Her personal tenacity is something of a miracle, and readers of this honest, engaging memoir will wish the author well.
Wary, defiant, not a little defensive, and not a little pissed off, Lords recaptures her youthful voice as she excavates all the rocks on her road from underage porn star to singer and actress.
She hailed from a low-rent Ohio mill town, product of a drunken father and a feckless mother, soon divorced. Sexually abused by one of her mother’s boyfriends, she fled home at 15. To make money, she agreed to do some nude posing (she was still only 15 when Penthouse featured her as a centerfold), and from there it was an alarmingly simple step to pornographic movies. She captures this dark and rotten world with all its ambiguities—and hers: “[Porn] allowed me to release all the fury I'd felt my entire life. And that's what got me off.” But it was hardly a joyous milieu; drugs and booze calmed her, while a series of wretched relationships gave her glancing moments of security. Federal agents finally started giving child pornography the scrutiny it deserved, but the actors, not the producers, bore the public brunt of their investigation. Still a teenager, Lords pulled in the reins and, remarkably, engineered her own reversal of fortune. With a self-control that invites admiration, she got roles in R-rated flicks, worked her way up to John Waters movies, and then a sequence of TV and film roles. As if out of nowhere (it’s not clear where she discovered her musical talent), she charged to the top of the charts as a techno queen, meanwhile grabbing roles in Melrose Place and Roseanne, all the while contending with her past as a porn star. If on occasion Lords sounds a wee superficial (“Howard Fine's annual Christmas party was a must appear, so I searched my closet for a festive frock”), you can see she knows how to play the Hollywood survival game.
Her personal tenacity is something of a miracle, and readers of this honest, engaging memoir will wish the author well.Pub Date: July 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-050820-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
Poetic, inspiring proof that you can go home again.
Ten homespun personal essays—most published elsewhere—from the author of last year’s acclaimed novel Jim the Boy.
Earley grew up in a small-town, kudzu-covered corner of North Carolina more recognizable as the terrain of Thomas Wolfe than that of Dorothy Allison. Seven of these pieces explore his early years there, as a 1960s television acolyte, a squirrel-hunting dilettante, and, through it all, an astute, heartbreaking observer of the idiosyncratic people around him. The title story, which appeared in Harper’s, serves as an introduction to this American boyhood, wholly transformed by a color, Zenith television set, replete with rooftop antenna. As the cornerstone entry here, a masterful exercise in metaphor, it’s hard to imagine what more the author could have to articulate about his young life. But Earley thankfully only has more trenchant memories to spin. With “Hallway,” in an equally unadorned language, but with more deeply felt remembrances, Earley recalls, with a child’s perception, his extended family’s peculiarities and his own fearful awe of his grandfather. A look at the odd Scots-derived Appalachian dialect of his youth (“The Quare Gene”) leads to a reflection on the “shared history” that the author is losing with his highland ancestors. A similar wistfulness pervades “Granny’s Bridge,” a tribute to a time when crossing a bridge—and certainly not one to the 21st century—could enhance a person’s outlook. In “Ghost Stories,” Earley takes his wife to New Orleans to investigate the haunted city: “We are looking for ghosts, but, I think, a good story will do.” And the final piece (“Tour de Fax”), another gem from Harper’s, follows him on a record-setting circumnavigational flight, recorded stop by stop in under 32 hours. Earley’s skewering of the trip’s corporate sponsors is good fun, and his capstone epiphany—that where he ended up, at home, is the only place he’d fly around the world to get to—rings true.
Poetic, inspiring proof that you can go home again.Pub Date: May 25, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-302-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
Decked out like a history, with index and bibliography: a striking, romantic, personal narrative.
An extravagant tale of war and romance, with a decided emphasis on the latter.
Now in her 90s, Travers writes in an “I shall never forget” mode. With remarkable recall, she describes her cold English upbringing and portrays the tenor of society life in Cannes during the 1930s. In 1940 she changed her tennis whites for nurses’ khakis and joined the Free French—who, apparently, were free in lots of ways. She was soon chauffeuring officers in Eritrea along the road to Kub-Kub (a map is provided), but she managed to find the time for various randy encounters and assignations. The liaisons are presented as guileless romance, mind you, not actual sex. Under the nom de guerre of “La Miss,” Travers served as the driver for General Pierre Koenig—a dashing officer who soon became the love of her life. She was with him at Bir Hakeim when that North African outpost was besieged by Rommel; with her General in command, La Miss guided the historic breakout. Her description of the drive, negotiating between land mines and flying bullets, is the central and best part of her story, which really has less to do with military history than romance. She lived with lucky Pierre in domestic bliss during much of the war—but the joy faded with the arrival of the General’s wife. After the war, La Miss became an authentic member of the French Foreign Legion, married a fellow soldier, and raised a family. Now she’d like to tell her grandchildren “what a wicked grandmother they had.” It’s all a bit melodramatic, full of old-fashioned schoolgirl romance, but this is not “Barbara Cartland Goes to War”—for Cartland surely never received, as La Miss did, the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire.
Decked out like a history, with index and bibliography: a striking, romantic, personal narrative.Pub Date: June 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0001-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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