Teen Sleuth Haunted Library

Little do such men know the toil, the pains, the daily, nightly racking of the brains, to range the thoughts, the matter to digest, to cull fit phrases, and reject the rest.

If you are expecting a collection of sordid punk rock anecdotes, put down this book and pick up the unauthorized Courtney Love biography. This punk rock The Bell Jar is an achingly sad and complex memoir by the grieving mother of  Nancy Spungen, doomed sweetheart of Sex Pistol Sid Vicious. Nancy was a violent, whining, selfish, immature, cultural cipher and groupie from hell. But she was also the gifted eldest child to a middle-class, suburban Philadelphia Jewish family. And her mother loved her.

Deborah Spungen readily admits that her daughter decimated everyone and everything in her midst and that wherever she went she brought with her a double black rainbow of fear and hatred. But she also gives insight to her daughter’s damaged psyche. Nancy began her life with the umbilical cord squeezing the oxygen to her brain, jaundiced, and suffering from a rare blood disorder. Infant Nancy was impossible to console, prone to tantrums, hostile, insatiable, demanding, a bully to her siblings. As she grew older, she displayed symptoms of neurological disorders and schizophrenia. She had psychotic episodes, banging her head, attacking a babysitter with scissors and her mother with a hammer. Today we know, of course, that this child isn’t necessarily a “bad seed”. Of her defiant, difficult daughter, Deborah writes:

“It seemed as if every week she got wilder, further and further from our control and our sense of right and wrong. Our morality meant zero to her. She would simply step over the line, draw a new one, and then step over that. We were also revolted. It was ugly and distasteful and we hated to see such a bright child throw her life away—trash it, really. But we were powerless to stop her”.

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Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

-Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now