AND I DON'T WANT TO LIVE THIS LIFE

by Deborah Spungen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1983

Parental nightmare--stark, relentless, mercilessly involving: the mother of Nancy Spungen, who was stabbed to death in 1979 by punk-rocker Sid Vicious, tells why that murder came as a relief/release as well as a shock and sorrow. Nancy, the first (unplanned) child of the very young Spungens of suburban Philadelphia, had a traumatic birth in 1958: oxygen deprivation, blood incompatability problems. Was there permanent physical/psychic damage? The Spungens would never know for sure--but certainly Nancy was, from the start, unlike other children: as a newborn she screamed all day and night, non-stop; doctors (lambasted by Spungen throughout) offered useless advice, prescribed phenobarbital as a sedative; by two Nancy was having venomous, wildly verbal tantrums and violent nightmares; by seven she ""ran our household""--impervious to punishment, dominating a younger sister and brother. But psychiatrists and social workers insisted that Nancy was basically normal, that family-related therapy would help. (A 1969 diagnosis of schizophrenia was, for unexplained reasons, kept secret from the parents.) And when Nancy got still worse--a psychotic episode, a hammer-attack on her mother--the Spungens had a grim choice: Thorazine (which ""did the job, if you call turning Nancy into a vegetable doing the job""); or placing Nancy in a special school--which was fine for about a year, then disastrous, with drugs, abortions (self-inflicted, unnecessary), and suicide-attempts commonplace by age 15. The Spungens next tried mental hospitals, winding up with a destructive, dangerous Nancy back at home: heroin, orgies, death threats, vandalism. So, to save their marriage and their other kids, they finally threw her out, in a nice way: subsidizing rock-music-mad Nancy's move to N.Y., where she worked as a go-go dancer (probably a prostitute too), was on and off heroin, got in with the punk-rock scene, went to London. . . and came home with the already-has-been, skinny, pathetic, sporadically violent Sid, who would soon be both murderer and suicide. (Spungen believes that Nancy, who had ""wanted to die for years,"" engineered her own death.) There are repetitious, overwritten sequences here. And, periodically, one feels that Spungen, bitterly attacking doctors, administrators, the press, is insufficiently self-critical. But, like the Sylvia Frumkin case-history in Susan Sheehan's Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, this harrowing memoir succeeds in conveying a tragedy that goes beyond blame or explanation--thanks to Spungen's grim humor (a mother/daughter day in N.Y., from gogo booking agency to Methadone clinic) and her evocation, right up to the end, of Nancy-the-helpless-little-girl as well as Nancy-the-monster.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Villard/Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION