MY LIFE, by Edith Piaf (Penguin, $90). WHEN Edith Piaf died in 1963 at the age of 49, her farewell was an outburst of weeping from the gathering of 100,000 Parisians who had turned out to mourn her passing.
It is easy to see why everyone loved Piaf so passionately. Reading My Life is like reading a letter from an exuberant friend who writes as she speaks, thinks and feels.
A thousand exclamation marks litter the text, her effervescence spills over on to the paper and she communicates with an eerie immediacy. Yet she has been dead for 30 years.
Left in the original until this translation into English by Margaret Crosland, who also wrote the singer's biography, My Life was written by Piaf on her deathbed from cancer, cirrhosis of the liver and all the by-products of bad living that had seen her in and out of detoxification units and morphine clinics throughout her later life.
It is less of an autobiography than a sentimental journey through non-chronological territory; Edward Behr's preface supplies a badly-needed context to the historically parched no-man's land of Piaf's reminiscences. But her disdain for fact and circumstance is understandable in the light of her success in surmounting them.
Born and brought up in a Paris brothel, having been abandoned at four months by her mother (who, after an overdose of morphine, was packaged by a neighbour and put out for collection by the bin men), and dependent on the immoral earnings and kind hearts of prostitutes for her survival, Piaf's achievement is a slap in the face for nurture-over-nature theorists.