Marianne Faithfull: Memories, Dreams and Reflections

This book offers a more personal history than Marianne Faithfull has ever before shared, either by her own hand or through the words of others. Anecdotal, conversational, intimate, and utterly revealing, this is her no-holds-barred account of her life, her friendships, her triumphs, and her mistakes. A decade after the publication of Faithfull, one of the most acclaimed rock autobiographies of all time, Marianne Faithfull returns, periodically vowing to leave her wild ways behind and embrace maturity, only to find that peculiar things continue to occur.

A wry observer of her slightly off-kilter existence, Marianne muses nostalgically about afternoons spent languishing on Moroccan cushions at George and Pattie's, indulging in highs and listening to new music. She fondly remembers the outlandish antics of her Beat friends Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, is frequently bemused by her portrayal in the press (opening a newspaper to read of her own demise: 'Sixties Star in Death Plunge'), terrified by the curse sent her way by Kenneth Anger, and mortified by her history of reckless behaviour, not to mention her near-death experience in Singapore while searching for an opium den.

Marianne populates her anecdotal memoir with legendary characters, an eccentric and beautiful assembly imaginable only in her orbit, from Henrietta Moraes and Donatella Versace to Sofia Coppola, Juliette Greco, and Yves St. Laurent's dog. Here is Marianne on the darker side of the sixties and the brighter landscape of the nineties, which saw her collaborating with the likes of Blur and Jarvis Cocker. She shares compelling recollections of an unconventional childhood within her father's orgiastic literary commune to a hilariously decadent few days spent at Lady Caroline Blackwood's deathbed. Here she reflects on her blossoming movie career and how her records serve as a form of subliminal autobiography.

This is as intimate a portrait as we've ever encountered of Marianne, as she meditates on sex and drugs, confronts her alter-ego, the Fabulous Beast, and faces her own mortality in her battle with breast cancer. Since her last book, Marianne has, in her own words, "made quite a few records, gone on many tours, tried to play it straight, and. Well, the rest is the subject of this book."