Anyone familiar with Lily Allen’s songs will know all about her capacity for bluntness. In 2009’s “Not Fair” she grumbled about rubbish sex and being left lying in the wet patch, while in “As Long As I Got You”, an ode to new love, she sang: “Staying in with you is better than sticking things up my nose.” So it’s not surprising to find that her first memoir has a tendency towards oversharing. In recalling her childhood, her rise to fame and her travails as a pop star, daughter, wife and mother, no detail is deemed too personal.
In the introduction, Allen, 33, says she’s too young to write her entire life story; instead she’s interested in “the things in my life that changed events, upended things, upset the cart”. Her father, the actor Keith Allen, is the first to turn things upside down, leaving his wife and children when his daughter was four. On the rare weekends that he saw his children, he would plonk them in a room at the Groucho Club while he got smashed in the bar downstairs. “I’ve learned over the years that everything is about him, so fine, that’s the deal,” Allen says. “I’ve stopped trying to fight or bustle about trying to find a spare slot in his universe.”
Her mother, the film producer Alison Owen, began a relationship with Harry Enfield, which brought a period of stability. But Owen went on frequent work trips abroad, where she partied and took drugs. Soon she was doing the same at home. After five years Enfield ran out of patience, and Owen and her children moved out. The result was to create longstanding abandonment issues in Allen, along with what she calls a “raging co-dependency” – a desire to be loved and looked after, whatever the cost.
If she is tough on the failings of those close to her, she is brutal when it comes to herself. She attends nine schools – some state, some private – eventually leaving at 15 with no qualifications. She drinks, takes drugs and has lots of sex, sometimes with men she likes but often with those she doesn’t. When she isn’t the life and soul of the party, she has tantrums and meltdowns and, at one stage, a breakdown. She endures untold trauma, from the stillbirth of her son George, to an attempted rape by a man she calls “Record Industry Executive”, to a stalker breaking into her home in the middle of the night. There are intermittent moments of joy, but more often there is sadness, shame, self-loathing and fury, all of which makes for compelling but discomfiting reading.
The book serves as a cautionary tale for young women thrust into the limelight before they have fully understood who they are. You would struggle to find a more lucid and heartfelt account of how constant press attention – which, in Allen’s case, involved waking up to find 30 photographers watching the front door – can warp one’s sense of reality. She talks about the disconnect between her loudmouth public persona, whom she calls “Cartoon Lily”, and the quieter, insecure person at home, and how, when you read enough about your car crash life, it becomes self-fulfilling. She reveals the shock of old lovers selling their stories, the creeping paranoia that comes with anonymous sources leaking details of your private life, and the daily abuse from online trolls. It’s with palpable rage that she recalls her bulimia that was, she says, “a direct result of having my body constantly scrutinised. I’d sit in restaurants and as soon as I had finished eating, I’d be, like, ‘Fuck, how soon can I get to the loo?’”
Elsewhere, Allen insists that her background as the daughter of well-known, comfortably off working-class parents makes her neither posh nor privileged. It’s the only moment in the book when her characteristic self-awareness deserts her. “Sure, I had media connections through my parents and an entrée into the Groucho fucking Club, but I managed to get a career in spite of that and my education – not because of them,” she says, misunderstanding how privilege works.
This isn’t to say that Allen hasn’t worked hard, or that her achievements haven’t sprung from a rare talent. In her songs, she funnels dark themes into bracingly acerbic couplets and sets them against a jaunty soundtrack. In this visceral and affecting memoir, she seizes the opportunity to fill in the gaps and create a three-dimensional self-portrait that is far removed from Cartoon Lily. “Telling stories is important, especially if you are a woman,” she says. “When women share their stories, loudly and clearly and honestly, things begin to change – for the better. This is my story.”
• My Thoughts Exactly is published by Blink. To order a copy for £17.20 (RRP £20) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
