Jenny Diski writes:

Yes, we’re talking here about an icon, a priestess, an African American civil rights hero. We’re also talking about dissolution and craziness, tantrums, hallucinations, wilderness years, comebacks, more wilderness years and sad endings. We might as well be talking about Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Maria Callas, Janis Joplin, Karen Carpenter or Judy Garland, and several of them get namechecked here – Callas and Holiday repeatedly. All those women artists wracked and torn, felled by life’s blows, never finding their man or peace. I presume that the man and the peace are mutually exclusive. One or the other would be bad enough for the avid biographer and other lovers of desperate women singers, but to get both a man of her dreams and peace would surely render a life unwritable.

(LRB 25 June 2009)

Aurum | hardback 346 pp. |ISBN: 9781845134303