Three years ago Sinead O'Connor, who has died at the age of 56, published her memoirs, Rememberings, in which she discussed with characteristic frankess her troubled upbringing, her career, her health issues, and her attitude to fame.
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Critics admired its "jaw-dropping" account of her childhood trauma, describing it as "a tremendous catalogue of female misbehaviour" and as "a document of a difficult life [that] is also deliciously funny". In the book, Sinead also proved herself to be a fine and perceptive writer.
Here are five of the many anecdotes from its pages.
* The Prince episode
One of the best-known incidents in the book. Prince - whose song, Nothing Compares 2U, she had long made her own - invited her to his home in the Hollywood Hills. It was weird from the start. Prince was "done up like the dog's dinner" and seemed to be wearing "literally all the makeup that was ever in history applied to the face of Boy George", O'Connor observed.
He tells her that he dislikes her swearing. There's a pillow-fight in which Prince strikes O'Connor with something hard stuffed inside his pillow. Duane - "Igor", as Sinead initially thinks of him - is a terrified, cowering figure who works for Prince, who tells her that Duane is his brother.
Prince's behaviour degenerates. He prevents her from leaving, but when she escapes he catches up with her in his car. Apparently, Sinead says, it all had something to do with her manager, Steve Fargnoli, having previously been Prince's manager, and Fargnoli and Prince were now embroiled in a legal case. "I never wanted to see that devil again", she writes of Prince.
The picture of the Pope
O'Connor shocked America by ripping up her late mother's photograph of Pope John Paul II, on the TV show Saturday Night Live in 1992. It was her protest against sexual abuse of children being carried out within the Irish Catholic Church and its subsequent covering-up. "My intention", O'Connor writes, "had always been to destroy my mother's photo of the pope. It represented lies and liars and abuse".
Outside the New York studio, two protesters pelt O'Connor and her personal assistant, Ciara, with eggs. The men flee, pursued by O'Connor and Ciara. "We catch up with them in some alley. They are leaning, gasping for breath, against a black fence they didn't have the strength to climb
"All we say, laughing at them, is 'Hey, don't be throwing eggs at women'. The two of them are so shocked at being chased and caught that they start laughing, too, and it all ends very friendly. They straighten up and help us find a cab back to the hotel".
Sinead O'Connor, Oran Mor, Glasgow, 2012
Two weeks later, however, O'Connor was booed off stage by the crowd attending a Bob Dylan anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden. Deeply upset, she bellowed the Bob Marley song, War (which she had sung before ripping up the papal photograph), and was swiftly consoled by Kris Kristofferson.
Speaking on the BBC today, music journalist Dave Fanning, who met Sinead many times, observed: "When she tore up the picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live and people said she'd ruin her career, she did ruin her career, because that was the plan.
"She never wanted to be famous, to be a pop star, she felt she was a protest singer."
The homeless man
"The most incredible human being I ever met" writes O'Connor, "was a homeless man whose name I didn't even get", not long before her Saturday Night Live performance.
She was in a New York diner on a Good Friday when in walked "this African-American man wearing a long, long army-type trench coat and, around his neck, a jack-to-jack lead, which is the lead that connects a guitar to an amp".
The diner's boss turned the man away, but he returned a few minutes later. "And he did what I thought was the most incredible thing for a human being to do. He came back into the restaurant, stood about six feet inside, and said, 'Can I get a hug? Can I get a hug?'
"Genius, I thought. And I ran up to him like a monkey. And I was the only person who did. I jumped into his arms and hung onto him as if he were a baby, wrapping my legs around his waist. I hung on to him for a very long time. We then went outside and had some conversation".
A Scottish inspiration
O'Connor's 1987 debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, included a track, Jackie.
She wrote it when she was about 15. "I had seen a play on TV about a very old lady in Scotland who was coming towards her own death", she says in Rememberings. "She would spend her days looking through her curtained window, waiting to see her long-gone husband return from a fishing trip he'd taken forty years earlier and during which he'd drowned.
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"They had been childless, and she never met anyone else. This inspired me, somehow, to write 'Jackie', about a character who is wandering the beach waiting for the return of someone dead. In my song, the narrator is a ghost".
The Johnny Depp anecdote
O'Connor and her band had once been on a tour so long that "we'd lost our minds slightly", she recalls.
Her cello player had a bag that resembled a child's stuffed sheep. It was christened Shaun, and was the band's mascot. One night in LA, they decided that the sheep should be married to another cuddly animal that had become part of the entourage.
Johnny Depp had been at the show and afterwards went backstage, only to be bemused by the wedding ceremony. "It was an elaborate ceremony and [he] had to stand and watch us go through this forty-minute-long wedding".
A few years later, Depp told her that he had had lots of fun that night. "I'm sure", Sinead reflected, "he just thought we were mental".
* Rememberings, by Sinead O'Connor, is available in hardback (£20) and paperback (£9.99)
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