From Publishers Weekly
Actress Burns, who has appeared on
E.R. and
Law and Order, has written a funny, touching mother and daughter memoir. Born in 1961 and nine when her father died, Burns felt she got no sympathy from her mother, who worried that her daughter would use people's pity to become manipulative. Besides, her mother said, "where is it written you have to be happy." As a teen, Burns suspected her mother was trying to get rid of her—shipping her off to live with older step-siblings, sending her to boarding school—so she could have fun with her male friends. Surviving drugs, sex and suicidal behavior, Burns went to college, started an acting career, married, had a child, divorced and discovered her mother again. The full circle of the maternal bond is what makes this memoir satisfying; readers see the daughter who schemed to get the attention of the mother whom she believed was self-centered become a mother herself and confront her own daughter's control ploys. When Burns tells her mom what readers have long suspected—that her mother is her best friend—her mother decides she herself is "finished being crazy" and they're both, finally, able to relax together.
(May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Burns recounts with gut-twisting authenticity the love-hate relationship she had with her mother. First widowed at 28 with two children and a mortgage, and so broke she had to take in boarders, Mom was fortysomething when she lost her second husband, a show-biz exec; their child, Catherine, was 10. What followed is rather the stuff of
Mommie Dearest as the smart, driven, resourceful woman sans college degree became a college professor and head of an academic department, and little Cathy was shunted between twentysomething pothead half sibs and a nanny. Surrounded by drugs and alcohol early on, Cathy developed a serious cocaine habit, repeatedly tried rehab, and eventually traded coke for bulimia. The tone of the writing brightens for her recovery, progress toward a successful acting career that, with its attendant money and celebrity, finally got her mother's approval. The child of Cathy's second marriage proved the hinge on which relations with her mother changed into a powerful bond.
Whitney ScottCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
