A forthright revelation of hard-won survival.
A Hollywood star recollects a traumatic past.
In an affecting debut memoir, Moore, now in her mid-50s, looks back on an undeniably successful acting career—her salary for Striptease made her the “highest-paid actress in Hollywood”—and a life marked by pain. Both parents were alcoholics. Her mother, eventually diagnosed as bipolar, repeatedly attempted suicide, and her father was a gambler whose debts kept the family on the move to outrun loan sharks and creditors. “It’s possible,” she writes, “that all the adapting I had to do primed me to become an actress: it was my job to portray whatever character I thought would be most popular in every new school, in every new town.” What also primed her was an overwhelming need to be valued. At 16, having left home, quit school, and moved in with a married guitarist nearly twice her age, Moore posed for nude photos for Japanese magazines. That photo shoot led to modeling assignments, giving her a first “tiny taste of success” and an “empowering” feeling of pride—but also constant self-scrutiny about her looks, weight, and attractiveness. Suffering from low self-esteem, she often escaped into drink. Just after turning 20, Moore landed her first real movie role in Blame It on Rio; on location in Brazil, she supplemented alcohol with so much cocaine that she “nearly burned a hole through my nostrils.” Soon she was an addict. Forced to enter rehab as a condition for a part in St. Elmo’s Fire, Moore now wonders if she would have survived without that intervention; even so, she later relapsed several times. The author makes much of her love for her three daughters, who witnessed her “gradual downward spiral” into substance abuse and who refused contact with her for three years. She recounts her marriages to Freddy Moore, Bruce Willis, and Ashton Kushner; offers fresh anecdotes about her experiences on the set of movies such as Ghost and G.I. Jane; and reflects on the demons that finally led her to seek therapy.
A forthright revelation of hard-won survival.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-204953-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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