Here's a thought worth considering. Maybe Sinéad O'Connor isn't difficult. Maybe it's the world.
At the time of her parents divorce, her father was only the second man in Ireland to be granted custody of his children.
After the divorce, Sinéad's mother becamephysically abusive. Beatings were frequent and unannounced. She and her sister were locked up in cupboards, naked, for days at a time. They were struck with whatever was on hand—hockey sticks, carpet sweepers, a tennis racket.
“Thank f--k I had a sense of Jesus,” Sinéad once told an interviewer. “When I was lying on the floor having the s--t kicked out of me, I'd envision Jesus on the top of some hill on the cross, and the blood would run from Jesus's heart down into mine on the floor and that's how I got through being beaten. I'd concentrate on that image.”
Take her recording career. Her first record company loved her music, but they thought they knew better about her image.
“They took me out to lunch," she once said, "[and they told me] they’d like me to start wearing short skirts and boots, grow my hair long and do the whole girl thing. What they were describing was actually their mistresses. I pointed that out, and they didn’t take it terribly well.
“So I went to this barber—only a young fella—and he didn’t want to do it. He was almost crying. But when he was finished shaving my head, I was delighted with it.”