Stories I Might Regret Telling You
By Martha Wainwright
Simon & Schuster $35
Martha Wainwright told me a story the first time we met that has never left me. We were talking about her mother, as you do: the great Canadian singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle. She wasn’t the kind of mum who stuck every fingerpainting on the fridge, her daughter said, laughing in her downcast way. Praise had to be earned.
There was something crushingly sad about it. Also telling. Kate and Loudon’s daughter; Rufus’s kid sister was an emotional depth charge on stage. A voice of red raw vulnerability concentrated into laser-focused fury. She seemed to be in a permanent state of tension between naked self-doubt and volcanic compulsion.
Martha Wainwright seems to switch between naked self-doubt and volcanic compulsion.Credit:
Her parents loved her “— or at least, they grew to love me,” she finds it necessary to mention in the opening lines of this tautly strung memoir. Her father very nearly succeeded in having her aborted. Then he left, throwing blackly comical songs over his shoulder with careless precision.
One night about 20 years ago, Martha watched him tell a London audience he’d written I’d Rather Be Lonely about the one year she’d lived with him in New York when she was 14. She’d always assumed it was about one of his lovers. Swallowing tears, she walked out on stage and sang with him anyway.
Kate was loving in a more clear and present way, though “she occasionally told me I was mediocre”, the author reveals more than once – perhaps a symptom of simmering resentment that she’d curtailed her own magnificent career to raise two children.
The matriarch and her sister in harmony, Anna, conducted a fabulously bohemian trans-Atlantic milieu with Irish folkies and American icons and a brace of gifted cousins. Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt were part of an extended family forever gathered around a piano, with all the competition you can imagine that might entail.
There’s magic in those moments that Martha barely pauses to relish as she races from high school to acting college in Montreal, chasing “music and poetry and philosophy and cigarettes” while trying to “shape myself into something great – something I so desperately wanted to be”.
It comes in fits and starts, stepping out first as her adored brother Rufus’s backing singer, then airing her first “plaintive, lonely country” songs in Montreal clubs before a reckless love affair with travelling folk singer Dan Bern rips the road wide open.
She’s gleefully frank about “doing blow” at 6am at Stephen Stills’ house as she mingles with Rufus’s “sons of” social group in LA: Adam Cohen, Sean Lennon, Harper Simon, Teddy Thompson … but she’s soon railing against their male privilege as her own career stalls in New York.
Again, it’s telling that her breakthrough song is an eruption of rage at feeling disregarded and marginalised by blokes. Bloody Motherf—ing Asshole has always been read as a letter to her father, but it’s “really about getting the short end of the stick” in general.
The triumphs of Carnegie Hall and Sydney Opera House would come, though Martha’s career arc is more loose cannon than guided missile. An overly playful appetite for recreational substances derails a gig at Glastonbury. On another important day she wakes up in a mat of dried blood in some morning-after flat. A physical brawl with her mum after a show in London is the result of booze and the “mediocrity” accusation again.
If the author does regret telling us these stories, it might be because the family portrait she paints is characterised foremost by a kind of unflinching truthfulness that looks, from here in the cheap seats, like cruelty. In an abstract way it’s admirable. Great art demands brutal honesty and no concessions. But in this remarkable family at least, the toll in broken homes is tragic.
Martha foreshadows her own “bad divorce” on page two. The bitter estrangement from malcontent bassist and musical director Brad Albetta is described 200 pages later in unsettling detail, smoke still clearing. “I spent a couple of years in total darkness,” she writes. “Turning my face away from the kids so they wouldn’t see me cry after they were mean to me, following their father’s script.”
It’s tough reading, especially after Kate’s last fight with cancer plays out at the exact same time as the dangerously premature birth of Martha’s first son. Cue a nightmarish blur of mercy dashes between Montreal and London.
But the surreal way in which the show goes on – in this case, a magical family all-star Christmas concert at the Royal Albert Hall just weeks before Kate’s passing – provides the glow of redemption that somehow manages to eclipse even the cold hospital glare.
That’s the wonder of showbiz. As she regroups for her next act, Martha Wainwright has earned every shred of her small share of praise. But best read this before wishing it on your own kids.
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