Gossip frontgirl Beth Ditto has written a book! Rather her memoirs that she appropriately named ‘Coal to Diamonds’, and reading the first 6 pages available on Amazon, it looks awesome, funny and shocking of course. Seriously, she is an excellent writer (I must say she got some help from author Michelle Tea), but these first pages depict a white-trash family beyond poor, living on semi-rural Arkansas with such poignant and vivid details, that I was asking for more.
These days, Ditto may be this glittering electro-punk-plus-sized chanteuse dressed up by Jean Paul Gaultier and invited at Cannes festival, but her childhood hasn’t been this glamorous, living in her aunt’s children-crowded house, which was the extended refuge of her family ‘so large that it tumbled and stretched to the edges of comprehension’. This is how she explains the situation of her depraved upbringing:
‘For the A’s it was their drunken, neglectful mother. For me it was my violent stepfather. For my mother it was her sexually abusive father. And there were countless other short-term squatters, like my cousins whose mother shot her husband in the head. Children came and children went as circumstance and tragedy dictated. Aunt Jannie just couldn’t turn away a kid with nowhere to go, not even when her diabetes made her so slowed-down and sickly.
Aunt Jannie took people in for so many years that her house probably would’ve felt empty without stray bodies on every spare bit of furniture. Jannie’s heart – her original heart – was a good and giving thing, even though her life had fossilized pain around the outside.’
There’s also question of squirrel cooking a little later, ‘My dad liked to boil a squirrel head and suck the brains out the nose’, but it is probably not the most chocking thing in the book, as I haven’t read the rest, when she talks about her sexuality and body image… ‘There’s some shit in there that is going to seriously shock the crap out of everyone. Things that’s going to make people forget about me eating squirrels. Totally eclipse it’, she told NME.
Some critics say it’s an inspiring, brutally honest book, I would say it’s probably a must read.