Faithfull: An Autobiography.

Celebrity autobiographies are generally wearying. Few personalities with any stake in the future are willing to reveal themselves in a truly unflattering light, and most rely on ghost writers, which gives their memoirs a synthetic flavor, both collaborators becoming ventriloquist and dummy at the same time. Some exceptions can be found in the subgenre of the "comeback" memoir, in which notorious burnouts confess to regal numbers of sins and demand absolution. Robert Evans' The Kid Stays in the Picture is a squalidly entertaining recent example: Evans has no inner life, and therefore nothing to protect except his bank account. His ups and downs have the fascination of a mindless video game.

Faithfull is a different kettle of fish. Marianne Faithfull suffers from masochism rather than hubris, and her successes have been symbiotically tied to her failures: her troubles have fed directly into her voice, her musicianship deepening after every fall from grace. She became a pop singer because it was an easy thing for her to do at the time, and perhaps because it was easy she placed little value on it. She took up with Mick Jagger partly to ditch a career that didn't hold her attention. Then she became a junkie, and seems to have spent most of the '70s storing up the rage and abjection that exploded into Broken English. The success of that album put her back on the map, but did not pull her out of her personal hell.

Many albums and detoxes later, she has, by her account, struck a less punishing deal with life. This is good news for her fans, and for her. Faithfull is not. It is mildly interesting to learn that Faithfull was really in love with Keith Richards instead of Mick Jagger, and that Jagger was also in love with Keith Richards, whom he fantasized about blowing while making love with Faithfull. But these are "revelations" of a puerile, fanzine kind of naughtiness. Full of promising raw material, and of hints that its putative author is far more intelligent and reflective than these outpourings of dated slops would indicate, Faithfull remains anecdotally anemic, awkwardly written, and shallow and pointless by turns.

Faithfull herself half emerges as a rather endearingly self-absorbed, distracted type, not at all mean-spirited, a person acting on random impulses of a decidedly' unopportunistic kind. The product of seriously eccentric parents who separated early on, she seems to have been genetically torn between Catholic convent girl and raging libertine, a duality that led her to rebel against convention and then punish herself for it disproportionately. The book spends a lot of time assuring us that Faithfull, Jagger, Richards, and the rest were privately very different from their public images, though Faithfull also claims, intriguingly, that the pop royalty of the '60s became the various personae they embodied, making up their identities from bits of fiction. She doesn't much develop this idea, however. At best she provides snippets, little flashes of half-forgotten evenings, trips to Morocco so compressed that their emotional meaning is impossible to determine. She recounts numerous acid trips in detail but her scanning of the day-to-day is impatient. This is less important in her account of the '60s, when a lot of things were happening all the time, than in the decades when Faithfull's life was often the nightmarish routine of the junkie. We would like to know a lot more about how she survived day to day, how she smelled when she was living on the street, the person she was in a heroin fog.

An absence of detail muddles the book. Faithfull tells us that Anita Pallenberg was an extraordinary figure in the '60s, and because some of us remember Pallenberg's screen career we know this is true. But a book of this type should try to convey its characters' personalities without relying on their public image. Pallenberg spoke a curiously witty garbled English; Faithfull mentions this but doesn't provide any of it. Dialogue, in fact, is her weakest resource--hardly any of her sardonic, ultrahip Stones, Beatles, and Dylans says anything worth repeating. Nothing they do has much interest either: Brian Jones playing his tapes for zoo monkeys, Allen Ginsburg planting himself in John Lennon's lap, etc.--the stories just aren't well-written enough. And in cataloguing who Faithfull slept with and who she could have but didn't, the book wastes an appalling number of opportunities: since most of her sexual encounters were in the nature of non sequiturs, her partners drift into the ozone.

Sometimes things liven up--when Faithfull describes how a piece of music strayed into her ken, or how she recorded a song. Perhaps she could have organized the book by citing her recordings and spinning out her associations with them. Instead, we get spotty impressions of this and that. When even significant figures in Faithfull's life are rendered in fuzzy focus, a subtext emerges in which nobody is especially important and everyone is, in some unacknowledged sense, oppressive. Certainly a major thread is the relationship to Jagger, whom Faithfull obviously loathes but can't bring herself to repudiate. The ambivalence creates such a contradictory picture that Jagger never really emerges as a person: she adds some flesh and then scrapes it off, as if she still can't decide what he's really like.

Faithfull lays out her years of heroin addiction, but the horror is manicured. It's not that she tries to make herself look better than she was: she obviously can't remember, or finds some things too painful to bring into focus. Even so, there are telling moments. Immediately after Faithfull tells a lover that she's leaving him, he jumps out a window to his death. While she feels a responsibility, her main thought is that suicide is terribly cruel to the survivors. (True, perhaps, but the thought might have kept until after the funeral.) I doubt she's really so self-absorbed that you have to kill yourself to catch her attention, but you wouldn't know it from Faithfull. The baleful influence of ghost writer David Dalton can be assumed: the book seems mangled to fit the tell-all formula Dalton has followed for years. Faithfull deserves a deeper and more reflective summing-up. For that, the reader should turn to her music.

Gary Indiana's story anthology Living with the Animals will be published next month by Faber & Faber, Winchester, Mass.