To Throw Away Unopened- Viv Albertine

Johanna recommends:

‘Viv Albertine has always been obsessed with the truth: the truth about family, power, and her identity as a rebel and outsider. But at what cost? In this brutally honest memoir she relentlessly exposes human dysfunctionality: the impossibility of intimacy, and the damage wrought upon us by secrets and revelations, siblings and parents.’

This memoir is a feat in forethought and editing. Albertine artfully discloses her family’s ordinary but opaque past, taking her readers on a gripping journey of stumbled upon diaries, unexpected revelations and interrogated memories, while she sifts through a mass of conflicting information and reassess her close relationship with her late mother.