I was 13 when I read Faithfull: An Autobiography and it shook me to my teenage core in such a chilling manner that I’ve been hesitant to pick it up since. Over a decade on, part of me feels I was too young to have read it, but a more prominent part of me feels I picked it up at the perfect time to make me the person I am now—as both a commenter on pop culture and as a woman in a world that does not take women seriously. At the time, I had taken the book out of the library looking to learn more about the mammoth history of the Rolling Stones, to hear more swashbuckling tales of Mick and Keith’s escapades. At the very least, I knew that they were present when their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, discovered Faithfull (then a convent school pupil and the daughter of a military man and a baroness, soon to be wed to artist John Dunbar and become pregnant with her son, Nicholas) at a party, asking if she was interested in becoming a singer. Instead, I found where all the shame of the infamous 1967 Redlands drug bust had landed while the Stones had been lauded as outlaw heroes, learned about the public furor which arose around a suicide attempt, experienced secondhand the years of addiction while living on a wall in London’s Soho.
It’s a question of who gets to emerge from tabloid scandal without rumors swirling and being deemed unclean. It’s part of a “sexual revolution” that still required women to strip down in order to be bankable—it’s art now, don’t worry. It’s the notion of being remembered as a “muse” rather than an artist, as the pages men press you into are deemed more important than the pages you penned for yourself. Of course, it’s not shocking that Mick Jagger has been mentioned in the first paragraph of every obituary I’ve seen for Marianne Faithfull. That’s how the history we’ve been taught works. The same thing happened when Faithfull’s dear friend Anita Pallenberg—the person who arguably made the band both were associated with what they were, with no exaggeration—died several years ago.
But it’s that word “muse” in the headlines that’s made my skin crawl most in the wake of Faithfull’s death. It communicates that she is only important because a famous man fell in love with her for a short while decades ago. In our current cultural moment, where so much must be consumed in a soundbite or a thirty-second clip in order to be considered worthy our time, I am faced with the daunting task of fully explaining the harrowing and heroic life of Marianne Faithfull, cheater of a thousand deaths and music history’s true avenging angel. I’m terrified of compressing all her glory into something pithy that people will be more compelled to click on. She deserves better than that.