To listen to Lily Allen’s new album West End Girl is to be drawn into the painful disintegration of a marriage. It feels like we are there, with Allen: on the call learning about her husband’s alleged infidelity, reading the texts on his phone, finding the physical evidence.
The critics love it. Fans are writing obsessive, breathless newsletters about it. One reviewer said that it may well have changed the chemistry in their brain.
I was alone in my office when I first pressed play, expecting a couple of catchy but ultimately forgettable pop songs. After listening to the album from start to finish – twice – I ran downstairs and subjected my own husband to a track-by-track breakdown. I recounted every twist in the tale like I was reading out a celebrity gossip page.
Unlike her contemporaries, Allen hadn’t succumbed to coy sexual metaphors about “knocking on wood”. This was raw, in-your-face, storytelling about imagining another woman naked on top of your spouse. It felt like Allen had created a theatrical moment. I wasn’t wrong – it turns out she’s touring the entire album in theatres next year.
Read more: Seven albums to listen to during a breakup – from Lily Allen to Marvin Gaye
I couldn’t stop thinking about the record. Allen’s voice was inside my head, repeating the words of her ex. “If it has to happen baby, do you want to know?” is a particular earworm. This emotional connection came from the album’s intimacy and the sense of catharsis – here was a woman openly exorcising her failed marriage.
Indeed, Allen has noted how making the record was a way for her “to process what was happening” in her life. She also said that the album could be considered a “work of auto fiction” in which an alter ego named Lily Allen has gone through a devastating breakup.
Allen’s decision to agree to an interviewer’s description of West End Girl as a work of autofiction is revealing. The term is usually reserved for novels that draw heavily on the author’s experience while blurring the line between real and imagined. But its use here signals something bigger. Each song becomes a piece of fieldwork – the sound of someone analysing her own life in real time.
Turning life into data
That impulse – to turn our personal experience into artistic material that can be appreciated by others – is what fascinates me as an academic. My own research explores autoethnography, a contemporary method where the researcher turns the mirror on their own life.
Autoethnographers write about their own experiences as a way of understanding broader social and cultural issues. Like Allen’s confessional album, the aim isn’t self-indulgence, but insight.
Yet there’s often a cost to that kind of authenticity. When you use your own story as material, you may expose more than yourself. Writing – or singing – about your life inevitably involves others.
Autoethnographers call this relational ethics: the duty to protect third parties while still speaking truthfully. I thought about this when journalists clamoured to discover the real identity of “Madeline” – the other woman from Allen’s lyrics – or when people gleefully joked about how her ex-husband would have the most miserable upcoming press tour.
In autoethnography, there is no single code of conduct for navigating these tensions. There are plenty of proposals – seek consent where possible, disguise identities – but even the most careful guidelines can’t cover every circumstance. Ethical writing is situational and relies on careful judgment.
No list of rules can tell Allen, or any writer, how much truth is too much. The challenge is to balance artistic integrity with wellbeing – to ask, before sharing, who might be affected by this story, and how?
Then there’s the writer themselves. When we release our story to the world, it remains out there. The tale becomes fixed in time – a version of ourselves we can’t evolve or retract. Later, we may come to see events in a different light. We may regret exposing what we have revealed.
Art like West End Girl is powerful because it collapses the distance between the creator and audience, but that same intimacy – rehearsed again and again – can retraumatise the storyteller. The process of telling our truth may be cathartic at the time, but it can also open old wounds. Who knows whether Allen will still want to be recreating her fragility for our entertainment in years to come.
The lesson from both autoethnography and Allen’s album is to tell our stories responsibly. Sharing our narratives can be healing and politically powerful – it can give voice to experiences that tend to be ignored. But we need to take care. West End Girl reminds us that the line between art and real life is thin, and that the most compelling stories are often the riskiest to tell.
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Elaine Gregersen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
