Music and boys erupt in Albertine’s life at the same vulnerable time, one feeding her hunger for the other. TO THROW AWAY UNOPENED: A MEMOIR by Viv Albertine Faber & Faber Social, 320 pp., $24.95 Punk’s rigor, its daring, its refusal to compromise, are familiar to young Viv from her mother’s attitude. Teenage Viv decides to hitchhike to Amsterdam one weekend (after checking with her mother what country it’s in), and when she gets back, she and her mother have to spend a couple of extremely intimate hours picking crabs out of her pubic hair with tweezers. In particular, Albertine describes the tight-knight unit that formed after her parents’ divorce-of her mother, sister, and herself-and vividly portrays her mother as a hardworking and grimly supportive parent. She is determined to put “punk” in its proper place in the course of a whole life, from childhood to marriage, through cancer and IVF, motherhood and divorce, and back around to creativity in new forms: filmmaking, sculpture, writing. There’s the funny-looking boyfriend from art school, Mick, whose latest band, the Clash, seems pretty good there’s John’s mate Sid who hasn’t joined his band yet and hasn’t yet earned the nickname “Vicious.” But Albertine’s celebration of the moment before the scene got big, when the line of safety pins in your pants was there to save them from ripping apart, mostly resists cliché.

There are plenty of before-they-were-famous thrills, standard issue for a rock-star memoir. Yearning to be a part of things, she tells Paul Weller that she’s a guitarist, only to hear in reply, “Good. Without a map, she picks up what she can from boys who want her to stand in the wings or, at best, at the side of the stage, looking pretty. In one vignette titled “Blow Job,” young Viv gamely offers her services for the first time to her pal Johnny Rotten, familiar enough with unwashed genitalia to be unfazed by the opportunity, until she hears an “imperious voice from on high” telling her to stop: “You’re trying too hard.” It’s funny, but the scene is telling: Throughout her career, she’s desperate to learn, to participate, to be good. The boys are often disappointments, their hygiene even less evolved than their attitudes towards women. “I’m a bit of both.” Cynicism and sympathy wrapped in a self-deprecating sneer, it was a distinctly British opening to the brash, sometime brutal story of a working-class girl’s coming of age in London in the 1960s and ‘70s.Ĭlothes, music, boys: Shallow obsessions, says Albertine’s mother, but they are what builds this girl and offers her excitement, escape, and self-discovery. Boys, Boys, Boys.: A Memoir, which came out in 2014.

“Anyone who writes an autobiography is either a twat or broke,” Viv Albertine, guitarist for the all-female punk band The Slits, wrote in the introduction to her first book Clothes, Clothes, Clothes.

Johnny rotten autobiography