The year 2021 is shaping up to be a pretty solid one for fans of The Velvet Underground. In the next few months, we will see Velvet Goldmine director Todd Haynes’ long-awaited documentary The Velvet Underground hit streaming platforms as well as an indie-rock star-studded tribute to The Velvet Underground & Nico called I’ll Be Your Mirror featuring literally everyone you are thinking of right now that would participate in a project like this. This year is also giving us a brand new biography of the life of Christa Päffgen, better known as Nico.
You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico, out now in the UK and coming out August 10th from Hachette Books in the US and Canada, isn’t the first book on Nico. Far from it. But it’s the first book to tell the entire story of Nico, from birth to death, without condescension or sensationalization.
Writer Jennifer Otter Bickerdike presents her hypothesis early on- while male artists who struggle with addiction and mental health issues are often deified, female artists who deal with similar issues are often mocked and disrespected by the public and press. It’s impressive that, over the course of 512 pages and 49 years of life, the book never veers from that hypothesis.
The book begins in Germany in 1938, presenting the most detailed account of life under Hitler for your average family, as well as what it was like to raise a family as a single parent after the war. The writer doesn’t shy away from the fact that Päffgen’s father fought on the side of the Nazis but also sympathizes with the kind of poverty and desperation felt by the survivors during this tumultuous time in Germany. This pain early on helped forge the “Nico” identity.
The book explores Nico’s time as a teenage model, becoming the “it” girl at a young age. We learn about her desire to create avant-garde art that introduces her to Andy Warhol, who in turn introduces her to The Velvet Underground, convincing the band to let her join. (Spoiler: The band was not happy about this)
Throughout this story, we are introduced to a surprising array of celebrities with ties to Nico, some of whom she dated and some she didn’t. The writer is careful not to paint Nico as someone who “slept her way to the top,” but instead explains which partners helped encourage her and which ones were less than great to her. Without much detail, both Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop come off as class acts, while Brian Jones and Jackson Browne made for less kind partnerships. And Lou Reed is probably the biggest asshole of all.
Despite how significant her time with The Velvet Underground is in our awareness of Nico, the book spends very few pages on her time in the band. Possibly because it amounted to less than a year of her life, her most famous solo record, Chelsea Girl, is also glossed over to make room for exploring her lengthy solo catalog. During that time, we watch a woman struggle to make a living as an artist while people seem to be hyper-focused on her looks. Her struggle for credibility takes her on a road of addiction and, in her mind, doing whatever she could to not present as “pretty” in order to be taken seriously.
The book is a stunning portrait of a conflicted artist that I personally knew very little about before reading this book. It’s a deeply engaging, well written, and well paced book that I enjoyed immensely and may even read again soon.
