NOT YET!

Heit recounts her life balancing showbiz dreams with family realities in this debut memoir.

As the author lay in a hospital bed at age 89, she had one thought: “I can’t die yet. I haven’t been discovered.” From her earliest memories, Heit wanted to see her name in lights. She grew up during the Great Depression, one of eight children raised by austere parents with little affection or attention to spare, and she learned from an early age how to make space for herself. “I was the monkey grinder’s monkey,” she recalls of her childhood. “I could and did perform at the drop of a hat. Every time we had company, I would crawl out from my hiding place under the piano, climb atop the piano bench, and sing.” She also performed plays on the side porch and was accepted into the High School of Performing Arts, where she studied with Sidney Lumet. While the author never stopped looking for her big break—in college productions, Broadway auditions, or charity theater—life got in the way: marriage at 21, children, even a bout of tuberculosis. It was only after she left her unfaithful husband that her acting—and sex life—finally took off. With this memoir, Heit recounts a long career ranging from Broadway to Hollywood with numerous and not always glamorous spots in between, culminating in a one-woman show that she performed into her 80s. The author writes with tremendous wit and frankness, detailing a biography that she summarizes as, “Sex, stardom, marriage, sex, parenting, sex, stardom, sex, travel, sex, divorce, and most importantly, the childhood trauma that gave me a passport to be a very sophisticated neurotic.” Though she never quite achieved the fame she dreamt of in childhood, Heit made it further—and did so later—than the reader might guess at the outset. Along the way, she gathered plenty of hard-won knowledge to share about marriage, motherhood, careerism, art, and how to live life on one’s own terms.

A rich, funny, frequently wise memoir about getting what one wants out of life.