To Throw Away Unopened

by Viv Albertine

Overview

NPR BOOK OF THE YEAR

AS HEARD ON NPR'S FRESH AIR

"Enthusiastically chaotic...on the page she is wry and vibrant..."—New York Times

"Brave and engaging."—Kirkus Reviews

At the launch party for her memoir Clothes Music Boys in 2014, Viv Albertine received the news her mother was dying. She left the party immediately and spent a few final hours with a woman who had been an enormous presence and force in her life. In the weeks that followed, Viv was left with the task of sorting through her mother's affairs. In that process she came across one fatally curious item: a bag labelled "To throw away unopened".

This auspicious moment lies at the heart of Viv Albertine's second book, part memoir, part manifesto, part polemic in which she touches on sex, ageing, feminism (in all its guises) and other conundrums that characterize the 21st century life. It is a bold and unapologetic follow-up to a book which became a sensation by a musician and writer who sits at the heart of the counter-cultural landscape today as a celebrated and feted figure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780571326211
Publisher:	Faber and Faber
Publication date:	05/08/2018
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	902,201
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Songwriter and musician Viv Albertine was the guitarist in cult female punk band The Slits. She was a key player in British counter-culture before her career in TV and film Directing. Her first solo album The Vermilion Border was released in 2012, and her memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys was a Sunday Times, Mojo, Rough Trade, and NME Book of the Year in 2014.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"It's a book of odd and beautiful fragments, occasionally pictorial. Black and frank, but simultaneously light and glimmering."


—Sara Baume

"'Truth is splintered', Viv Albertine tells us. It’s through this splintering, I suspect, that she’s able to lay hold of so very many truths. I don't know any other writer who’s even half this honest - it’s this unsparing frankness that gives the book its lush power. Reading it I felt I was really out there on the ledge with her, feeling emboldened, and like both of us were a little less alone."


—Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse

Editorial Reviews

The book's title comes from instructions her mother left with her papers, a directive Albertine fortunately ignored. Her deconstruction of these documents turns the memoir into a sort of therapeutic whodunit. And the way she tells the tale of her mother's dramatic final night a little at a time makes that story into a propulsive chorus to the song that is the rest of the book. To Throw Away Unopened is enthusiastically chaotic, bursting with asides, footnotes, photos and quotes…The effect is an echo of the cluttered closets and drawers she finds herself excavating once her parents are gone, as well as of the distracted mind of a middle-aged woman trying to balance a creative life with seemingly endless obligations to other people…But where Albertine describes herself as frustrated, exhausted and repressed in real life, on the page she is wry and vibrant, and seems to hold nothing back.

The New York Times Book Review - Ada Calhoun

"Oh Viv Albertine! I salute you. Such honesty!"—Nigella Lawson

“Forget Katniss And Tris - Viv Albertine Is Your New Hero.”—MTV.com

“A fully realized portrait of its author.”—Rolling Stone

"Viv Albertine, I love your book VERY badly. It's amazing."—Caitlin Moran

"To Throw Away Unopened is enthusiastically chaotic...on the page she is wry and vibrant..."—New York Times

From the Publisher

04/01/2018
The second book from British musician Albertine (Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys), former singer/guitarist for the early punk band The Slits, departs from her first memoir's tales of rock and roll and artistic rediscovery to take an unflinching, often painful look at family dysfunction. She begins with cheeky bravado and righteous anger toward men, middle age, and awkwardness. But once she reads both parents' diaries after their deaths—kept at their lawyers' behest before their divorce—the book takes a somber turn. In her father's recollection her mother was cold and vindictive. Her mother, in turn, depicts her ex-husband as physically and emotionally abusive, forcing her to break off contact with her son from her first marriage, beating her, and possibly harboring sexual interest in his daughter. Albertine intersperses these portraits with her own deeply ambivalent musings—she and her mother were close—autobiographical vignettes, and a running narrative of the night of her mother's death, featuring a horrendous (and hilarious) brawl with her sister in the hospital. All are saved from bleakness by the author's chipper voice, in turns dry, profane, self-deprecating, and darkly funny. VERDICT For memoir fans who appreciate an engaging, unsentimental take on knotty family dynamics.—Lisa Peet, Library Journal

Library Journal

2018-02-20
In her second memoir, the influential rocker addresses life after punk.Albertine's publishing debut, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (2014), earned widespread acclaim beyond music circles. Its unflinching honesty and street-wise feminism struck responsive chords as she recounted the formative years of British punk rock and her standard-bearing role in the Slits, a female band that demanded to be taken seriously within punk's male-dominated hierarchy. Now that Albertine's music career appears to be over—or is at least winding down—she has become a writer, with this second book required to follow the breakthrough success of the first. Here, the author dwells little on the music through which most previously knew her—and which she covered so well in her previous book—and more on her roles, mother, daughter, and sister, among others. As Albertine prepared for the book party to launch her memoir, she learned that her 95-year-old mother was on her deathbed, so she rushed with her daughter to be by her side. There, she joined her younger sister, with whom she was once much closer. The two engaged in a horrific battle at their mother's bedside, a hair-pulling, blood-letting fight to the finish between two women in their mid-50s whose years of bottled-up tension was just waiting to explode: " ‘You're mad,' said [sister] Pascal. She was right. I was mad. Completely insane. A deranged, murderous, certifiable, raging lunatic." The narrative intersperses short paragraphs detailing the mother's death as the sisters battled between slightly longer reminiscences about growing up together as their family was falling apart and how their mother did her best to keep them estranged from their father. Albertine also quotes at length from her father's diary and her mother's testimony on the dissolution of that marriage, which she discovered after the death of each, and which frequently contradicted each other (and sometimes her own memory). "Truth is splintered," she concludes.Not the cultural resource that her first memoir was, but still as brave and engaging in the writing.

Kirkus Reviews