Customer Reviews

Ruth Gordon, an open book

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Ruth Gordon was a noted playwright --she co-wrote "Adams Rib" which became a Katherine Hepburn Spencer Tracy movie--, and actress --she starred as Maud in "Harold and Maud" the only movie about a passionate affair between an 80-year old woman and a 20-year old man. Nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe. You get the idea: she was a big deal and for a long time. She was smart too. She was a remarkable woman in her personal life and this book reveals what it was like subjectively to live her life. I don't mean here just the list of Husbands (including Garson Kanin), children, starring roles and travels (although it does contain some of that), but also those infinitely more real moments of one's life when one is alone and thinking one's own thoughts and experiencing one's own feelings, those evanescent but never forgotten moments of stopping and smelling the roses. I read it in one sitting and couldn't put it down.

I have never read such a slovenly written book in my life, and she calls herself a writer. Hah! She neither knows nor cares where a sentence should end and another begin. Apparently, she has written two previous books about her life, and to learn anything about her son, Jones, or her relationship with his father, Jed Harris, who, other sources report, was practically a monster, you'd have to read the other books as well. One was more than enough for me.