After recently watching the Sex Pistols documentary, The Filth and the Fury, I was reminded of this book, “And I Don’t Want to Live This Life”. So I dug it out of my closet and gave it another look. I’ve had this book since the mid-eighties, around the same time the movie Sid and Nancy came out. After watching the movie I was left wondering what had caused the doomed pair to lead such self-destructive lives. I bought the book hoping it would fill in the blanks. It didn’t disappoint me.

A bit about the book

And I Don’t Want to Live This Life was written by Deborah Spungen, Nancy’s mother. It is an often heartbreaking story of a family’s struggle to deal with mental illness and the aftermath of a murder that made them front-page news. Deborah is open about Nancy’s troubled life, and the consequences the rest of her family suffered as a result of it. Her writing may not be the most polished, but she was obviously speaking from the heart. Her style is informal, kind of like a friend or acquaintance telling you their story. I’ve read this book several times, and there are still parts of it that bring me to tears. It’s fairly long, at 432 pages, but an easy and engrossing read. There are also a few pages of black and white photos in the middle of the book, showing various family members through the years.

Umm, who are Sid and Nancy?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this story, Nancy Spungen was the girlfriend of Sid Vicious, bassist for the seminal punk band the Sex Pistols. The Sex Pistols were hyped to be outrageous, and often made headlines. So the tumultuous relationship between Sid and Nancy was soon fodder for the tabloids. Nancy was made out to be a spoiled, self-centered groupie, rebelling against her middle class upbringing with drugs and wild behavior. Sid was portrayed as an untalented pawn – while not much of a musician, he had the right look and attitude to fit into the Sex Pistols. Together, they became punk personified – angry, unhappy junkies in black leather whose domestic tiffs often escalated into bloody battles. And the press caught it all, reporting about them as if rubbernecking at the scene of an accident.

Deborah Spungen wrote this book for a couple of reasons, and one was to explain her daughter’s life. After Nancy died, it seemed to be a widespread assumption that she was just a thrill-seeking wild child who liked to live dangerously. The child that her mother writes about is a different one, a mentally disturbed girl who was unable to find peace or happiness in life.

A (somewhat) brief look at the story

Nancy seemed to be in pain all of her life. Her 1958 birth was traumatic, leaving her young parents fearing for the survival of their first-born. As an infant, she screamed constantly, never sleeping for more than an hour at a time. Her mother, concerned that something was wrong, sought the advice of her pediatrician repeatedly. His response was to prescribe Phenobarbital when Nancy was three months old. This would be the first in a lifelong series of attempts to solve her problems with drugs, both by doctors and by Nancy herself.

She grew into an angry and aggressive toddler, having several violent tantrums a day where she would hit herself in the face repeatedly and scream until she was hyperventilating. When she was two years old, she threatened to destroy every item of clothing in her mother’s closet if she wouldn’t come outside with her immediately. She literally named every item, listing the contents of the closet three times from memory. Her behavior continued to grow more violent, until her parents took her for a psychiatric evaluation. The results were that she was a normal, frustrated kid and would outgrow it. She didn’t, and things only got worse.

Nancy did very well in school, being placed in a gifted first grade class and skipping the third grade all together. But she was unable to maintain friendships, and would often cry to her mother that everyone hated her. Her behavior at home continued to spiral out of control. She was desperately unhappy, the slightest things causing her anguish. It wasn’t just normal childhood angst, it seemed that simply being alive caused her great discomfort. She acted out violently, making it impossible for the rest of her family to function normally. Discipline had no effect on her and she was relentless when she didn’t get what she wanted. The household was beginning to revolve around her rampages, and her younger siblings couldn’t understand why there was a different set of rules for Nancy. Her parents took her for another psychiatric evaluation, only to be told that they were the problem, not Nancy.

Even after hearing that eleven-year-old Nancy stood on the garage roof screaming “I wanna die!” then climbed back in through the window and chased her babysitter around the house with scissors, threatening to kill her, her doctor refused to acknowledge that she was troubled. Only after Nancy attacked the doctor herself would she order another evaluation, to be done by the director of the clinic. The results of this one were quite different. The opinion of the director was that Nancy was schizophrenic, and needed further neurological testing. However, when he met with the Spungens to discuss his findings, he never mentioned the diagnosis, or the need for any testing. Instead, he told them that Nancy couldn’t be helped by the clinic, and that they would have to find another place for her. (Frank and Deborah Spungen learned of the schizophrenic diagnosis only after Nancy’s death.)

This became a pattern in Nancy’s life. Her parents, believing since she was a toddler that she was seriously disturbed, would seek help for her, only to be disappointed. They were told repeatedly that Nancy was normal. If it was acknowledged that she was disturbed, drugs were often prescribed, masking her problems instead of solving them. Once the drugs wore off, the problems would resurface. Because she was often misdiagnosed as basically just an angry kid, therapy proved ineffective. And when these methods failed, as they inevitably did, they were simply told, “We can’t help you.” Being turned away time and again took is toll, not only on Nancy, but also on the rest of the family. Her behavior put severe stress on the Spungen household; as she would verbally, and sometimes physically, attack her parents and siblings, leaving them with strained relationships and problems of their own to overcome.

When she was thirteen, Nancy was sexually active and using drugs. By the age of sixteen, she had made several suicide attempts. At seventeen, Nancy was a heroin addict. Her parents watched helplessly as their daughter destroyed herself. She had voiced her desire to die many times, and her parents had always fought for her life. But they knew they were losing the battle.

Nancy moved to London when she was nineteen. Within a week of her arrival, she met Sid Vicious and the two were soon living together. After the Sex Pistols failed U.S. tour and subsequent breakup, Nancy became Sid’s manager and they moved back to the States to work on promoting him as a solo act. His career, however, didn’t take off and they were soon broke. Both were using heroin, and their relationship became increasingly violent. On October 12, 1978, Nancy was found dead in their room at the Chelsea Hotel. She had been stabbed in the abdomen with a seven- inch hunting knife that she purchased two days earlier. When Sid returned to the room shortly after the police arrived, he confessed to having killed her.

The Aftermath

After Nancy’s death, the Spungens hoped to mourn quietly and also to rebuild their shattered family. This wasn’t to be the case. The press began to hound them, desperate for a story. They camped out on their front lawn while the family sat inside, grieving. They called until the phone number was changed to an unlisted one. When told “No comment”, they would simply make something up. Nancy became a punch line for late night TV shows. The fact that this was someone’s child, that she had relatives and friends that loved her and were deeply saddened by her death, seemed to be forgotten. There seemed to be little sympathy for this family. Even the assistant medical examiner, while typing up the information for Nancy’s death certificate, seemed shocked by how much information her mother was able to provide and asked “How do you know all that about that piece of sh*t?” And when Frank and Deborah were called into the office of the assistant district attorney that would be prosecuting Sid, he treated them as if they were the accused, and threatened them with a subpoena if they refused to attend the trial, something Deborah didn’t want to do.

This, as it turned out, was one thing they wouldn’t have to worry about. Sid died of a heroin overdose on February 3, 1979, before the trial began. Since their deaths, several theories have emerged as to what really happened the night Nancy was killed. Deborah shares her own, based on her knowledge of Nancy and on letters that Sid sent to her after Nancy’s death. The title of this book is taken from a poem Sid wrote for Nancy and sent to her mother.

A new beginning

As the Spungens began the healing process, Deborah decided to help others, to spare them the ordeal her family had gone through. She and Frank started a chapter of Parents of Murdered Children in their home city of Philadelphia. She became an advocate for victim’s rights, and for the rights of the families of murder victims, with the hope that the system would improve in its treatment of cases like hers. And she wrote this book, not only to shed some light on Nancy’s misunderstood life, but also to let other people in her situation know that they are not alone. Hopefully, by sharing her story, someone else’s troubled child will have a chance of receiving the treatment she (or he) needs.

My conclusion

As I mentioned at the beginning, I’ve read And I Don’t Want to Live This Life several times. I think it’s an amazing story, the kind that stays with you long after you’ve finished reading it. I also admire Deborah Spungen for telling it so honestly. After being burned by the media repeatedly, it must have been a pretty scary undertaking. While the book is now almost 20 years old (I think it was written in 1983), it’s definitely worth picking up if you come across it.

Thanks for reading :)

*When I looked at the Epinions listing for this book, I saw that the release date listed was 1996. I’m guessing that is just a later edition*












Recommended: Yes