic condition that causes pain all over the body. Lena also struggled with a pill addiction for years. She’s been sober for 18 months now, and on Oct. 26 she was named Woman of the Year by Friendly House, an addiction treatment facility for women in LA. “Pills that I thought dulled my pain,” she said in her acceptance speech, “actually created it.”