With her soaring voice, stunning songwriting and decades-spanning career, Sinéad O’Connor loomed larger than life. At 21, after the release of her first album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” the slight Irish singer, sporting a shaved head and frequently clad in black, was already a star. Four years later, her sophomore release, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” catapulted her to global success.
Under the powerful lens of fame, O’Connor often appeared a controversial figure. A new book sheds light on her life beyond the headlines, through a consideration of O’Connor’s impact on her fans. “Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means To Us,” out this week and featuring several Chicago contributors, offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of the artist just two years after her untimely death. Each of the 25 essays, all by women writers, is inspired by one of O’Connor’s songs, whether a chart-busting hit or obscure deep cut.
The book, co-edited by Waukegan writer Martha Bayne and Connecticut-based author and professor Sonya Huber, has also ushered in a series of events, including one on Monday at the GMan Tavern featuring live readings and music performances.
In considering their various connections to O’Connor, the writers don’t shy away from the complexity of her life. O’Connor refused to perform at a concert where the American national anthem was to be played. While performing on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992, she famously tore up a photograph of then-Pope John Paul II and called out the Catholic Church for the abuse of children.
That event led many to vilify the singer and her music. At a live tribute to one of her musical idols, Bob Dylan, some crowd members booed her appearance. O’Connor responded by waiting quietly and then bursting into a spontaneous and stark a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “War.”
Connecting O’Connor’s struggles to their own, the book’s essayists offer a more nuanced view. Many came of age alongside O’Connor — “us feral women of the nineties,” writes one contributor, the Chicago author Megan Stielstra — singing or shouting her hit songs, finding inspiration in her activism, her spiritual journey and her openness about the lingering trauma from her abuse at the hands of her mother and others.
Irish writer Sinéad Gleeson, in an essay that considers O’Connor’s defiance in the context of a larger social upheaval in 1980s and ’90s Ireland, especially around reproductive rights and the role of women, writes that the singer was “determined to say the unsayable, and in a country so adept at silences, she was a beacon. She was us, and we were her.”
Bayne said the impetus for the book is the enduring power of that connection, across time and different experiences. Upon hearing of O’Connor’s death, many fans burrowed into her music for solace, including the book’s co-editor Sonya Huber, who found herself playing O’Connor’s iconic breakup anthem “The Last Day of our Acquaintance” over and over.
Huber writes, “I wanted this song, and I needed other writers to choose theirs.” Posting a call on social media resulted in an avalanche of responses, which Huber and Bayne pared down while also reaching out to their own network of writers for essays.
Returning to O’Connor’s canon of songs while revisiting formative moments in their own lives sometimes brings joy and sometimes is tinged with pain and regret. The essayists write about their own divorces and abortions, their struggles to find love or accept the death of a parent, their falling away from family and friends or moving on from the idealism of their youth.
Listening to “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Stielstra writes, “Try not to time travel, back to your years-ago aching self, or maybe the ache is right now.”
In her essay, Zoe Zolbrod recalls how “Jackie,” a song O’Connor first wrote as a teenager, became an anthem for her own rebellious college years. “The opening bars plucked my spinal cord every time I heard them,” she writes, a visceral reaction not just to O’Connor’s voice or lyrics but to the recognition brought by both. “They — the social mainstream — were all wrong.”
Bayne, too, was in college when “The Lion and the Cobra” came out, and she looked to O’Connor as a contemporary. Still, like many other writers, she didn’t have the full picture. “I didn’t know anything about her seizing control of the production of that record away from the original producer,” Bayne says. “It cast her whole career in this new light, as someone who was really working from this place of artistic independence.”
The flip side of the intimacy many of the writers still feel with O’Connor is a palpable sense of grief or even guilt, that they too misunderstood or just drifted away from her. Iranian American novelist Porochista Khakpour, in a series of letters to the singer (O’Connor was a prolific letter writer, a medium she often used to offer public explanations of her actions) reflects on “I Want Your (Hands on Me)” and on calling out O’Connor on social media, calling herself “a nobody who was briefly on the adversary’s team.”
Dutch American author Mieke Eerkens considers O’Connor’s complicated relationship with her mother, channeled into the singer’s interpretations of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” She recalls her momentary dismissal of O’Connor as a sellout with regret: “I wish I could spool back time like a movie reel, to remove this tiny cut from the film of a person who felt misunderstood her whole life.”
Bayne hopes the book will offer a corrective and a sort of healing, a view of O’Connor as more than “just a punchline.”
“She was a funny, committed, deeply eccentric person in her own ways,” Bayne says. “She was a visionary artist, a spiritual seeker. She wasn’t just a pop star. She was a protest singer.”