Girl You Better Try To Have Fun
Megan Stielstra on embodying many ages at once, and learning of Sinéad O'Connor's death the summer her father was dying. An excerpt of "Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us"
That summer in Alaska, I cried at everything. Of course I did. My dad was dying, but I was refusing to accept that fact so instead I cried watching the sunrise over the ocean. I cried watching whales breach off the side of the boat. I cried watching him gut fish with my teenage son, the ooze and blood and final flutter.
I cried because Marilyn introduced me as her daughter and her kids introduced me as their sister and nobody used the word step. I cried because my 16-year-old niece asked if we could listen to “Wannabe” in the car. I cried because my 2-year-old niece had on llama pajamas and they were too awesome to handle. I cried because I wanted salad and the produce shipment from the mainland hadn’t come in yet. I cried when Rob got off the plane and my dad came out to the tarmac to greet him.
My dad was dying, but I was refusing to accept that fact so instead I cried watching the sunrise over the ocean. I cried watching whales breach off the side of the boat. I cried watching him gut fish with my teenage son, the ooze and blood and final flutter. I cried because Marilyn introduced me as her daughter and her kids introduced me as their sister and nobody used the word step…
They hadn’t seen each other for thirty years, not since Rob and I dated in high school. We broke up a few weeks before the senior prom and I will never forget the look on my dad’s face as he watched my first gut-punch heartbreak: sitting on the dock in our backyard in Michigan, our feet in the lake, me crying my face off, him saying it would all be okay. “The sun will come up,” he told me. “I promise you, it’s coming.”
I was 16 then, and my dad was almost 50, the same age I am now, and I understand more about heartbreak. The gut-punch, sure, but also what comes after.
A year before that summer in Alaska, I was visiting my mother in my hometown back in Michigan, still raw from my recent divorce, and I ran into Rob again. I mean this literally: I was out for a run along the Huron River, I rounded a bend, and there he was. We stopped. The wind stopped. I could hear my own heartbeat. At work I’d been editing a book about eternalism, the philosophical theory that the past, present, and future are all happening simultaneously, and it felt like proof. I was 46. I was 16. I was 60, 70, 80, looking back down the line of my life to that moment by the river when everything made sense.
The airport was at the far end of the island. Around us were mountains, a planet of sky. So many miles to get here. So many decades. “Glad you finally decided to join the family,” my dad said to Rob on the tarmac. They both cried. I was already crying. I’d been crying for days.
Honestly?—it was perfect.
We were all still here.
***
“Sinéad O’Connor died,” my sister called from the living room and snap your fingers—that’s how fast I started sobbing. It was the end of July—July 26, 2023, to be precise—and I was in the kitchen making coffee. Kim and I worked remotely that summer, logging onto Zoom every morning at five a.m. to show up in Eastern time zones. The rest of the house was asleep: my kid, her kids, our brothers and their kids, Marilyn, Rob—everyone except my dad. He was already out on the ocean. He liked to watch the sunrise. “It always comes up,” he’d say: when I cried on the dock after the prom, when he and my mom split up, when I told him my husband left me, when he told me he had cancer. “I know it’s dark right now,” he said. “But the sun will come up. I promise you, it’s coming.”
At work I’d been editing a book about eternalism, the philosophical theory that the past, present, and future are all happening simultaneously, and it felt like proof. I was 46. I was 16. I was 60, 70, 80, looking back down the line of my life to that moment by the river when everything made sense.
“Are you okay?” Kim asked, coming into the kitchen. I wasn’t, of course. I was a fucking mess. I didn’t have language then to explain but I’ve got it now: that summer in Alaska, I was remembering how to feel. At some point in the proceeding years—the pandemic, the divorce, trying to find work, living in four different states alone with a twelve-year-old, isolated from every support system in a country submerged in collective grief—I’d hit an internal switch, pulled the off lever on my insides. “Vampires turn their feelings on and off,” my son told me once. He liked horror. He liked sci-fi. “They don’t want to feel pain so they stop feeling anything at all.”
“What happens when they start again?” I asked.
“They feel everything.”
Kim was visibly alarmed. My face was a faucet. I gasped and choked and leaked into the coffee. “I’m so sorry,” she said, wrapping around me like a vine. “You must have really loved her music.”
Love is the wrong word in the context of Sinéad O’Conner. Let’s try live. I lived her music; the soundtrack to my life. I see many of you nodding in agreement, us feral women of the Nineties, our memories choreographed to her velvet razor of a voice. The morning of my divorce, I turned up the volume on “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” and scream-sang along, knowing that decades of almost ex-wives had felt this same release. When I was pregnant and scared I’d never write again, I remembered that she recorded The Lion and the Cobra in her last trimester and knew I was joining a thriving coven of ferocious mother-artists. The lyrics from “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” replaced the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear as my secret teenage mantra for how to keep going in this mess of a world; to this day I repeat them, under my breath, over and over until my pulse slows, until my rage feels rational.
Her songs have shaped me. Especially—
Well. You know the one.
***
Try not to sing along when it comes on the radio. Try not to stretch the word wrong into four syllables, the want into five. Try not to time travel, back to your years-ago aching self, or maybe the ache is right now. Loss comes for all of us, at any age—a parent, a partner, a dream.
Dad liked to watch the sunrise. “It always comes up,” he’d say: when I cried on the dock after the prom, when he and my mom split up, when I told him my husband left me, when he told me he had cancer. “I know it’s dark right now,” he said. “But the sun will come up. I promise you, it’s coming.”
The statistics are legend: “Nothing Compares 2 U” charted at number one in seventeen countries. It won Video of the Year at the 1990 MTV Music Video Awards. It was the #1 World Single at the first Billboard Music Awards, topping the Billboard Hot 100 for four straight weeks. This acclaim meant nothing to me at 15; I just wanted her voice. I remember waiting impatiently for Casey Kasem to count down the American Top 40 so I could record it on my boombox and rewind ‘til the tape snagged. Here's what I heard when Sinéad sang: girls can feel. It felt shocking—subversive, even—for a woman to be loud, wrecked, angry, honest. I lived in small-town Southeast Michigan, Midwest nice. I’d never seen emotion like that, let alone heard it. It would be a couple more years before I understood what she was singing about, standing at the prom in my pretty dress, my fishnet tights, watching Rob dance with another girl. It had been two weeks—"seven hours and fifteen days”—and there he was with his arms around someone else.
The opening strings filled our high school gym.
I let myself feel it.
“Good morning,” Rob said as he walked into the kitchen,” and then: “Oh. Hey. Come here.” I felt myself moved from Kim’s hug into his. There’s something about arriving at a place of safety that lets us lose it completely and never in my life have I lost it so completely. I cried because Sinéad O’Connor was dead. I cried because Joan Didion was dead, and Tina Turner, and all the artists I hadn’t grieved because apparently I was a vampire and somewhere in 2020 I’d turned myself off and now that I was on again I couldn’t stop. bell hooks was dead. Milan Kundera was dead. Valerie Boyd was dead. Don’t tell me it’s silly to mourn people we don’t know personally—those artists let me feel. They help me access my own heart. They keep me from remaining numb, complacent, complicit. What’s the line?—between grief and nothing? I’ve done the nothing. I’ve done the numb, the careless, the empty and I’ll tell you what: I’m with Faulkner. I choose life. I choose living. I choose feeling, even when it hurts. My dad was dying and it hurt.
He was dying. He was dying. He was dying.
***
Music lives in the body. I hear the opening strings and I’m back in my high school gym. To carry an artist in your bones across decades is miraculous enough, but Sinéad O’Connor took it even further; her influence on me and so many of us spanned far beyond the visceral, sense-memory response. She got in our brains.
I cried because Sinéad O’Connor was dead. I cried because Joan Didion was dead, and Tina Turner, and all the artists I hadn’t grieved because apparently I was a vampire and somewhere in 2020 I’d turned myself off and now that I was on again I couldn’t stop. bell hooks was dead. Milan Kundera was dead. Valerie Boyd was dead. Don’t tell me it’s silly to mourn people we don’t know personally—those artists let me feel. They help me access my own heart. They keep me from remaining numb, complacent, complicit.
Do you remember?—in 1991 “Nothing Compares 2 U” was nominated for three Grammys and she declined to show up, criticizing the music industry in an open letter and subsequent interviews for honoring material gain as opposed to artistic merit. “How can we communicate with and help the human race,” she wrote, “when we have allowed ourselves to be taken out of the world and placed above it?” I can’t overstate what a vital lesson that was for teenage girl—hell, for any of us, wherever we’re at on the line of our life. It was the first time I remember a woman saying no. It made me ask why she said no, and the search for that why showed me that a song is so much more than a song, that music and language are tools. We can make this world better. We can make things. With the aid of a very dedicated librarian (I love you, librarians), I read into the politics of her music, what it means to stand for something as an artist and a human being. It helped me differentiate between the making of art and the selling of art, a lesson I carry to this day in my tangled jobs as both a writer and a publisher.
She also got me thinking about different perspectives and ways of seeing through the seemingly simple act of covering a song. You can’t talk about “Nothing Compares 2 U” without talking about Prince, who wrote and first recorded the song in 1985 with his funk-pop band The Family. He never spoke publicly about what inspired the lyrics, though it was speculated to be about the loss of his long-time housekeeper Sandy Scipioni. I was shocked to hear O’Connor say, in the 2022 documentary Nothing Compares, that for her, the song was about the death of her mother. For me at 15—and again at 45, when my marriage imploded—it was about the loss of romantic love. Shortly after my husband left, a friend sent me Aretha Franklin’s jazzy 2014 cover, and I had a sort of epiphany (there was bourbon involved) around the lyric “Girl you better try to have fun.” In the O’Connor version, that line was all rage, some jackass fool belittling the depth of her pain. But in the Franklin version, the line gave me a choice. I know it hurts, she seemed to be saying. But baby—you’re alive. Go out there and try to have fun!
Believe you me: I did.
I looked at Rob, wondering if he remembered. It was so long ago, back down the line of my life. He held out his hand. “You know,” he said, pulling me in for a dance. Above our heads, the word want had five syllables. “If memory serves, I owe you a prom.”
At some point I cried myself out. Kim made a fresh pot of coffee. Rob suggested we go to Safeway; Marilyn told him they were expecting a produce shipment and he knew I wanted salad. He couldn’t deliver me from the heartbreak, but lettuce—lettuce was a thing he could do. He piled bags of it into the cart while I wandered around in a post-cry hangover, when all the endorphins have poured out your nose and everything feels slow-motion. That’s when I heard it: through the grocery store’s stereo system, the opening strings.
It was still early in Alaska. The radio was waking up to what the internet already knew.
I looked at Rob, wondering if he remembered. It was so long ago, back down the line of my life. He held out his hand. “You know,” he said, pulling me in for a dance. Above our heads, the word want had five syllables. “If memory serves, I owe you a prom.”
Back at the house, we ran into my dad in the driveway, fresh from the boat with a cooler full of gutted salmon. He was months into chemo but hadn’t slowed down; fishing every morning, hiking with his dogs, playing with his grandkids, telling his daughter it would all be okay.
“Hey,” he said as I passed him on the steps. He put a hand on my cheek and tilted my face, red and puffy from crying. “You okay, kid?”
Six months later I would go back to the island and spend his last few weeks with Dad, the gift of my life. I got to say what I wanted to say. I figured out the words. We will always figure out the words. We open our mouths or we pick up a pen and we try.
He always called me kid. I was 48, I was 16, I was 6, 7, 8. “Well,” I said. There were so many things I wanted to say in the moment but I didn’t know the right words. “Sinéad O’Connor died,” I said instead.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Was she a friend of yours?”
I laughed. It felt good to laugh. “Something like that,” I said.
Six months later I would go back to the island and spend his last few weeks with him, the gift of my life. I got to say what I wanted to say. I figured out the words. We will always figure out the words. We open our mouths or we pick up a pen and we try.
“Have fun,” he said on the steps.
“I will,” I said. I thought he meant at the store.
“I mean it,” he said. The words had weight. I looked at his face and my own looked back. “I want you to have fun.”
Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections: Everyone Remain Calm, Once I Was Cool, and The Wrong Way to Save Your Life. Her work appears in the Best American Essays, New York Times, The Believer, Poets & Writers, Tin House, and on National Public Radio. She is an acquiring editor at Northwestern University Press. Previously, she took The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.
Reprinted with permission from the collection Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us (Atria/One Signal), edited by Sonya Huber and Martha Bayne.
Attend the anthology’s book launch at Books are Magic’s Brooklyn Height’s location tomorrow, Tuesday Jul 22nd, 2025 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM in Brooklyn—Sonya Huber & Martha Bayne: Nothing Compares to You w/ Sharbari Ahmed, Zoe Zolbrod, Porochista Khakpour, Millicent Souris, & musical guest Monique Bingham
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I am hugging all of you from across the internet. Thank you for your kind words.
And thank you for making this space for us, Sari. I will follow you anywhere/everywhere.
I read this a day after a text from my son about a dream he had. His four-year-old daughter, my granddaughter, was running to hug my mother and father, whom she’d never met, who died years ago. But yet, in the dream, she already knew them, loved them. It was if time was nothing more than a clock on the wall. Megan’s beautiful words about Eternalism and grief have left me crying about David Crosby dying, about Paul Austor, about Louis Gluck and Brian Wilson, and of course, my mother and father. It’s a beautiful thing to consider how all of everything is here and now, and how grief can bring us together…through all of time.