“I don’t know why I believe in miracles”
HER LIFE followed the trajectory of the Sixties, from wide-eyed innocence to dead-eyed decadence, but somehow Marianne Faithfull came through it all.
Now this one-time Sixties golden girl, who managed to turn her life around after more than a decade of drug addiction is living with anew challenge – long covid. Marianne went down with the disease in March last year, and was so ill at one point that her doctors recommended palliative care only.
“One of my doctors didn’t think my lungs would ever recover,” she told the Guardian, “and where I finally ended up is OK. Maybe they won’t, but maybe, by a miracle, they will.
“I don’t know why I believe in miracles. I just do. Maybe I have to, the journey I’ve been on, the things that I’ve put myself through, that I’ve got through so far and I’m OK.”
It has certainly been quite a journey, and in her new book, Why Marianne Faithfull Matters, the academic and writer Tanya Pearson suggests that Marianne has “lived her life as a soldier at war with a revolving cast of enemies that at various times have included men, marriage, heroin and finally herself.”
Marianne was born on December 29, 1946 into an unconventional Hampstead family. Her father, Glynn, and gave his name to the term masochism. It was not the most conventional of upbringings either.
