Being Conchita: We Are Unstoppable by Conchita Wurst; John Blake Books, $19.95
With a fearless, flawless image and a singing voice to match, bearded Austrian genderbending songstress Conchita Wurst dazzled fans and judges alike to win the UK's 59th Eurovision Song Contest in 2014. Her autobiography Being Conchita, a cheerleading narrative about unity and overcoming hardship, forms an impressive if uneven profile of an artist who seems to have been primed for greatness through a misfortunate past.
The book is prefaced with a letter by fashion designer and Wurst muse Jean Paul Gaultier, who considers himself an "unconditional fan" and compares her to Madonna, "who is a real macho in a woman's body," while Conchita is a "Wonder Woman in a man's body."
Born Thomas Neuwirth in Gmunden, Austria in 1988, Wurst moved to Bad Mitterndorf, known for being a winter sports resort, where the bulk of her childhood took place. There, the bullying due to her "otherness" began chipping away at her self-esteem, and these "small acts of cruelty" continued on throughout her teen years. Resilient and hopeful, Wurst's move to nearby metropolis Graz, coming out, and enrollment in fashion school (she designed the dress worn in her Eurovision performance) proved to be the catalysts that propelled her onto bigger and better endeavors, including a singing career.
Wurst gushes about auditioning for the Austrian casting show Starmania in 2007, becoming a founding member of the short-lived boy band "jetzt anders! " ("be different!"), and being mononymously known as "Conchita" while working her way up the ranks in the Eurovision competition. Her win in 2014 with the song "Rise like a Phoenix" received great praise, though her controversial persona garnered derision from right-wing conservative groups.
While inspirational, motivational, and written with clear-cut intent (Wurst's words were developed into book form by travel writer and documentarian Daniel Oliver Bachmann), the autobiography won't appeal to everyone. Some readers will find the surfeit of platitudes eye-rollingly derivative and Wurst's self-elevation to superstar status imperious. Some sections read as overly self-conscious: "When I started to explore drag," she says, "I felt as if the concept had been created specially for me. I began to accept my body and enjoyed seeing women get jealous." Other comments are hackneyed, such as, "The search for one's true self is a life-long quest, like the challenge of learning to love oneself," or, "Every Pride festival is living proof that we're capable of achieving a whole host of positive things when we all pull in the same direction."
To be sure, more impressionable readers may find these words of enthusiastic encouragement beneficial. But the experienced, middle-aged queen who has lived through the bullying and the hard-knocks life lessons to emerge strong and shimmery may want to pass on this one. Even so, the book isn't a total wash. There are moments of excitement tucked within the chiffon folds of so much puffery. A particularly troublesome stretch of reflective foil on the catwalk proved disastrous for three fallen models in a Jean Paul Gaultier fashion show, but Wurst, headlining the show in a glamorous wedding dress, simply stepped over the fashion roadkill as Gaultier "actually knelt down before me."
Her interplay with fashion workaholic Karl Lagerfeld and former Vogue Paris editor-in-chief Carine Roitfeld also simmers on the page, as does her work with Light into Darkness, Austria's largest humanitarian relief campaign. Generous sections of glossy photographs trisect the memoir, and that may be the biggest draw here: to visualize the evolution of Conchita Wurst in a picture form rather than through stiff wordplay. As she imparts a message of tolerance, equality, compassion, humanitarianism, and self-love, perhaps the greatest takeaway (for those who make it through to the final pages) is to dream big and rise above life's ceaseless roadblocks.