Don’t Be Alarmed
An interview with the NYT’s Amanda Hess about Sinead O’Connor
ILLUSTRATION | EDITH ZIMMERMAN
This is where we start the interview with Amanda Hess ready set go.
TSB: So did you have any preconceptions going into the Sinead story?
AH: Well … I grew up with this ambient awareness of her as a beautiful, cool singer who was controversial, but I never thought too much about why. I didn’t know anything about, like, Ireland, for instance. I just had this 2-minute “Behind the Music” promo understanding of who she was. And then when my editor Caryn asked me if I was interested in Sinead, I sensed immediately that I was very interested in her. While I was preparing to interview her, I consumed a bunch of content about her, both old stuff and more recent stuff, that made me uneasy — not uneasy about her as a person, but about what was being said and how it was being said. I watched the segment Dr. Phil did with her, grilling her about her childhood abuse, and it’s terrible to watch, like a snuff film. And then I read a transcript of a Dr. Drew segment that aired on CNN in 2016 where “Sinead O`Connor’s Alarming Behavior” was discussed alongside three other people: a man who killed his pregnant wife, a mother who killed her daughter, and George Zimmerman! I also read some other, less sensationalistic stories about her recent life that nevertheless made her existence seem kind of dour and sad and very serious. I felt like I had less and less of an idea of who she was, the more I read about her.
I did know that she had some experience with mental illness, and I knew I wanted to address that in some way. I was interested in thinking about what we mean when we call a person “crazy,” because sometimes we mean that the person is mentally ill, and sometimes we mean that they’ve crossed some social boundary. Often those two meanings are applied to the same person, and it’s assumed that is because being mentally ill makes people act “crazy,” but I think perhaps the opposite can be true, that having one’s behavior or beliefs stigmatized — on a massively public, global scale — is not always helpful for cultivating mental wellness. My work on this overlapped with a low period for me personally, where I was dealing with some PPD that is probably related to some trauma I experienced around my pregnancy, and so I also had this really personal sense of how “mental illness” doesn’t necessarily make a person a less reliable narrator; it can offer a lot of clarity and insight, actually.
Anything that surprised you?
In the days leading up to interviewing a celebrity type figure, I’m mostly thinking, selfishly: Is this person going to be mean to me? I’m thinking about whether the next two hours of my life are going to be pleasant or not. The answer to that question has no real bearing on the shape of the story because whether or not a famous person likes me does not provide any particularly interesting information about them. Anyway, she was incredibly warm and kind.
I think often when you read about a person who has been through some difficult things, their life circumstances can tend to rub off on them. You can start to see them as a sad person or a difficult person because they have endured some sad, difficult things. But often the opposite is true. I wrote a profile of Brandi Carlile recently, and as I was fact-checking the piece with her over the phone, I found myself listing off this depressing sequence of events from her childhood; she grew up very poor in rural Washington. And she very gently was like, the thing you have to understand is that I never experienced that stuff as depressing and I’m proud of being poor. So I try to be aware of not holding someone down with the weight of their circumstances. And in Sinead O’Connor’s case, she is one of the purely funniest people I’ve ever met. Just incredibly, delightfully, profanely funny. The most difficult thing about interviewing her is that the New York Times doesn’t let me print swears even in quotations — I got just one “crazy bitch” through — so I had a terrible time trying to find clean quotes from her that also gave some sense of her personality and her wit, which are unmatched.
Did your writing approach change at all after you read the memoir?
It did, actually. I am always thrilled when a subject has written a memoir because it gives me a sense not only of what has happened to them but also of how they think about it. One of the greatest things about having the memoir on hand is that you don’t have to ask them about everything. You specifically don’t have to ask for minute details about the worst things that ever happened to them. When I interviewed Tina Turner, who had released a couple of books about her life, I didn’t have to ask her to confirm, like, the name of the hotel she ran to when Ike almost beat her to death for the last time. I always want to ask a subject at least something about all the topics I plan to write about — I want to give them fair warning and make sure I understand how they really feel about it. But having the book lets me ask them about it in a way that does not feel so prosecutorial.
Did you ever fear you were being exploitative?
I’m always afraid of that! This is a transactional relationship: I am writing a story in a newspaper that sells subscriptions, and she’s sitting for the interview because she’s written a memoir that she also hopes will sell copies. That all makes me profoundly uncomfortable; I just don’t seek out transactional relationships in any other part of my life, and I’m bad at interpersonal politics and networking and whatever. Not that I’m such a pure and serious artist, I’m just a shy person who is bad at lying. So I always have a sense that the potential for exploitation is baked into the whole thing. And then when you’re dealing with a person like Sinead, who has been covered in such gross and inappropriate ways, you obviously want to avoid reinscribing those tropes even if you’re raising them to bat them down.
How much should you talk about mental health? How defined is this person by that? I have a mental illness, and it runs in my family, and my mom was a social worker, so I’ve always seen it as a normal and discussed thing. But that doesn’t mean that I know how other people are going to react to the issue being raised. Like, my own mental health is something I talk about with my family and my therapist and my friends, not strangers who are Zooming with me for a couple of hours and then turning around and summing up my life and career in under 3,000 words. So there are a couple of competing things I’m thinking about when I’m preparing to ask someone about something like that. On the one hand, I recognize that sometimes I’m overly nervous to ask about something that the subject is actually very blase about because this is their life and it’s the most natural thing in the world for them to discuss. On the other hand, we’re often talking about trauma, and reliving and rediscussing trauma can create its own kind of trauma. So I tend to raise it in a kind of meta way: How do you feel about talking about this? And that’s what I did with Sinead.
There is this other, competing impulse that you have to keep in mind when you’re writing about a celebrity, which is that you don’t want to kiss their ass too much. I am not really interested in writing a puff piece or a take-down but more of an essay that uses a person’s life and art and testimony as material for discussing issues I find interesting. In writing about Sinead, I really wanted to get across just how lovely it is to spend time with her, and how weirdly vindicated she had been by the passage of time, and how funny her book was because I felt like all of those elements of her life that are obvious if you spend two seconds with her were not coming through in the coverage that I had read. But that also introduces the risk of softening the edges a little too much, you know? Bette Midler tweeted about my story and said something like, “she was right about everything!” I mean… she wasn’t right about everything. She’s a human being!
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And you can purchase Sinead O’Connor’s memoir “Rememberings” from the Greenlight Bookstore.
