Family matters

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This article was published 02/04/2022 (1450 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The talented Montreal singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright is correct when she observes that the world is more interested in her better-known family members than it is in her.

But the 45-year-old daughter of the folk singers Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, and younger sister of pop singer and opera composer Rufus Wainwright, still complains in her dishy new memoir about the low branch she occupies on the family’s tree of fame.

Wainwright, a dynamic performer with seven albums notched on her well-trafficked bed post, enjoyed a burst of notoriety in 2005 with her profanely titled song Bloody Mother F—ing A–hole, supposedly about her dad. Even then, however, journalists had ulterior motives to interview her.

“It sometimes annoyed me every article was centred on my family, but it was also understandable, and I was used to it by now,” she writes in this aptly titled effort, Stories I Might Regret Telling You.

“I had eked my way into the spotlight, sort of like I had eked my way into the world.”

Indeed, Wainwright opens by saying her folks only “grew” to love her after her mother backed out of the abortion her father encouraged her to have. This fact, which her father unwisely gave her as a teenager, seems to have filled her with a “bottomless insecurity.”

Based on the evidence she supplies, she has spent her adulthood as an emotional mess. She has managed to have both daddy and mommy issues, man issues, drug and alcohol addiction issues, body image issues and ex-husband issues.

“I was hard to be proud of,” she says, “because I was prone to failures and missteps and self-sabotage.”

Despite being a child of divorce, Wainwright was raised in a surprisingly warm and normal extended family in Montreal, among her maternal aunts Anna (the older half of the McGarrigle Sisters duo) and Jane, her maternal grandmother, and assorted cousins.

Kate wasn’t perfect. How many mothers are? She once told Martha she was “mediocre.” But she was there for both her kids.

In summer, Wainwright was shipped off to New York State and her emotionally distant father, “essentially like living in enemy territory.”

That said, she enjoyed Loudon’s accomplished upper-class WASP family, as well as her stepmother, the folk-trio member Suzzy Roche, whom Kate hated as a home-wrecker.

The book flirts with tedium when Wainwright recounts her various problems with boyfriends, career, pregnancy and her ex-husband, who started as her bass player.

But showbiz buffs will enjoy her name-dropping of all the famous people she has had access to. All readers will recognize her insight into family dynamics.

She recounts at length the details of Kate’s cancer diagnosis in 2005 and of her sad decline and eventual death at age 63 in 2011.

Wainwright says her mother had a harder time with Rufus coming out as gay in his early teens than her dad did.

She also denies that BMFA is about Loudon. She claims the song is about entitled men in general, those who have doors opened for them while she gets “the short end of the stick.”

She maintains a sisterly but competitive relationship with Rufus (who will be performing in Winnipeg April 15), saying she is “his biggest fan.”

For all her candour, she says little about her brother’s relationship with his child’s mother, Leonard Cohen’s daughter, Lorca.

Once good friends, Wainwright and Cohen no longer speak: “Cross her and there is no coming back from it.”

Wainwright, meanwhile, seems to bounce back from anything.

Morley Walker is a retired Free Press journalist.

Martha Wainwright launches her Stories I Might Regret Telling You virtually on Monday, April 11 at 7 p.m. in conjunction with McNally Robinson Booksellers. To register and for more information, see wfp.to/wainwright.