“I never could′ve told you anything I long for
While I was in the water swimming ‘gainst tides we′re taught to
Take it in our stride, laugh it off, take it on the chin just right
Don’t be too loud or too quiet, but I got all this fight
And now I see it clear with every passing of each year
I deserve to be here
And every time I fall, I crawl back like an animal
My focus is powerful.”
I knew I was going to love Self Esteem when I first caught her set at Glastonbury a few years ago, referencing 1990 Madonna with her black suit and corset. What made me stop and watch was that instead of the iconic John Paul Gaultier conical bra each breast was covered with the dome of Meadowhall Shopping Centre in Sheffield. At that point I didn’t know that Rebecca Lucy Taylor was born there but I could see she had a sense of humour, a sense of where she was from and had something very powerful to say as the above lyrics from her song Focus to Power show. In the intervening years Self Esteem has become a creative force with three solo albums, including A Complicated Woman this year. She had a Mercury Prize nomination for her album Prioritise Pleasure in 2022 and was the BBC Music Introducing act in 2021. She is not just a singer, she’s a multi-instrumentalist and has composed for theatre and became a West End lead in 2023/24 playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret. She’s been awarded an honorary doctorate in music from the University of Sheffield and a portrait of her hangs in the National Gallery. Now she has written a memoir, bringing together notes and lyrics, journal entries and observations on life as a woman in the 21st Century, referencing relationships, abuse, self-worth, creativity and living under the weight of the impossible expectations we impose on young women. The blurb refers to it as a ‘subversive anti-Bible’ and a ‘cathartic scream of a book’ and it is raw, emotional and so incredibly exposing. I will be buying it for my stepdaughters.
The narrative is jagged and feels unfinished, a structure that underlines the theme of being the ‘finished’ article something that applies to both the professional and personal self. Creative work never feels fully done. I always imagined that when writing a book I would know when it was complete and I would feel satisfied that it was finished. A piece of writing is always open to change, but we have to let it go at some point and finishing is a collaborative process with mentors, agents, editors and might end up looking different to what you expected. Similarly as people we are never finished, the self is not one fixed thing and can be influenced by mood, something we watched, whether we slept well or not and interactions with others. I think we imagine as children that there’s a point where we become an adult and our self is a fixed thing, but the self is fluid and open to change until the last day we’re alive. The author writes that she wakes up knowing it’s going to be a day when her brain is against her. So out of all the options open she decides on the middle ground:
‘Ultimately doing nothing garnished by a little of what I as a child imagined being an adult would be. A coffee in a cafe, walk to the cinema, watch an art house film alone, walk home.’
It’s almost a fake it till you make it idea. The self is just a raw block of clay but we still go out there, pretending to do what we think adults should.
Toxic relationships are also a huge part of the book and it’s clear there was one in particular that was coercive and damaging. Tiny little snippets of information are dropped about him and I identified strongly with how she feels at these times. She addresses him remembering that: ‘ he made sure to take at least two pieces of jigsaw and hide them so it could finish it himself.’ It made me shiver with recognition. My heart broke for her in this paragraph:
“I’ll never forget the first time it cracked and he became someone else. I spent that night trying to sleep on the floor and reaching back up to him in his single bed, sleeping soundly. Offering my hand over and over through the night. – And forever he held back. Each tendon in his fingers finally gracing me with tension. And in that moment the sickness in my stomach was gone and the addiction to his acceptance began.”
She clearly spent years trying to please this person, to be enough but not too much. Enough in the right way that was acceptable to him. A rollercoaster of arguments followed by apologies to make things nice again, a blissful few weeks when he’s happy because she made herself smaller, then a withdrawal of affection, hurtful comments and arguments. It’s a place I’ve been and it only ended when I accepted I was enough, just as I was. I still feel sick to my stomach when something takes me back there and this really hit home. As she says, ‘tell me anyone who left when they should have.’ She also addresses the inevitable question of children, something women are always asked and I have noticed that I make a lot more sense to some friends now I have stepdaughters. The author wishes she could just have one, now, not because she wants one just because it would be done and people would stop asking. They ask as if you’ve forgotten to do it. There’s a point in the book though where change begins and it’s in a letter, because unsent letters have such power. It’s a letting go leaving the path clear to be whatever.
We get the sense of a person who has a huge and imaginative inner world, but is hampered by her own mind throwing out options, constantly questioning whether this or that is the right thing to do. There’s a very busy internal critic here and while the author may be an over-thinker and struggle with anxiety, I think this second-guessing herself is a habit many women have. It starts with parental pressures of what a girl should be, educational expectations influenced by gender, societal expectations of what an adult woman should want and how successful she should be. It’s as if feminism succeeded in giving women more choice, but also more expectations rather than equality. Yes of course we can have a career, but then you must go home and more than a fair share of housework, cooking, laundry and having the mental load of who eats what, which week a friend is coming to stay and an encyclopaedic knowledge of where every object belonging each family member might be found. On top of that are grooming standards, the endless opinions on whether women should age naturally or have surgery, when they should stop wearing short skirts and how to keep their sex lives spicy. No one asks a man when he’s going to fit in having a child or whether he should sacrifice his career for his family. This pressure is described beautifully here as it runs throughout the narrative alongside the extra pressures of being creative and a famous woman. Everyone talks about America Ferrarra’s speech in the Barbie film about what a woman is but I find the author’s words much more affecting as she writes a poem about herself as the woman she feels society wants her to be. A woman who eats the right things, who makes money but stays generous and humble, who is modern and desirable, but above all things maternal. It reads like a modern fairy tale.
‘I had one thousand friends and each and every one was happy with me, and felt I had given them enough time and attention’.
It feels like slicing yourself into a thousand different pieces to be everything and keep everyone happy and they all think you’re amazing, but you’re still slicing yourself. It takes therapy, age and self-acceptance to throw off these expectations and doubts. In amongst this torrent of emotions there is a down to earth feel and a sense of humour that comes out a lot in lists – ‘things I should have said no to’ being one. There are also blunt truths that she clearly can’t say to the person but records in her diary – ‘I want to be fucked like that but not have to hear about your Edinburgh show.” I loved this directness, tempered with humour. It also shows how hard it can be for some women to say what they want and don’t want without judgement.
She gives us an insight into how those judgements are magnified in the music industry, where you’re trying to get your creative work out there but are being told you’d sell better if you wrote a certain way or were a bit more attractive. If she’d compromised she’d have a record deal by now, she’s told, why is she so difficult? This is a tale we’ve heard again and again in the music industry but it has to keep being said till something changes. We’ve heard it from the incredible Raye who wrote for other people for years because her own stuff didn’t fit in a specific box, or Cat Burns who writes about how difficult it is to know how to be the human everyone expects. Paloma Faith is an incredible inspiration and I watched a clip of her speaking to students at the university graduation. She has delved into music, fashion, writing, broadcasting and art and she passed on an incredible bit of advice – she has always been brimming with ideas and would worry that she couldn’t fix on one way to get these thoughts and ideas out there. She remembered a conversation with one of the tutors who said she didn’t have to fit all of her ideas into one mould. One idea might be a brilliant book, rather than trying to condense it into a song but another might be better suited to fashion or art. She didn’t have to fit into one mould. I think Rebecca is the embodiment of that idea, brim full of ideas and happy to range across music gigs, theatre shows, dance, tv appearances and memoir writing. The point is the creativity, not the medium.
I can think of so many women who can take something from this book and it will sit happily up on my shelf with writing from Caitlin Moran and Paloma Faith, hugely creative and intelligent women with a lot to say. It renewed something I’ve been wrestling with in my own head now I’m hitting menopause and middle age – it’s ok not to ‘grow up’ but take joy in every new incarnation of yourself and the changes it brings. It’s subversive in a world where we’re told we should be striving to stay young and relevant. to be unhappy getting older. I found so much inspiration in this memoir, both personal and creative, as well as a wonderful feeling of being seen.
The Lotus Readers 