The singer showed me that burning bridges can be extraordinarily beautiful, from any vantage point – which is a good note on which to end my Name and Shame series

The brilliance of the band’s debut album got me through learning difficulties at school – and later, helped me articulate the impossible as an adult

The Rehearsal features regular people trying out different solutions to a problem. Isn’t that what we’re all doing much of the time?

The singer and rapper gave me my template of how to be a grown woman, and now my daughter is transfixed, too

The actor Marisa Abela, who will play Amy Winehouse in a new biopic, is a breath of fresh air, radiating youth – and confidence in her ancestry

Lust and longing turned me on to Eve Babitz – the writer who spells out that the real female equivalent of male power is not beauty but self-possession

The Harold and Maude actor shows us that spur of the moment acts of generosity can be truly life affirming

The point of reading a book, seeing an art show or listening to an album is to be absorbed – but this can also be bewildering and, at times, dangerous

I had my icons and I worshipped them. And one of them dumping on me from a great height was painful – though perhaps useful, too

In the first of her nine weekly columns, the author and screenwriter looks back on a life shaped by her icons, from Tim Curry to the Beastie Boys