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Marianne Faithfull
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Memories, Dreams and Reflections Paperback – 7 July 2008

by Marianne Faithfull (Author)
3.7 out of 5 stars 267 ratings
on any 4 Qualifying items | Terms
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This book is a more personal history than has ever before been written by or about Marianne Faithfull. Anecdotal, conversational, intimate and revealing, this is her no-holds-barred account of her life, her friends, her triumphs and mistakes.

A decade after the publication of ‘Faithfull’, one of the most acclaimed rock autobiographies of all time, Marianne Faithfull is back, vowing periodically leave her wicked ways behind and grow up, but finding that somehow strange things keep happening.

A wry observer of her slightly off-kilter world, Marianne muses nostalgically about afternoons languishing on Moroccan cushions at George and Pattie's, getting high and listening to new songs. She fondly recalls the outlandish antics of her Beat friends Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs; is frequently baffled at her image in the press (opening the paper to read of her own demise: 'Sixties Star in Death Plunge'); terrified by the curse sent by Kenneth Anger; mortified by her history of reckless behaviour; not to mention her near-death experience in Singapore while looking for an opium den.

Marianne peoples her anecdotal memoir with legendary characters one can imagine only Marianne assembling around her, both the eccentric and the beautiful, from Henrietta Moraes and Donatella Versace to Sofia Coppola, Juliette Greco, and Yves St. Laurent's dog. Here is Marianne on the dark side of the sixties and the bright side of the nineties, which saw her collaborating with the likes of Blur and Jarvis Cocker; compelling recollections of an unconventional childhood in her father's orgiastic literary commune to a hilariously decadent few days at Lady Caroline Blackwood's deathbed. Here she is her blossoming movie career, on her records as subliminal autobiography. This is as intimate a portrait as we've ever had of Marianne, as she meditates on sex and drugs, confronts her alter-ego, the Fabulous Beast, and faces her own mortality in her battle with breast cancer.

Since her last book Marianne has, in her own words, 'made quite a few records, gone on many tours, tried to play it straight, and… Well, the rest is the subject of this book.'

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  1. Print length
    336 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    7 July 2008
  4. Dimensions
    13 x 2.13 x 19.71 cm
  5. ISBN-10
    9780007245819
  6. ISBN-13
    978-0007245819
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Product description

Review

‘A rare talent for lyrical, inventive prose gives her anecdotes wings….a powerful, radical and quite beautiful work of biographical art.’ Sunday Telegraph

‘She opens up a box of mini-memoirs about the characters she has met. Instantly engaging. Faithfull is able to produce something of grit and newsworthiness.’ Observer

About the Author

Marianne Faithfull is an English singer, songwriter and actress whose career has spanned five decades. She is known, all over the world, as the crown princess of swinging London in the 1960s and 70s, as a singer, and as an actress. She is the author of Faithfull: An Autobiography and Memories, Dreams and Reflections.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0007245815
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ 7 July 2008
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780007245819
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0007245819
  • Item weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 kg
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13 x 2.13 x 19.71 cm
  • Best Sellers Rank: 291,464 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • Customer reviews:
    3.7 out of 5 stars 267 ratings

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Customer reviews

3.7 out of 5 stars
267 global ratings

Customers say

Customers have mixed opinions about the book's readability, with some finding it a compelling read while others describe it as disappointing. They appreciate the author's personality, with one customer noting how her personality and character shine through. The content receives criticism for being rambling.

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PersonalityReadabilityRambling content
4 customers mention ‘Personality’4 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the author's personality, with one noting how her character shines through in the book.

"...She is a highly intelligent, funny, and beautiful, talented lady. Read it, you'll love it." Read more

"Lovely person who's lived a life and a half but this tome is a little deep and meandering rather than her 'Faithfull'" Read more

"A very interesting lady, but this is a book too far, lost in its meandering and random thoughts. I would enjoy a biography much better." Read more

"...Nevertheless her personality and character shine through and she has great powers of observation. Very entertaining...." Read more

12 customers mention ‘Readability’8 positive4 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the book's readability, with some finding it a compelling read while others describe it as disappointing and dull.

"...always seem to win through, usually with others help again. A good read, but some of the bookish references are mite dreary but overall a..." Read more

"Very disappointing. It’s all rhetoric about the Beatles and Stones. Rambles on in a chaotic fashion." Read more

"Dull, dull, dull...." Read more

"Loved this book - of course I did but some of the 'those I have known ' seemed a bit arch as an intellectual balance to the 'bad girl' image - but..." Read more

3 customers mention ‘Rambling content’0 positive3 negative

Customers find the book's content rambling.

"Rambling and pretentious in parts." Read more

"Found the book very heavy going , became increasingly bored with the ramblings !! I was totally lost in places" Read more

"...It’s all rhetoric about the Beatles and Stones. Rambles on in a chaotic fashion." Read more

Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • Inquisio
    5.0 out of 5 stars A 60's intrigue.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 June 2015
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    A little self indulgent but that is allowed in biographies of course. I read into her that she is a mite ditzy, a bit pretentious and silly, but her artistic side, with the help of a lot of others, is very cleverly shown in this book. She comes over as a girl/woman who enjoys her life whatever it throws at her, so, the many situations, that would have an average person baulking, are herein mentioned, and overcome in whatever way she can find. I give Marianne a lot of credit for her luck, most would have lost their lives if they did the same as she, but her naivety and persona always seem to win through, usually with others help again.
    A good read, but some of the bookish references are mite dreary but overall a reasonable tome.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Montasio
    4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but a bit disjointed
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 February 2013
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    Enjoyed the original autobiography very much. This is more low key, interesting but not very well constructed. Nevertheless her personality and character shine through and she has great powers of observation. Very entertaining. MF would make a great dinner party guest!
    One person found this helpful
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  • Mr. Anthony I. K. Bates
    3.0 out of 5 stars Marianne's advertising campaign
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 February 2014
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    I was expecting something more along the lines of Marianne's first literary outing; sadly there is a lot of unnecessary name dropping her re the shoes she wears, the clothes she wears and am surprised she did not mention a brand of preferred toilet tissue paper! A couple of chapters re her favorite 'Beat' artists, such as Brecht, Weill I speed read as it was so damned boring and 'up herself'. The remainder I enjoyed, but buyer beware this is not like 'Faithfull'!
    5 people found this helpful
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  • d herceg-lockhart
    5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling read
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 December 2020
    Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
    Well-written, honest, at times hardly believable, but such was the life of Marianne Faithfull. Her motivations and life choices leave a thousand question marks, but her story is compelling and worth a read.
    One person found this helpful
    Helpful
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  • Sony Victim
    1.0 out of 5 stars Very disappointing.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 October 2023
    Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
    I loved the Album Broken English and I used to be a huge fan of Bill Ivy (c.f. Girl on a Motorcycle)

    I checked out the reviews for this Book before ordering it and was disappointed that some people described it as an endless stream of name dropping - sadly, they were spot-on.

    I went ahead and ordered a copy in the hope that there might be some insight into someone who seems very disturbed - sadly, there isn't; the book does seem to be meandering and self-indulgent.

    As an aside, the Kindle version could do with some proof-reading - a LOT!
    Helpful
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  • Amazon Customer
    2.0 out of 5 stars Unintelligible
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 November 2024
    Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
    Stopped reading this about half way through, no clear layout of her life and experiences , more like the ramblings and often incoherent stories poorly told
    One person found this helpful
    Helpful
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  • Patricia
    5.0 out of 5 stars Good condition fascinating read
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 December 2021
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    This is a present to me.Great read.Book in good condition
    One person found this helpful
    Helpful
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  • Scribe
    4.0 out of 5 stars A must for Marianne fans
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 September 2013
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    Loved this book - of course I did but some of the 'those I have known ' seemed a bit arch as an intellectual balance to the 'bad girl' image - but she is brilliant, slightly tongue in cheek , hard on herself and on the money about others.
    Helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

  • john
    5.0 out of 5 stars Must Read
    Reviewed in Canada on 10 April 2018
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    Lot more fun read than her previous biography. Very British till the end. found it quite funny at times.
    Report
  • Como Mike
    3.0 out of 5 stars She's faithful
    Reviewed in Italy on 9 November 2018
    Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
    I think i would like her as a person. She's honest. Has fun and is original. The book is a bit disorganized but then this reflects the author.
    Report
  • Fan of Marianne
    5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable...and sometimes scary lives and times realized in a 320 page chronicle from a gifted musician, actor, and writer.
    Reviewed in the United States on 17 November 2007
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    Marianne Faithfull has put together passages of her life and times entwined with a host of well known and not so well known characters that make for riveting stories with a perceptive insight.

    This book gives much more rounded details of the life that has been Faithfull's as compared to previous offerings. The Rolling Stones and 60's connections are here of course (the Beats and more contemporary fare as well), but there's so much more. Family, friends, Mariannne's indepth knowledge of history, literature, and music all figure in here and ultimately provide an understanding of why Marianne is who she is and where she's been. Also, why she is such a compelling musician and actor.

    Marianne has lived life with a passion that can sometimes be scary, but is ultimately textured and is as grand as the lady's rich heritage.

    The adoring fan base she has garnered over the years is well deserved and all of those fans will surely love this book. Others will too. Marianne is a hoot -- with beauty, intelligence and class.

    I wonder if Britain and the British press realize what a treasure this lady is. I hope she's acting, singing, and writing for the next "20 years" she mentions toward this book's conclusion. Her work will be one of France's (or Ireland's) best exports.
    Report
  • Baranabus
    4.0 out of 5 stars fun, fascinating
    Reviewed in the United States on 22 June 2012
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    Marianne covers many previously uncovered(at least as far as I've read) corners of her life- especially interesting was her account of her father's work as British intel in WWII; he interviewed Nazi officers. He also ran a utopian commune after the war. She comes from pretty distinguished stock! Also, she obviously has a generous, funny spirit even when she's admitting her own and other's flaws (I like how she unflinchingly discusses the darker sides of Burroughs and Ginsberg). Her scandalous tales of teaching poetics Naropa college were interesting too. Although I think Corso took it too far.

    It was also refreshing to read her disavow the romantic Artist/Addict notion -- 'disordering of the senses' and all of that. That notion really needs to die once and for all! Also interesting was that she had a different take on Acid as 'Seeing God' than you might think, for a 60s icon.

    I was irritated by the seller giving me a public library copy with missing photo pages though when they listed it as "Good Condition". Tsk tsk.

    All in all, a good sequel to her last book.
    Report
  • Surferofromantica
    3.0 out of 5 stars Chatty, brief, with lots of overlap to her first memoir
    Reviewed in the United States on 5 April 2014
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    Marianne Faithfull’s first autobiography, Faithfull, was published in 1994 and is a brilliant rock autobiography, probably something that just about anybody should read, as long as you can deal with the incredible self-absorption (hey, it’s a rock bio – what do you expect?). She followed it up with this book in 2008; sadly, though, it is simply not as good. It re-treads a lot of material as the first one (mommy and daddy’s doomed relationship is revisited, but without any new insights, other than “one of the reasons I was sent to the convent was so that my mother could have a sex life.”), but also tells interesting anecdotes of her grandfather and his Jewish wife in Vienna, so dipping back into the past is not all wrong! Finally moving ahead in time, it deals quite superficially with events that have come up in the years in between, which includes health issues (most importantly the fortunate, fluke-y just-in-time discovery of deadly cancer – Al Jourgensen had the same luck), friends dying, recording sessions, acting, and more tours. She also dwells on the Beats, her appreciation of them, and of experiencing the passing of William Burroughs, (hero or monster?), Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.

    The chapters are all over the place, some of which are devoted to a single friend’s memory (for Caroline Blackwood, Henrietta Moraes, Juliette Greco and Gregory Corso she becomes a sort of “Speaker for the dead”, a la the Orson Scott Card book in his Ender series, which I have just finished reading – which I guess is what happens when people get old and survive their friends, family, acquaintances), and one chapter covers her surreal conversation with Fabulous Beast (herself). Being a proto-goth, she gets gloomy too. “I think the apocalypse will appear for far more banal reasons than [the end of the Mayan calendar]: war, pestilence, famine, and global warming. And rampant greed. And, of course, sheer incompetence. It ain’t gonna get any better. I just hope my grandchildren get to see the world I grew up in and know what a tree is. It’s tragic, I know. I’m beginning to sound like a complete curmudgeon – but I am a curmudgeon! And now I see how curmudgeons get to be that way. This world sucks!”

    She also goes back to the Sixties a lot in the text (and even more so in the pictures section), talking about how beautiful and stoned everyone was, but how the Sixties were really just a weak version of the Fifties, which she was too young to be involved with until later in life when she moved in with the Beats. “Being with George (Harrison) and Pattie (Boyd) was very relaxing. Mick and I were able to lie back on Moroccan cushions, get high and float away listening to George’s new songs.” She claims that Mick Jagger had nothing to do with the writing of “Ruby Tuesday”, despite getting a writing credit, but that Brian Jones had a large hand in it (more than any other Stones song), it “was a collaboration between Keith and Brian. Without Brian there wouldn’t be a ‘Ruby Tuesday’.” She talks about the Joe Orton play “Up Against It” that they were trying to cast the Beatles to make a movie of, which would have been edgy, and potentially career-destroying, but for which they may have built up enough popularity and credibility to pull off. In it, “the Archbishop of Canterbury turns out to be a woman, the [Beatles] get dressed up as women, commit adultery and murder, and are involved in the assassination of the Prime Minister.” Hmmm… tantalizing to think about what may have been, or if Mick Jagger and Ian McKellan had taken it up afterwards, as is the legend! (Orton was murdered by his gay lover, inspiring the Beatles song “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”).

    We learn weird tidbits throughout, some of which complement the first book; for example, it seems that she lost all ability to speak French after her near-OD in Australia and six-day coma. Interesting, she also gets to sing an unused Roger Waters song from 1968, "Incarceration of a Flower Child". She gets catty with Paul McCartney, and Mick in a sort of backwards way. “Whatever we thought of Linda – and she didn’t make that great an impression on me – I think it was a credit to Paul that he didn’t marry a model. A module. Because that’s what all the others have ended up doing, they’ve married these modules. And they have children who also become modules.” Of course, Mick, Keith and Ron all married/allied with models/former models, and some of their kids have become models now too! “There was a lot of dark, creepy stuff in the sixties, I can tell you: The Process, Mel Lyman, Manson, Anton LaVey, and L Ron Hubbard. Those people were always trying to get hold of me. Somehow I managed to negotiate my way around them quite successfully. I didn’t get involved in any cults, apart from going up to Bangor for that regrettable weekend with the Maharishi and the Beatles, the weekend that Brian Epstein killed himself.” Inspection of Brian Epstein, inspection of Spanish Tony’s Vesuvio (“like all dealers, he didn’t consider himself just a dealer, he wanted to be something else, something a bit more grand, a maitre d’ to the hipoisie; thus the Vesuvio”), and regret about ever having anything to do with Kenneth Anger (she had played Lilith, “a cemetery-haunting female demon” in his film Lucifer Rising; “dabbling in the occult has a nasty way of casting its baleful influence long after you have left the scene – and accumulating vengeful force along the way”).

    But things were much different then for privileged people like Faithfull. “The artistic community, even in the sixties, was very small. ‘The Sixties’ was actually a very few people. In the sixties you could go up to the Stones’ Maddox Street office and tell Mick some crazy idea you had and he’s listen to you – not that he’d probably do much about it, or Paul at Wimpole Street, but today it would be beyond belief what you’d have to do – apart from the fact that you wouldn’t want to! There’d be fourteen lawyers prancing, seven accountants simpering, managers mulling, minders, minions, middle-men, media mentors, marketeers.” The book is incredibly chatty, and at times the author doesn’t even try to cover up that this was all narrated to him: “”When I hear Gregory laughing while I’m reading his poetry on the album – which you must get – I see Gregory rise up with his wicked puckish grin, a wild jail kid, but so sweet.” At one point she even gets someone else to tell the story!

    It is with great envy that I read about her collaboration with Nick Cave (!!), the Bad Seeds, and PJ Harvey (!!). Unfortunately, her chapter on Before The Poison, the recording where she collaborates with them, is brief, and she really doesn’t talk much about other musicians! Happily she also mentions being in Singapore, staying at the Raffles Hotel, and walking around the corner in search of an opium den to hang out on Bugis Street (also called “Boogie Street”, according to the local pronunciation, which Leonard Cohen wrote a book about), and nearly getting killed by the tough punks who used to hang out there (times have changed - now it’s a youth hang-out). And with drugs she’s still unrepentant, willing to find some good there. “I’m not prepared to feel that everything I’ve done in the last ten years is wrong. I am ready to admit that my body prefers it when I don’t drink, but I'm not sure about the rest of me! I’m convinced that there’s something in us deep down that needs a break from the regular life. My theory is that by keeping yourself just slightly off the straight and narrow you can avoid all sorts of things perhaps major things, that otherwise could spell trouble. I know that when I’ve been in top form, off drink and whatever, it’s then that I can get into all sorts of trouble – sexual pickles and all that stuff. I’ve even been known to marry the wrong person soon after sobering up.”

    Of course, none of this changes that fact that we’re hearing all of this from the Marianne Faithfull, who along with Michelle Phillips became the vision of hippy chick beauty and youth. The fact that she’s aged like a wine into this incredible songbird is also a stunning achievement of someone who has really had it all, on both sides of the coin. What a life!!

    The pictures are great, and the book even has an index!
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