Tina Turner had already published a first memoir book in the 1980s, simply titled Me, Tina. Forty years later, she returned to bookstores with My Love Story. “La Tigresse” recounts her very destructive relationship with her husband and partner on stage, Ike Turner, her health problems and the fight she led, during her 60-year career, to establish herself as a true symbol of the American music scene.
Icon of Private Dancer, queen of rock’n’roll, recognized for her voice as well as for her incredible wigs, is nonetheless the mother of four boys. At the turn of the pages, Tina Turner also confides in her mourning and her regrets concerning her first son, Craig, who committed suicide in 2018. “What I would really like is to hear my son still call me darling. » When her first son, whom she had at 18, Craig Raymond Turner, killed himself with a pistol shot on July 3, 2018, the diva was in Paris for Fashion Week. She bids him farewell by scattering his ashes off the California coast, surrounded by family and friends, and immortalizes the moment on social media: “He tragically died at 59, but he will always be my baby “, she testifies.
“I am a strong person,” she wrote. I would have liked to pass on some of that strength to Craig. Or that he finds it within himself.” She also remembers the last words exchanged with this darling son. Shortly before his suicide, Craig had telephoned his mother: to “hear my voice and my laughter”, she says. A call that will take on its full meaning after the announcement of the tragedy. “I think it was his way of saying goodbye to me, but at the time I didn’t realize it,” she laments.
“He always looked down with great sadness, already described the star at the time. My son was a very emotional child.” An emotionality which would be explained in particular by the years lived with his adoptive father, Ike Turner, who beat his mother. Tina Turner returns in her book on this toxic relationship, since the success they met together in 1966 with the song River Deep Mountain High and the unforgettable Proud Mary in 1969, until the divorce in 1978, then death by overdose in 2007 of his “nightmare”. In an excerpt quoted by Closer , the singer details the violence suffered for more than 15 years by her side: “He used my nose like a punching bag so often that I felt blood running down my throat when I sang. And I no longer knew what it was like not to have a black eye.
Survivor of a stroke, cancer and a kidney transplant, Tina Turner confides without reserve. The singer seems to remain the proud fighter who raised her to the top of the music industry. And she remains an inspiration to generations of artists, from Mick Jagger to Beyoncé.