A candid, reflective memoir.
A Golden Globe–winning actress tells the story of her life as a singer/songwriter who unexpectedly became a TV star.
Sagal grew up with two parents who had artistic aspirations. Her mother had been a TV screenwriter, and her quick-tempered, workaholic father had dropped out of Harvard Law School to become a respected TV director. But their home life was turbulent. The author’s stay-at-home mother suffered from depression and heart disease and died when she was young, and the father she feared died when she was in her mid-20s. Through all the personal difficulties, Sagal's saving grace was music. Acting was an afterthought, something her father thought she did well and that got her into the Cal Arts theater arts program. After dropping out of college in the mid-1970s, Sagal found work as an actress in a touring musical and then in a restaurant as a singing waitress, where she met and began dating Kiss lead singer Gene Simmons. She then became a backup singer for Bette Midler; in the meantime, an early marriage fell apart. A brush with cancer during this period led to her recovery from alcohol and the pills to which she had become addicted as a teenager struggling with weight issues. By the mid-1980s, Sagal was discovered by an agent who helped her land the role of sex-starved housewife Peg Bundy in Married…With Children, which ran for 10 years. Offscreen, she married—and later divorced—her second husband, had two children, remarried a third time, and had a child via a surrogate mother. Despite her acting success, Sagal admits that “it took me years to feel like I belonged” on TV, just as it took her time to get used to turning 60. While this book is sure to please the author’s many fans, its thoughtful, no-regrets honesty will no doubt also appeal to readers of Hollywood memoirs seeking substance that goes beyond gossip and name-dropping.
A candid, reflective memoir.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9671-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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