Can you remember what you
were doing in the summer of 1999, the last summer of the century?
I can. I was bonkers and I
have the case notes to prove it. I was 27 years old and though I didn’t die
with the twentieth century and join the ‘almost rock star 27 Club’, I nearly
did. Some seven months before I was starting to lose my mind and left London
and my beloved burgeoning music career to unravel in Ireland.
Then on the 25th of
June, 1999, disintegrating on the west coast of Cork, I attempted suicide.
Later that day I was admitted to the medical ward and referred for psychiatric
review.
The next day I was admitted
to the acute unit where I subsequently stayed under observation for five and a
half weeks, 36 days in total.
There, parts of me,
fragments of selves, neuroses and identities, traumas and conflicts, complexes
and defences, fought and fell away, as we hurtled towards the millennium where
I imagined we would be wearing intergalactic silver space boots in a UFO cult
led by Buck Rogers and Bjork singing Spaceman by Babylon Zoo.
I didn’t want to end up in
such a nightmarish 2000 AD scenario in a century with too many zeros. It felt
like my identity would be cancelled out, I would be a nobody and all I had
worked for would be ground zero. I was a twentieth century hangover dreading
New Year's Eve.
This is an apocalyptic
memoir for Generation X, for those of us who straddle the old century and the
new; for those of us who remember The Muppets, The A-Team, The Blues Brothers,
Jaws, Chips, Hart to Hart, Wonder Woman, Popeye, Cindy, Barbie and Bettie Page,
Snow White, Elvis’s white jumpsuit, Marilyn’s white dress, Ministry’s sampled
guitar riffs, Madonna’s gold conical bra, Jim Morrison’s leather trousers,
punks, Goths, shoe-gazers, ravers, Dadrock, the MGM lion roaring through a
semi-circle before movies, the little dog looking into a large gramophone on
classical vinyl records, the swastika, the atom bomb, Einstein and Don Johnson
in a pastel pink suit talking into a huge mobile phone.
Written in direct yet dreamy surreal “Gráinnesque” tone and style this
confessional memoir of madness confronts raw emotional truth and has the
hallmark of any true survivor; dark gallows humour.
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