Life with his sister Madonna

Dear friends,

I have just finished reading “Life with my sister Madonna” by Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone… I know, here we go, jumping from posts about upcoming stars, to war criminals, to divas. But it’s all a part of my world and I am sure that I am not the only one with mixed interests all coexisting in one head… Anyway, enough of me justifying something that doesn’t need justification. This is not my intention. What I want, is to comment the book a brother wrote about his sister and the interesting dynamics that lead a family to behave the way they do.

After an entire day spent reading the book from cover to cover I have come to several conclusions. First of all, there are many ways of analyzing this product, and even if it is extremely simple in its nature, being a book for easy reading and quite unpretentious, it is still multi faceted from a psychological point of view.

Lets start with the commercials and hype surrounding it. Christopher has given a couple of TV interviews and several websites have posted excerpts from the book. All these excerpts seemed negative and pretty critical towards Madonna’s choices in life, especially when it came to choices and judgment towards Christopher. I started wondering if the entire book was going to be a sort of psycho sniper aimed at the most famous sister in the world. I doubted it because no matter how lousy a person might be, you can hardly fill an over 340 page book with only negative bitchy comments and get away with it as being honest and interesting. In fact, the passages taken out of it were the juiciest when it comes to negatives but the book itself was pretty harmless when it came to the point being: fans want to find out as much as possible about every intimate part of Madonna’s life.

At first I thought, reading how many times Christopher was repeating how little Madonna was paying him for his decorating her homes or dressing her during her tours or even directing her tours, he needs the money and has finally decided to write this book out of two reasons: 1) getting back at his sister for making him feel like a servant and not supporting him financially the way he wanted her to and 2) he finally wanted to free himself from her control over him.

Point one is clear, but point two should be further clarified: From the book it is clear that Christopher always felt controlled by his sister in several ways: 1) she kept him at a distance, never too close as to keep her own freedom and power untouched, 2) she needed him to be with her most of the time because she could not trust almost anybody else and by having him close could monitor what he was doing, 3) She would use any flaw, he would have ,against him, by magnifying it to unproportional extents – like when she accuses him of being a drug addict even when the doctors prove her wrong. Even though this part of the story could be only Christopher’s way of seeing it. If he really were a drug addict, he still could have opted not to admit it openly and in the end it is his book, so he can write in it whatever he wants. It’s up to us to believe him or not. One of the bigger reasons she stopped working with him was supposedly her lack of trust towards him because she was and maybe still is convinced he is a drug addict. If she really believes this or if she is just using it as a cheap weapon against Christopher in order for her to have a fast and apparently solid excuse not to have him close any longer, stays open and is not cleared in the book.

In several parts of the book he clearly states that Madonna’s fame also got to his head and he admits that drugs became a reality too but he always denies he had a problem with them. To be honest, to me this is the first symptom of addiction. But if it is true that he got several doctors to prove he was clean, then I see no reason why he should be writing about him using coke in more than one occasion in the book and right after that having to explain to Madonna he is not addicted. He writes that whenever he would do something like taking drugs, he would have his sister on the phone the next day yelling at him. How did she get to know he was using drugs in the first place?! She knew because most of the time he would do drugs with friends they had in common, especially Ingrid Casares. Ingrid would call Madonna immediately to tell her her brother was on coke. Ingrid was on it as well, but this apparently doesn’t bother Madonna. Why should it? She just cares about her own family.

O.K. so the drug part of the book is a bit fuzzy but it is a passage he needed to go through in order to get to the essence and in the end, probably the justification as to why he really decided to write the book in the first place. He states that Madonna doesn’t believe the doctor’s diagnosis and pushes him to try another one and he ends up going to the shrink. And here we have it, he loves his doctor and feels she is helping him help himself and he starts the long process of psychic cleansing of the soul. He also decides to write this book because he thinks it really might help him and his sister understand each other more and in a healthier way.

I don’t know if I should believe all of it, but the innocent and naive way in which the book is written proved to me that he is a gentle person, fragile too and that this was a sort of childish attempt, if you wish, to get to his sister and make her really listen to him. I am not saying that he is screaming for attention, but I do believe that one of the reasons he wrote this book was because he also thought it was maybe the only way to get to Madonna. She lives in a strange world and does not respond to the logic of common people. If he would have written an over 340 page letter to her, maybe she wouldn’t have read it or taken it as seriously. But, as he decided to publish it, she felt a threat, and only then did she maybe take the whole thing seriously. I have seen the movie “Truth or dare” and understand why Christopher is upset with it. But hey, if Madonna can use all intimate family matters and publish them in a movie, including Christopher’s life, then that is the language she speaks and that is the language she understands, hence, Christopher’s book was written for her in her language, using her media.

In reality, the only thing that worried me was that Christopher wrote a lot of personal things about other famous stars. That was a bad thing to do. He should have kept to his own personal story. He actually wrote he did coke with Jack Nicholson and Donatella Versace and other stars. I would never write such things. I would respect their private lives. If he wants to open up to the world about his habits that is fine with me but he shouldn’t use other people to in some way justify those habits by showing that what he does is normal in that world and that almost everybody is doing it. If I were any one of those people he mentioned, I would be pissed with him.

And in the end we have a product that will probably finally give him the economical independence he always dreamed of. He will probably lose a lot of friends but psychoanalysis on the highest levels, where family members have to deal with the most famous sister/woman in the world can only lead to drastic decisions and behaviour. Maybe part of the therapy is to get economically independent from Madonna but I don’t know if it is a healthy and good idea to do so by writing a book about you and her. In this way she can always continue to point a finger at you and tell you that all you are worth, you are worth because of her. If she weren’t your sister, not many people would read this book. So some or many might see it as a wrong way to prove or declare your independence from her.

But from a purely outsider point of view, I would have wished to have read deeper thoughts and information about their relationship. It all seemed very superficial to me. I represent the voyeur reader, the mass of people that want to discover something new about a star. In this book’s case I felt like it never went deep enough. It is written in a classical way, like almost all biographies: chronologically. So by the time you get to the present day, the information gets poorer ad poorer and the author seems to get tired of details. The fact is that the last chapters of the book seem to be written quickly and without much love for detail. The entire story pops like a bubble of soap and there seems to be nothing inside it. And ending it saying something like: “my sister and I remain inseparable in spirit”, is a kind of “whatever” ending.

At first you think that the book was written to heal family wounds or personal wounds and it all comes through as a naive childish attempt but then you stop and realize that Christopher is way in his forties by now and a grown up man but the book seems to have been written by a teenager with a head of a little boy. Very immature and disappointing.

Love,

Ivan