Not long after Viv Albertine handed the manuscript of her memoir to the publisher, the enormity of what she'd done properly hit her.

Albertine - still probably best known as the guitarist with all-female punk band The Slits - suddenly realised how much she'd laid herself bare on the page. From the first page on, more or less. On page 3 she reveals a violent sexual fantasy. On page 58 she is telling her mum that she has pubic lice and asking for help in getting rid of them. On page 115 she performs a sex act on a Sex Pistol (John, if you must know - it doesn't go well). On page 292 she is bleeding heavily and being told she has cancer. On and on it goes. Page after page of candid, vivid self-exposure.

And when that sank in, she says, "I had a breakdown. I absolutely fell apart for three months at the thought of it being out there." She began to worry what that would mean, how that would affect the rest of her life. Would she be trolled? Would she ever meet a guy again? For a while she didn't sleep. And she started to kick up a fuss at the publisher's. "I think it was through fear. I almost wanted to make such a fuss that the book was taken back or not published."

Fortunately Faber were unfussable. For all its rawness, its honesty, its openness - actually, because of it - Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys is a joy. A mouth-open-did-she-really-write-that kind of joy, but a joy nonetheless. With the honourable exception of Ben Watt's Romany And Tom, it's difficult to believe there will be a more compelling, more thrilling music memoir published this year.

That said, this is not just a punk story. But we can start it there.

Rewind. In 1977, Viv Albertine is in her early 20s. She has been learning to play guitar. She's in a band with Sid Vicious called The Flowers Of Romance. She's going out with The Clash's Mick Jones (though she has flirted with Johnny Thunders too). She knows everyone who's anyone in that small London scene (some of them intimately) and she's been asked to join a band, The Slits. She does. They make two albums, appearing half-naked on the cover of the first one.

"Men were terrified of us," Albertine recalls now. That's why, she now believes, it took so long for The Slits to be written into punk history.

"I think young people put us where we should have been because they weren't seeing us through a mist of terror and fear of us being powerful women, which was how we were viewed when we were younger. We were always extremely frustrated because we knew we had made a couple of classic albums. We set up to make albums that would last. We chose artwork that wouldn't date. That's partly why we were naked on the first one as well. Wanting to show our naked bodies as they were; not airbrushed like everything else was in the 1970s. We thought, 'How can we make an album cover that won't date? Bodies won't date.' But actually, in a way, they have because everyone is so thin now."

Punk, Albertine writes, was the first time she ever felt like she fitted in. "I remember walking down the road thinking, 'I'm the most me I've ever been, I'm the pinnacle of me,'" she says. "I don't know if many people get to that point in their lives and I didn't realise it wasn't going to continue. I was probably wearing rubber stockings, torn tops, Doc Martens, my hair all over the place and dyed bleach blonde. I felt that the inside of me was perfectly expressed on the outside and I had no rivals in the world. I was so right being who I was. I thought I would always feel that, but I lost myself again many times in the next 20, 30 years."

It's the account of those losses that makes Clothes Clothes Clothes so powerful, of course. It's a book that reveals the vulnerability behind punk and, more than that, the vulnerability behind adulthood. Albertine - who's now 59, an arthouse film star (she appeared in Joanna Hogg's film Exhibition) and, after years of silence, a reborn songwriter and performer - was born in Australia and moved to England when she was four in 1958. Her father was French, "odd and difficult". A bully. Albertine, her mother and her sister came home one day in 1965 and he'd gone. Their mother's first reaction was relief.

She describes herself at one point as a feral child. And growing up she was given a huge freedom. At 16, Albertine and her best friend decided to go to Amsterdam. They were not sure what country Amsterdam was in and they only had enough money to buy themselves a sandwich a day, but off they went. They ended up in a squat surrounded by people shooting up heroin. What was her mum thinking, I have to ask.

"Our parents weren't as schooled as parents nowadays. Most parents in their 30s, 40s, 50s have been through a bit of drug-taking, a bit of travelling, a bit of going over the top, you know, whereas the 1950s parents had no knowledge of all that culture. My mother was so ignorant of what could have befallen me and was probably so exhausted - she was one of the first generation of single parents as well - that it was all a bit overwhelming. So the naivety of parents meant we did have a certain amount of freedom. It's funny to think that you do actually make it through things.

"Now, of course" - she laughs - "I may even have done more and worse than my daughter."

Her daughter was hard won. A miscarriage, interminable IVF treatment, the cancer diagnosis, a marriage going wrong. "Living through it," she says, "I knew it was one thing on top of another. It took away all my feeling of invulnerability, all that youthfulness was absolutely swiped away from me, all that positivity and optimism. I was living a life on the level of an amoeba. I literally just existed, crawling round at ground level."

It's the most harrowing section of the book. "I knew it was important to put it in the book. I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk. I had to fight for it to be a book about a woman and a woman's journey, and it's why it resonated.

"The thing is, I didn't know whether to write that I s*** myself or about the blood and everything. I had a friend who read it who said, 'Every time people see you on stage, they're going to think of you bleeding and s****ing. Do you want to take away any sense of being a performer if people see you stripped to that?' And that's quite a lot to think about. Do I want to expose myself so much that people never see me again as just a songwriter and performer? I can never have a mystique any more which, of course, so many musicians rely on - the floppy fringe, the black skinny trousers and the sultry look. It's all built around mystique. But I thought once it was on the page it was so powerful I couldn't take it away. If you've written something that moves you and frightens you, you just can't take it back."

In the end she didn't need to. It's the book's candour that has assured its gratifying reception. She's proud of the voice she found on the page - conversational, accessible, funny, full of life (this is not, whatever the events covered might suggest, a misery memoir). It took work to find it.

She has gained something too. Acknowledgement, of course. But also knowledge. The book is a litany of men, from Mick Jones to Vincent Gallo. Boyfriends, one husband, none of them perfect (who is?). The temptation is to ask this: has she been seeking a father figure all these years?

"I definitely think so. I think my father had a profound effect on me that I only discovered through the book. He had a profound effect on me being violent and being distant and then leaving. And since I heard The Beatles and heard John Lennon's voice, it filled a huge void. Here's what a man can be. He can be like me and he can be passionate but loving and he can adore me, and I think I sought out that adoring man. And I think I still am. I think it's my real Achilles' heel actually. I think I function well in most parts of my life but possibly not in that emotional side of my life. Who I'm drawn to is still very affected by my father, and I'd have loved to have exorcised that, but I'm not sure I have. I think it's in my blood and in my bones and may be the wound I have to carry with me.

"I think I've gone through life seeking someone to fulfil that emotional side of me, that twin to make me whole. Men aren't really schooled emotionally and the two together make for constant disappointment, really."

We're not improving as a gender then? "I've said some terrible things about men recently, but I just think they probably need a kick up the bum. I do think the world nowadays requires you to be emotionally literate so I think men have to work on that side of it."

So what, we're a B+ at best? "B," she says, laughing.

This is not just a punk story. But you may have already realised that.

Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys is published by Faber & Faber at £8.99. Viv Albertine is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival tomorrow at 8.30pm