The Dark Story of Eminem Read Online Free PDF

because he didn’t have a dad. I tried to explain to him that I left his father because he was abusive” – partially clearing one mystery.
“When you see my Dad, tell him I slit his throat in this dream I had
,” Marshall declared himself in ‘My Name Is’, the single that announced him as Eminem to the world. But his father was never seriously mentioned again in his work. And in that
Source
interview, his memories of hurt had to be squeezed from him. All he wanted to say, and kept saying, was “Fuck him!” It was his father who had done him the simplest, most damaging wrong, by removing himself from his life. The cost of such abandonment to many children is helplessness and compensatory aggressive anger, a sense of loss and lack of self-esteem. Marshall would exhibit all these traits as he grew up, a typical child, in this way, of his times. Most of all, though, what his father left behind was a hole in his head, which could not be filled. So, in interviews and art, he sealed that wound over, ignored it as best he could, and moved on. His mother was a very different matter.
     
    “Me and my mother have never gotten along from the cradle,” he told
NME
in 1999. That mother was a 17-year-old girl when she was left with him. The consequence-blind teenage gamble she had taken with her life, by marrying his father and having him, had already failed. And in the end, all the evidence suggests she did not raise him well. But they were stuck with each other. More than anything, that explains why the dammed fury he kept for his father was not as strong as the hot, active hate he would come to have for his mother; why, by the time he was making records as Eminem, childish love had collapsed into a vindictive state of war.
     
    Everything his parents said after he was famous is tainted by a tone of self-justification, after he attacked them in lyrics and print. But even his father admitted that, in the time he knew Mathers-Briggs, “She was great with you – you were always clean and well-fed and well-dressed, and I couldn’t fault her for that.” “I am gullible and loving,” Mathers-Briggs said of herself, in the
Mail On Sunday
. “As a child Marshall was never spanked, and I never raised my voice to him. The real problem is not that he had a hard time, but that he resents I sheltered him so much from the real world. I love him so much that if he asked me to jump in front of a train for him, I would. I was an over-protective mother who gave him everything he wanted and more.” The strained exasperation she felt having to raise this insecure child on her own, barely an adult herself was, though, more realistically described on the
Tonight
programme. “I did the best I could – it was just him and me,” she sighed. “Anything Marshall wanted, I would try and get for him. I got kicked out of stores because he’d be like the spoiled brat, lying in the aisle, arms and legs spread open.”
     
    Marshall’s neediness only grew, though, as a direct result of his mother’s actions. In one of his most touching early interviews, quoted in his mother’s eventual, infamous suit against him for defamation, he described the difficulty of his childhood, with none of the bravado of later accounts.
     
    “Was your home life ever stable?” the interviewer asked.
     
    “Not really,” he replied. “I was an only child for 12 years. When I was little, my mother never had a job, so we used to always stay with my family. We would stay until we got kicked out. Some of the relatives stayed in Kansas City, some in Detroit, so we just kept going back and forth. I guess we were freeloaders, so to speak. Whenever we would come back to Detroit, we would stay with my grandmother. Finally, my mother ended up meeting some dude and shit, so we got a house on the east side of Detroit when I was 12 years old.” A little later, he expressed how that made him feel, in a tone of forlorn sadness for himself. “If you’re going somewhere