We were supposed to meet at the Ursa, his almost-pied-à-terre in Mile-End. Her all-purpose place: “performance hall/café/bar/community center/private club/gallery and any other possible vocation”, as she writes in the penultimate chapter of Nothing serious hasn’t arrived yethis memoirs published last month in their original English version, Stories I Might Regret Telling You, and these days in French in Fanny Britt’s attentive and fluent translation. Via the tongue, via the screen: the last snowfall in April and the sixth wave of COVID got the better of the desired proximity.
“You, where are you? she asks when we finally see each other. Observation: we are two pedestrians on the digital highway, we have a terrible time connecting, our computer will fail during the conversation. Never mind, this face-to-face chatter will live.
Didn’t she survive everything? Starting with being “just born”. First page, first secret unveiled: it starts as clean as a cut with a mechanical saw. Chat! “My mother, Kate McGarrigle, and my father, Loudon Wainwright III, loved me, or at least they learned to love me. When I was a teenager, Loudon confided to me that initially he didn’t want me, that he even insisted on my mother having an abortion. However, she had panicked at the time of the operation and the doctor had kindly intervened. »
They very nearly were very short, these memoirs. Note that Sartre fashioned some Being and Nothingness, its one kilo brick (to be exact: the pound was bought as a unit of measurement during the war). “It was decisive, we can say,” she comments, smiling slightly. “Learning it at 14, a time when you’re not too good about yourself, it’s a reality that strikes you. Yes, it hurts you, but it explains how you feel, too. It made sense, you know ? I felt different. So I was ! In the book, she has a wonderful way of expressing it: “A outsider endowed with a fiercely complicit family. »
Between rejection and recognition
The book oscillates between the (many) stories of rejection and the (too rare) moments of recognition. Manifest disproportion. For which Martha is responsible at least as much as those around her: she admits it bluntly. “Of course you put yourself in a rather negative position in relation to yourself. It justified my cast. I grew up in a play where there were Kate and Anna, and Loudon, and then Rufus: who was the youngest, the little sister, in the story? I was defined by them, and I sought so much to find an identity for myself. Like any teenager, really… maybe a little more dramatic! So I took that role and tried to make it mine. »
She systematically switches from French to English, almost always at the same time: when she has gone through her explanation and wants to summarize the point.
French-Canadian Catholic schools at the start, school of life in New York, she has in her veins a Gabrielle (her adored grandmother) as much as a Pat Donaldson, Kate’s companion for 10 years, “a Scottish bass player” . Martha paints an affectionate portrait of each, sparing us no detail. ” Once, [Gaby] forgot his dentures on a table and my dog grabbed them to bury them somewhere in the garden. Not only is everything Martha Wainwright writes absolutely true, not only does she avoid any misfortune in her circus program, but she is earthy and dangerously funny. ” But not “funny, ha ha”, I hope ! ” Never ! “I wouldn’t like that. I’m funny and not funny at the same time. »
Yes, sex, drugs and all that, what next?
Inevitably, as Martha’s career progresses, we follow in parallel and behind the scenes the feats of arms of Rufus, the tours of Anna and Kate, so that the story leads us to what must be called the “sex” section. , drugs and rock’n’roll”. Yes, we go through the notorious Château Marmont in Los Angeles, and we spend a night all in white lines at Stephen Stills: the list of celebrities is certainly impressive, but these revelations are the least revealing of the book. The most banal, finally.
“I saw a lot of things, I met a lot of celebrities, and it was fun when it was funbut being in the recording and entertainment industry has never been easy for me, especially for a woman like me, passionate, extreme, who wanted to be loved very much, but who did not want to compromise. They made it hard for me, and I made it hard for myself, you know? »
The real life
But the heart of the book is elsewhere. In the details of her first abortion, in the perilous, even miraculous birth of Arcangelo (we are in the middle of an episode of the series Call the Midwife), which corresponds to the last phase of the cancer that will kill Kate McGarrigle. Here, Martha’s propensity for dramatization arguably falls short of the stark truth of this period of colliding misfortune-happiness.
“My life as a woman, my relationship with my parents, my love affairs, the breakdown of my marriage and the battle with my ex, the almost impossibility for a woman to find a balance between family life and career — it’s more like a tightrope — that’s what I wanted to say. Quite simply the story of a woman. »
The story ends quite well. Even if the sequel remains to be experienced, we can at least say, as the title says: nothing serious has happened yet. Nothing very, too serious, let’s put things into perspective. “I’m a damn phoenix, or better, a hydra,” Martha writes. We’ll get out of this mess. I’m healthy, my kids are healthy, we live in a great city, and I’m able to earn a living like a grown-up. I’m a fucking hydra. Take my head off, and I’ll grow a new one. »
Fanny Britt and Martha’s Words