Sinead O’Connor mi ha ispirato a lasciare il mio matrimonio violento

Sonya Huber remembers it well. “It was MTV’s *120 Minutes*, and her *Mandinka* video,” she says, recalling the first time she saw or heard Sinéad O’Connor. “Her sound and her look: the whole thing was just so riveting. Like all great artists, it felt like Sinéad had always been there, part of our lives.”

Martha Bayne, her co-editor on a new book about the Irish musician and her influence, nods in agreement. “I think the thing I connected to right away was her absolutely fierce energy and confidence. That was just not something, within the realm of music in the US, that I think we got very many images for at all — especially outside smaller punk communities. The image of her, and her sound, felt very new. It was very obvious that she had a strong vision for who she was, and what she wanted her music and art to be. And for a young woman to see that, it was very impressive.”

Huber and Bayne are both American writers and dedicated O’Connor fans, and their book is an anthology celebrating her enduring legacy. *Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means to Us* is a compilation of 25 essays in which writers take a song from her catalogue as a starting point. Contributors include the musician Neko Case, who provides the foreword, as well as the novelist and memoirist Lidia Yuknavitch and the journalist Allyson McCabe.

Huber had the idea for the book in the wake of O’Connor’s death in July 2023, which triggered a wave of mourning among fans. “I think so many of us were overwhelmed at the degree to which we were upset,” she says. “It went beyond the many other losses of musicians. And I think for many of us it also really intersected with the political situation in the US at the time, and the idea that so much of our politics felt like an attempt to turn back the clock. I remember driving to the airport and rocking out to *The Last Day of Our Acquaintance* and other songs, and my first instinct was that I wanted to hear other people’s stories of their relationships to her via a particular song.”