My review of this book can be found on my YouTube Vlog at:

https://youtu.be/JI1E9lbfrkg

Enjoy! ( )

So sad. This book is slightly depressing. Towards the end of the book I was hoping it was all cathartic for the author, but she says it wasn't and neither was writing the letter to her mother, (included at the end of the book).
Regardless of how manipulative, emotionally & verbally abusive the mother was towards Brooke, she still managed to turn out pretty balanced.
And according to the book, the author has a grounded, attentive and present husband, a first born daughter whom appears to be quite a spit fire and independent and the younger daughter a very loving, sensitive and insightful sweetheart.
I'd say Brooke's life is pretty blessed. Hopefully she can find closure with her now deceased mom.
I'm not sure I'd recommend this book due to the heavy heart factor. ( )

Brooke Shields opens up about her sometimes tumultuous relationship with her mother and manager, Teri Shields. She reveals heartbreaking details about her mother's life-long struggle with alcoholism, and how her relationship with her mother affected her life. A constant theme throughout the book is Brooke defending her mother to critics, despite the pain Teri caused Brooke with her drinking. This might be a tough book for some readers, but I respect Brooke for writing it. She loved her mother, flaws and all, and this book proves it.

Kathleen K. / Marathon County Public Library
Find this book in our library catalog.

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Writing this book was obviously very important to the author, so that makes me glad she undertook it. I was surprised, however, by the quality: it was rife with grammar and punctuation errors and misused words. She refers to "a very scary, very unchartered path" (I think she means 'uncharted'; 229) and "I just lay their stewing, bottle in hand" (there; 378). This is barely the tip of the iceberg. She also uses hokey puns--which is fine--but she seems to think the reader is too stupid to catch the pun and she has to explain it explicitly. When she talks about wanting to leave college, she refers to deciding to stay and 'give it the old college try.' This would be fine if she stopped there, but she goes on to parenthetically point out that "the language seemed perfect for this scenario" (203). She does this repeatedly.

This book read as first-draft stream-of-consciousness; it was not well structured at all, jumping all over the place. One paragraph talks about how, b/c of her relationship with Dean, she had broken ties with her mom, and the next spoke of how she couldn't leave her mom, and the next spoke of how she HAD left her mom and was now untethered, and the next referred to how she would always be tethered to her mom! Obviously there was a huge amount of turmoil in her life, but she could have conveyed the turmoil through more effective writing rather than just throwing it all out there and letting it stand as is.

Still, I commend her for trying to process and present such a highly personal and ambivalent part of her life, and I understand her desire to try to offer the truth of her mom in the face of society's assumptions about Teri. All of us could look back at our own old writing and think "What a mess!" That doesn't mean this is a complete loss; it's a highly personal project, and perhaps the author wanted full editorial control over it, not understanding she wasn't well-equipped to serve in that role. ( )

This was interesting enough to see her mother-daughter relationship and to get Brooke's point of view about her movie roles. I found the writing repetitive. I think she may have said she and Dean Cain were in love a dozen times in six pages! ( )