Customer Reviews

As My World Still Turns: The Uncensored Memoirs of America's Soap Opera Queen

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Before Susan Lucci there was Eileen Fulton, the first actress to ever play a total bitch on a daytime soap opera. In "As My World Still Turns" Eileen discusses, in great detail, her life as a television and stage actress as well as touching on some personal matters, such as being married over five times and having an endless amount of lovers. However, what readers will find most fascinating are her accounts of how she became Lisa, the character viewers loved to hate on "As the World Turns" since Irna Phillips first introduced her way back in 1960, to her battles with writers, especially Phillips, over the direction her character was going. She writes about how terrified she was in the early days of filming "Turns" when the series aired live five days a week during the sixties and early seventies. She also discusses the times she quit the show over her battles with executives and her distaste for certain storylines, and how, eventually, she always came back to the soap as it was her first love.

Eileen writes a bit about her stage work and her recording career, but for fans of soaps and "As the World Turns" this is a great read and a nice encyclopedia for fans to possess.

As a fan of "As The World Turns" for over 50 years, I enjoyed this book. It was interesting to know what went on behind the scenes with Eileen Fulton and the rest of the cast. Her life has been interesting.

I don't watch soaps and have never seen "As The World Turns" so my judgment of this book is strictly on the book itself. I picked it up because of her name -- Fulton is a family name -- and it turns out it's a stage name so we're not kin.

Oddly enough, the book interests me because it's about a world that I find artificial and unappealing, and it certainly confirms my original opinion. Building a career as a stage actress, soap star and nightclub performer (she's also a singer) isn't easy and Eileen Fulton has worked hard to achieve her success. She is content with her successful career and her personal life, although husbands and lovers don't stay around for long. It is her career that she values above all, and that's what she has at the end of the book. It reminds me of an old popular song that Vaughn Monroe used to sing: "Dance ballerina, dance...and never mind the seat that's empty in the second row...."

The book reads like most other star autobiographies -- artificial, like it's written by a professional trying to sound like an amateur. I'd guess that it's ghost written, probably by the same person who wrote Lee Iaccoca's book. It is entertaining, though, and I'm sure it's a valid look at a life dedicated to theater and television.