Susan Boyle The Woman I Was Born To Be Extracts: Kisses, God And Photos

SUSAN Boyle has been signing copies of her autobiography, The Woman I Was Born to Be at Waterstone’s in Piccadilly, London. Who or what that woman is remains a moot point in the media, who have presented Boyle as the Hairy Angel, a sign of God’s love and a lumpen dolt.

Here’s La Boyle:

I knew what they were thinking. ‘Just look at her! She’s got a bum like a garage, a head like a mop, I’m not too sure if her teeth are her own and she’s claiming to be a singer! She cannae sing. She cannae! Well come on, let’s hear you then. . .’

So I opened my mouth and sang. ‘I dreamed a dream in time gone by . . .’

The O2

During my birth in 1961 it was touch and go for her as well as me but, eventually, I was delivered by emergency caesarean section. When my mother came round from the anaesthetic, the doctor looked at her seriously.

‘You have a girl,’ he told her. ‘She’s very small and she needs help with her respiration, so we have her in an incubator.’

When my father Patrick appeared at my mother’s bedside, she knew something was wrong. ‘She was starved of oxygen for a wee while,’ he said. My mother was an intelligent woman and knew what that meant.

Judges

One day we went to hospital for something called an assessment. ‘What’s an assessment?’ I asked.

‘It’s a test to see what sort of school you can go to,’ she told me. The test involved putting shapes through holes in a box. I wasn’t helped by a bald-headed man staring at me. Afterwards, I listened to him talking to my mother. The word he kept using was ‘borderline’.

Angels Move Me

The first song I can remember performing on my own at school was the hymn Child In The Manger in a Nativity play. I sang it to the tune of Morning Has Broken and I was nervous. When I opened my mouth to sing, however, the trembling stopped. As I finished, there was silence. The children looked at me with their mouths hanging open. Then the teachers and parents started clapping and smiling at me

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Anorak

Posted: 16th, October 2010 | In: Key Posts | Comment (1)