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And I Don’t Want to Live This Life, Deborah Spungen
Growing up, my mom never let me listen to the Sex Pistols. When I first got into punk, she would tell me it was because the band was ‘yucky’ or that the bassist was a murderer. I can’t remember exactly when she finally came clean about her intense Sex Pistols hatred, but it was much later and coincided with her giving me this book.
In my mom’s early teen years, she dated Nancy Spungen’s brother David. They went to the same Jewish summer camp; he even went to her Bat Mitzvah. She never met Nancy and broke up with David well before Nancy was thrown into the limelight and eventually died, but my mom always remained close with the family. Her hatred of Sid Vicious’ band, I found out even later, was much less to do with the tragic death of Nancy but more about the fallout surrounding the tragedy. My mom never hid her distaste for the worship of that couple. She would always bring it back to the Spungen family and how the media attention after Nancy’s death almost ruined them.
I’ll admit, it was years after being handed And I Don’t Want to Live This Life, that I actually read it. Before I read it, I kind of shrugged off my mom’s intense emotions on the subject as yet another way for her to try and get the punk outta me. As my interest in punk faded, I forgot about this book on my bookshelf and picked it up one evening out of boredom. I read it in two days, completely unable to put it down. Deborah Spungen wrote this book just five short years after Nancy was found stabbed in a hotel room. It’s intensely emotional and raw. This book is 20 years of pent up anger, frustration, and sadness.
Nancy’s life was never easy. Growing up in the 60s and 70s, there were only very rudimentary understandings of mental health and she suffered heavily because of it. Reading it from a modern perspective is heartbreaking because you can see, very plainly, that medication and therapy would’ve at least partially prevented Nancy from leading such a short and painful life. Mental health has come a long way since the year she died, 1978, and the year this book came out, 1983, but there are still a ton of people like Nancy unable to get the help they need. We might have a thicker DSM5 than those years, but access to life saving mental health treatments are still hard to come by.
Even if you’re like me and not a fan of Sid Vicious or the Sex Pistols, And I Don’t Want to Live This Life is the heartbreaking background to one of pop culture’s most notorious toxic couples and absolutely well worth the read if you can find it in print somewhere.