Hey guys. I am bumping this thread because there are excepts of the book and I want to post them. Madge's brother, Christopher is doing the media rounds this week to promote this book of his. He was on GMA yesterday and this morning. He will be on "Inside Edition" and "Extra" today. On the GMA (Good Morning America) website, they have excepts from the book and his interview. I am just going to post them and you guys state how you feel about this.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/SummerConcert/story?id=5366168&page=1
'GMA' Exclusive: Madonna's Brother on His Strained Relationship with the Star
Christopher Ciccone on Madonna: "She's a Lonely Person"
By DEBORAH ROBERTS and IMAEYEN IBANGA
July 15, 2008
The cracks that fractured the once tight relationship between superstar singer Madonna and her younger brother Christopher Ciccone began long before he even thought of writing a book about their relationship, Ciccone said in an exclusive interview that aired today on "Good Morning America."
While Ciccone partly blames Madonna's husband, Guy Ritchie, for his estranged relationship with the "4 Minutes" singer, the openly gay Ciccone said his view of his sister really changed after she ambushed him with cameras at their mother's grave for her black and white backstage documentary, "Truth or Dare."
"At one point, if you've seen the 'Truth or Dare' movie, when she's rolling around on my mother's grave that -- that was a turning point for me in my relationship with her," said Ciccone who just released the book "Life With My Sister Madonna." "I kept it inside but I thought to myself, 'OK, there are no boundaries now.' You know, my mother's now become a side -- a bit player in her life, life story, and it hurt me. And I — my, my opinion of her altered at that moment. I never said anything about it."
Click here to read an exclusive excerpt from Ciccone's book.
Ciccone refused to be filmed for the movie and said he began realizing the daddy's girl he grew up with in Bay City, Mich., was gone.
"I think, ultimately, she's a lonely person and, unfortunately, it, it truly is lonely at the top," he said.
But the "Truth or Dare" incident was just the first in a series of alleged episodes that weakened the bond between the pair. Ciccone, who said at one time his relationship with Madonna "was a bit like a marriage," said he hit his biggest rift with his sister over finances -- just as in so many marriages.
He said the "Like a Virgin" singer's refusal to provide adequate aid to their ailing, blind 97-year-old grandmother was too much.
"It's difficult to trust people, you know, but someone like my grandmother, you know, you just do it," he said. "I wanted her to look after her, to get her a driver and a car. "It seems like the easiest thing to do," he added. "Ultimately, so she, she gave her $500 a month and pays, and pays for her medical bills."
Ciccone's critics have said his book is just a way for him to cash in on his sister's fame.
"I'm happy to get paid for my work, so I don't have a problem with that. I'm also happy to get paid for the first time what I think I'm worth," Ciccone said.
Still, Ciccone said he was satisfied with the amount he ultimately received for his book.
"I'm not unhappy with it," he said.
When Ciccone was asked if it was true he had received seven figures for the book, he laughed and coyly repeated, "I'm not unhappy with it."
He added that he is sure his sister was worried about exactly how much he would reveal to the world when she learned of the book.
"I know that her reaction was like many people's — she went to the very worst place," Ciccone said. "That I was going to discuss very private medical matters, that I was going to tear her apart, that, you know, she was very upset. And she — since I wasn't responding to her, she was calling my father and trying to get him to choose sides, which I thought was of -- on the low side, if you ask me."
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http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=5367060&page=1
Excerpt: "Life with My Sister Madonna"
Pop Superstar's Brother Christopher Ciccone's Controversial New Book
July 14, 2008
Madonna's estranged brother Christopher Ciccone recently released a book about his relationship with his pop superstar sister. You can read an excerpt from the book, "Life With My Sister Madonna," below.
The Lanesborough Hotel, London, England 8:30 A.M., September 25, 1993
The alarm rings in a low-key British way. I get up, peer through a gap in the thick, purple silk drapes, and the sun glimmers back at me. Luckily, the weather's fine. After all, this is the UK, land of rain and fog. The Girlie Show tour, which I designed and directed, opens tonight, and we don't want the crowd getting drenched before the show even begins.
We. The royal we. Madonna and me. My sister and I, she who is still fast asleep in a mahogany four-poster bed in her suite adjoining mine. The royal we, so fitting for a woman who is sometimes a royal pain in my ass. Although Buckingham Palace, the queen of England's residence, is just across the road, in my estimation and that of millions of fans, she is the real queen of the universe—Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, my elder sister by twenty-seven months, who, just eleven years after the release of her first record, is now one of the most famous women in the world.
I eat an orange. No big English breakfast for me, no matter how much I like it. Otherwise, I'll probably throw up when Madonna and I take our scheduled six-mile jog at eleven. Just as we did yesterday, just as we will do tomorrow—and on every other day during the tour.
Schedule, in fact, is my sister's middle name. Up at nine in the morning, in bed by eleven at night, with every hour in between planned by her as rigidly as any military campaign. With her mania for making lists, for running her life according to a timetable, in another incarnation Madonna could easily have run a prison, directed airport traffic, or been a five-star general.
Sadly for her, though, her nights can't be structured or played out according to a strict schedule, because she is an insomniac and rarely sleeps more than t here hours each night
Madonna's insomnia only became apparent to me when we were living together in downtown Manhattan at the start of her career. Whenever I woke up during the night, she would be in the living room, perched on white futon, which—no matter how many times we washed the floor—was always dirty. She was usually dressed in a white oversize men's T-shirt, baggy, white cowboy-print sweats, sucking Hot Tamales, her favorite cinnamon-flavored candies, and reading poetry—often Anne Sexton whose lines sometimes inspired her lyrics. Or the diaries of Anais Nin, who along with Joan of Arc, is one of her heroines. Anything to get her through those long, hot airless Manhattan nights, nights when her mind didn't switch off, when fantastical candy-colored visions of her future sparkled in her brain. Unbridled desire for fame and fortune, you see, is incompatible with sleep.
This morning, though, I am confident that my sister is sleeping, a deep sleep. Her tightly wound high-octane energy has meant that when she is on the road, she sometimes needs a sleep aid. But who can blame her? She's now a superstar, a legend, one of the universe's most famous women, and in just eleven and a half hours seventy-five thousand fans will be screaming for her, throwing themselves at her feet, worshipping her. The pressure to perform, to entertain, to sustain, and to simply remain Madonna is immeasurable, and even I—who am now the closest person on earth to the Queen of the World—can't truly fathom how it feels to walk in her size-seven shoes, stalked by so much expectation, so much adoration, so many who love her, so many who hate her, so many who long for her to fall flat on her famous face.
Nine and time to wake my sister. I unlock the door between our suites. Too late. Loud snorting—not a pretty sound—is coming from her opulent marble bathroom. She's in the midst of her morning routine: swallowing a great gulp of warm salt water, gargling, snorting it up here nose, and then spitting it out. Abrasive in the extreme. But essential, she believes, for maintaining her voice.
I flick through CNN for five minutes. Then I open the adjoining door to Madonna's suite again. My sister, dressed in a white sweatshirt and black Adidas sweatpants, is sprawled on her powered-blue satin-covered bed, drinking black coffee with sugar, nibbling sourdough toast.
I grab a bite and then give her a brief kiss. "You okay, Madonna?"
She nods. "But I still didn't sleep much."
Like our father, a man of few words, neither of us have any use for small talk, as we know each other's glances and gestures by heart and can decode them with unerring accuracy. So that when my sister places her hands on her hips, fishwife style, I know there's trouble. When she starts picking on her nail varnish, usually red, I know she's nervous. And when she tucks her thumb in to the palm of her hand and wraps her fingers around it—a childhood habit of mine, but which she may have appropriated because she believes her fingers are too stubby and always tries to hide them—I know she needs reassurance. And for the past ten years, day and night, I've been happy to give it to her.
My job description may not be conventional—although I might sometimes be termed Jeeves to Madonna's Bertie Wooster—my ability to reassure my sister in times of trouble or self-doubt is one of the primary reasons that—unlike a myriad of less unfortunate others to whom she has granted admittance to Madonnaland, then summarily exiled—I have survived. I have endured both as her "humble servant"—as I sometimes sign my letters to her when I want to give her a hard time—and as the one person in our family ever to work for her long-term as her assistant/dresser/shoulder-to-cry-on, and as the only family member with whom she still maintains a close relationship at this point.
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