Hi everyone <3
Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day! Coupled, throupled, or single, I’m glad we have one special day a year to celebrate romance. I’ve been going through a 1970s punk phase which inevitably brought me into the folds of the endless rabbit holes that surround the lives and deaths of one of the most iconographically important couples in culture, Sid Vicious & Nancy Spungen.
Last week, I read “And I Don’t Want To Live This Life,” by Nancy Spungen’s mother, Deborah Spungen. It is a devastating read from cover to cover. It made me deeply reflect on motherhood and daughterhood as well; a true American tragedy.
In short, Deborah’s memoir accounts that Nancy Spungen was possessed by an unimaginable, unpredictable violence and rage since childhood. The author talks about how isolating and unhelpful the psychiatric system had been in helping her daughter, who, due to her high IQ, was never treated with the seriousness she required. The stress of raising Nancy placed unbelievable strain on her personal life, marriage, and relationships with her other two children, Nancy’s younger siblings.
The book presents a very complicated portrait of a mother’s view of her own daughter, and hers is a very complicated situation. I was extremely touched by the book, and deeply sorry for Nancy and her mom’s unending nightmare. Coming from my perspective where punk (and worse) is the baseline that surrounds my life and moves it forward, I can only imagine how jarring Nancy’s desperate desire to be so close to the rock scene could have been. Throughout the book, Deborah Spungen is preoccupied with respectability and normalcy in the “straight” world, which I forget is a very common, normal desire for people and so completely in contrast to my own.
Nancy’s struggles are often met with her mother’s bewilderment, and her tragedies trigger her mother’s primal protective instincts. Interestingly, as I write this, I find myself wanting to underscore that Deborah still loved Nancy very much underneath it all, and that she was still a loving mother that tried her best, almost as if I want to defend her prove or believe that she really did love Nancy. I don’t think Deborah was able to really accept Nancy for who she was. But again, can you really ever accept that your own firstborn daughter was working so distinctly towards her own destruction since the day she was born?
While it does feel that Deborah is writing about Nancy with almost an objectifying kind of contempt, that Nancy was just this horror terrorizing her sweet, suburban psyche, I do believe that these contradictions and hypocrisies form the experience of motherhood. In the book, she reveals her affair against her husband, which feels like a public admission of guilt in hopes of relief through confession and possibly to far of a departure on the reader’s interest in Nancy, however, I simultaneously understand why her family’s strain would cause her to engage in infidelity and her desire to admit this. It is her book, after all, and perhaps the opportunity afford herself some relief by allowing her to give visibility to her narrative in the wild, celebrity gossip mag story of Nancy’s life.
There are two major question marks that shape Nancy Spungen’s life: her birth and her death. She had a cyanotic birth and was separated from her mother for the first four days of her life. It seems in the traumatic tableaus illustrated in the book suggest that Nancy never really felt loved, seen or understood, and had extreme, uncontrollable reactions to this. From what I know from my YouTube psychology “degree” on attachment styles, I can only imagine what that kind of separation did to Nancy’s capacity to feel & receive love in the most primal, vulnerable time of her life. Our emotional health can be damaged by experiences that even precede our memory.
Her mother suggests that Nancy goaded Sid into stabbing her as a proof of his love for her. Her life was unending pain and she wanted to die the entire time. I recently watched the 1986 Alex Cox movie about their lives, where the director suggests that her stabbing was an accident by Sid. It seems plausible, and also a careful way to avoid making any claims as to who killed Nancy.
According to Deborah, Nancy admitted Sid was physically abusive towards her. Some other sources claim that the comedian Rockets Redglare (lmao) confessed to the killing. I strangely can’t seem to sort out any suspicion on what I think may have happened. It must have been something weird.
Nancy Spungen, as a cultural figure, represents a deeply psychological and subconscious archetype in culture. The extreme desire to be accepted, loved, and understood, to have our emotional needs met, the desire for individuation, adventure and spontaneity, even at the price of our own destruction. She embodies the permanently wounded inner child, calcified by anger and the repugnant aesthetics of punk rock.
Motherhood seems to accompanied by a kind of psychosis. A delusion caused by the deep, unimaginable love for your child and the desire to protect them. The inability to see them as anything except the sweet infant they were born as. And also sometimes, the inability to see them as something as beyond a projection of your wishes, something Nancy vehemently resisted in all capacities.
I deeply sympathize with Nancy. I believe many women who embody alternative culture and its lifestyle understand the deep, sweet pain of not being understood, of feeling abrasive and chasing a destiny so different from the one pursued by the rest of our families, and feeling so isolated & different from them, convinced (and sometimes shown) that they are unable to accept us as we are.
I read the whole book in two days, after ordering an especially good-looking edition from a rare book collector on Ebay. I was gripped the whole time. It was an emotional beatdown.
Like every time I consume a piece of media about Nancy & Sid, I feel so hollow and empty. It’s kind of a feeling I’m fond of, something familiar, but I really had to sit and think and let myself absorb the trauma of what I had just read. I knew the story was devastating, but hearing it in her mother’s words was eye-opening, and worse.
It was an incredible & well-written read, and it’s difficult to imagine the horrors Deborah experienced during and after her death, the ways she was mistreated by the judicial system. The book still stays with me.
Until next time,
Dora