Life with my Sister Madonna
Christopher Ciccone with Wendy Leigh
Simon & Schuster
* ½
Christopher Ciccone’s autobiography about his life with his sister – international superstar and reigning (and aging) queen of pop Madonna – suffers from a car crash syndrome. No, it’s not a badly put together mash of looks and themes. It’s surprisingly well written (probably largely to do with Wendy Leigh). Rather, the car crash factor comes from the fact that as you read it you can’t seem to look away, even though you know you should. Yes, this book is a ghoulish gamut of celebrity gossip and sibling driven jealousy.
It recounts – in sordid details – Ciccone’s life with that other Ciccone, the more famous Ciccone, the Ciccone who is so famous she doesn’t even have to use here surname, Ciccone, to be recognised. Her, Christopher Ciccone jabs and jibes his way through an autobiography which has a marked degree of fluidity to it and a scathing, almost vitriolic undertone which is acidic and relentless. It follows the Ciccones from childhood to their modern day estrangement with a heavy heaping of celebrity name dropping (and consequent drug taking) inbetween.
Ciccone comes across as a snide, horrible person. His attempts to illicit sympathy for his life long predicament (living in his sister’s larger than life shadow) are blatantly transparent and verge on the whiningly repetitive. Any marked instance of independence is fleeting before he returns to the same petulant tirade of being Madonna’s brother, and how hard it is to be Madonna’s brother, and how come no one can take him seriously because, after all, he is Madonna’s brother but as such deserves to be treated as such – as Madonna’s brother!! And if that argument seemed circular, well… it’s merely a reflection of Ciccone’s albeit far more economical, particularly since his weeps, moans and stamps its foot for 340 plus pages. And consistently so.
Then there’s always a certain trepidation one should have when reading a book which clearly states on the front cover that the ‘author’ has written the book ‘with’ the assistance of a clearly more aptly skilled writer, albeit one whose name appears in smaller print after the original authors. It’s that ‘with’ that makes one question whether the author actually had enough money to ensure the assisting writer appeared as a ghostwriter. Here? Clearly not. It’s the same ‘with’ that dogs the author bylines which dogs the title of this book. There really should be no ‘with’ for this book to gain the individual and distinct voice it so deserves.
Instead, Ciconne sells out (but clearly can’t do so to pay for credibility) to the point that the whole book actually casts him in a worse light than ever before. Madonna? Meh, she comes off as you’d expect – a complete bitch, particularly to her siblings, but also a bit of bimbo, albeit a loveable one. For her brother – well, there’s only so much acid you can spew before it eats away at you. Overall, if you pick this book up, expect an onslaught of celebrity gossip and name-dropping plus a persistent, unbearable whining sound. Oh wait, that’s Christopher Ciccone trying to prove his independence… by writing a book about his sister. Yeah, go figure.
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