Madonna

Mary Gabriel has dared to write a biography of a woman with whom the entire world is on a first-name basis. Here, she reveals Madonna as a rock-and-roll suffragette, managing the stress test of her personal life and using the power of music to bring about social change. Exquisitely detailed in her storytelling, Gabriel convinces us that we all still vogue in the House of Madonna – Brad Gooch, author of CITY POET: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FRANK O’HARAMary Gabriel’s astonishing book with its pointillist detail feels fresh, surprising, vital, and necessary. It’s thrilling to be reminded of how brave Madonna has been-to a fault! It doesn’t matter where it springs from, because the results are the same: a singular, towering career that changed the culture – Jonathan Van Meter, author of THE LAST GOOD TIMEMary Gabriel eloquently tells the engrossing story of how Madonna combined music, dance, art, fashion, theater and pop stardom to develop a completely contemporary way to be an artist. It chronicles how her embrace of the artistic vanguard transformed popular culture – Jeffrey Deitch, author of ART IN THE STREETSMadonna built the house in which nearly all female artists now live … A Rebel Life brings home not just her obvious willpower and strength, but her fearlessness and sheer intelligence – Suzanne Moore * Daily Telegraph *This meticulous study puts the shape-shifting star in proper context … It’s a mark of Gabriel’s skill that she has managed to wrestle this complex, sprawling, eventful life into a book that rarely flags and conveys its subject’s wider significance without tipping into hagiography * Guardian, Book of the Day *

Mary Gabriel is the author of Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art, which won the 2022 NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize for narrative non-fiction and the 2019 Library of Virginia and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’s Mary Lynn Kotz Award. Gabriel’s previous book, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored and The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone. She worked in Washington and London as a Reuters editor for nearly two decades and lives in Ireland.