To Throw Away Unopened

Every memoir is a battle between reality and invention – but in her follow up to ‘Clothes, Music, Boys’, Viv Albertine has reinvented the genre with her unflinching honesty. ‘To Throw Away Unopened’ is a fearless dissection of one woman’s obsession with the truth – the truth about family, power, and her identity as a rebel and outsider. It is a gaping wound of a book, both an exercise in blood-letting and psychological archaeology, excavating what lies beneath: the fear, the loneliness, the anger. It is a brutal expose of human dysfunctionality, the impossibility of true intimacy, and the damage wrought upon us by secrets and revelations, siblings and parents.