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This article looks at Lily Allen’s new album 'West End Girl' — her first in seven years — which transforms the end of her marriage to actor David Harbour into a bold, confessional work of autofiction. It explores how Allen reclaims her narrative through humour, rage, and vulnerability, refusing the shame often imposed on women after public breakups. The piece also draws parallels with Indian cinema’s history of artists turning personal pain into art, referencing Guru Dutt’s 'Kaagaz Ke Phool', Yash Chopra’s 'Silsila', and Mahesh Bhatt’s 'Arth', each a creative reckoning with heartbreak & relationships.
In her iconic new album 'West End Girl', Lily Allen declares in her song, "I will not absorb your shame," referring to the infidelity that led to the end of her marriage with Stranger Things star David Harbour. The artist, in her first release in 7 years, turns that private devastation into a masterful work of autofiction. Through a forensic account of everything her ex husband did, from using his West Village apartment as a 'Pussy Palace', as Lily calls it, to betraying the terms of their open marriage, which she agreed to reluctantly, the artist does the opposite of what most celebrities do at a time like this: be unsparingly honest.
At the end of a relationship especially one that's in the public eye, the scrutiny lands squarely on the woman and so does the shame. Even in innocence she is victimised and pitied. Through this album, Lily radically rejects that position of a woman scorned. Well, not entirely. West End Girl is, rather, a complete and rich expression of someone who was wronged, crafted through exceptional songwriting. There's rage and righteous contempt that mocks a 'sad sad man' who's addicted to sex, but there's also the grief and desolation of being wounded by someone you love. Betrayal is still a painful core of the album but Lily's tango with this big scary monster that every lover-girl dreads, makes the album a hilariously sharp, almost esoteric, girl's-girl guide to healing.
The most striking thing, personally, that makes this album so impactful comes from her song 'Let you W/in' that goes, "All I can do is sing." That act of taking pain and alchemizing it into a work of art is rooted in a lineage of creativity. Artists have always, turned the most private wreckage into something lasting and mythically resonant. Here are 3 homegrown films that were born out of the same instinct that drives West End Girl: to make sense of what hurts by making something out of it.
Critics and historians have often read 'Kaagaz Ke Phool' as a quasi-autobiographical film in which Guru Dutt stages the disintegration of a director’s life, marriage, and professional vanity — material that mirrors his own troubled marriage to Geeta Dutt, reports of an intense relationship with Waheeda Rehman, and his growing disillusionment with the industry. Scholars and retrospective essays describe the film as Dutt’s attempt to process personal failings through cinema — a celluloid elegy built out of heartbreak and failure. It stands as one of the earliest examples in Indian cinema of an artist using his own emotional turmoil as narrative fodder.
Film historians like Nasreen Munni Kabir and Arun Khopkar have written that the film’s story — a filmmaker’s doomed romance with his leading lady and his decline amid social censure — mirrored Dutt’s own sense of guilt, longing, and creative isolation. His sister Lalitha Lajmi has also described him as a man struggling with loneliness and inner conflict, which often surfaced in his films.
Amitabh Bachchan, Jaya, & Rekha — the unholy trinity of Bollywood blurred the line between private life and performance in Yash Chopra’s 1981 film, 'Silsila'. It cast Amitabh Bachchan opposite his real-life wife, Jaya Bachchan, and his alleged former partner Rekha, dramatizing a love triangle that was already a public obsession. Chopra’s decision to make the film and to cast those exact actors turned a rumoured affair into a kind of cinematic confession. Silsila became emblematic of the uneasy overlap between celebrity and image-making — an instance where the industry’s most closely watched relationship was re-enacted in plain sight.
Yash Chopra spoke about this openly in a 2010 BBC Asian Network interview, later reported by NDTV saying, “I was always on tenterhooks and scared because it was real life coming into reel life. Jaya is his wife and Rekha is his girlfriend — the same story is going on (in real life). Anything could have happened because they are working together.” He also told The Times of India in a 2015 retrospective that making Silsila “felt like walking a tightrope” because of how closely it echoed the actors’ off-screen lives.
Mahesh Bhatt’s 'Arth' remains one of the most openly autobiographical films in Hindi cinema. Written after his affair with actor Parveen Babi and the breakdown of his marriage to Kiran Bhatt, it reimagined those experiences through the story of a woman learning to define herself beyond her husband’s infidelity. Bhatt has often described the film as a direct response to his own life — a way of understanding his failures and the emotional wreckage they left behind. Arth turned private guilt into a public inquiry, asking what love, loyalty, and freedom mean inside a marriage. It also marked a turning point in how Hindi cinema portrayed women: no longer as victims of betrayal, but as people allowed to choose dignity.
Mahesh Bhatt told Filmfare in 2018, “Arth dug into my own wounds, my life burns. I had the audacity to use that as fuel. The emotional truth has been sourced from my life.”
