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Book Review: Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford
Summary:
In the early days of Hollywood, Joan Crawford became one of the first celebrities to adopt children. From the outside, it looked like her children had it all–presents, inherent fame, an apparently adoring mother. However, in Christina’s tell-all memoir, she reveals the truth behind the image. A mother obsessed with cleanliness and rigid rules. A mother who demanded her children worship her like her fans did in order to receive her love. A mother so desperate to cling to her days of fame that she attempted to beat down any glimmer of success in her children. A mother who Christina still desperately loved to the bitter end.
Review:
This memoir is a must read for anyone who thinks that having money and being a celebrity automatically makes for a good parent. Joan Crawford expected her four adopted children to be exactly what she wanted them to be instead of loving them for their uniqueness and human imperfections. Christina’s situation gradually worsens as she becomes older and starts to show glimmers of being her own person. The scenes of abuse in Christina’s childhood are the best written in the book. It is clear that she remembers them vividly and can still identify with the emotions that went through her as a child and young teenager.
*spoiler warning*
That said, Christina never manages to disentangle herself from her mother. In spite of everything her mother has done, Christina still attempts anything and everything to reconcile with her, apparently ignoring or forgetting the fact that she never did anything wrong to cause her mother’s behavior in the first place. Joan Crawford is a cruel, spiteful, evil person, and Christina naively continues to seek her love even in her 30s. This makes it more sad than most memoirs about abuse as it seems that Christina never truly overcame her abuser.
*end spoiler*
The writing, beyond the scenes of abuse, is sub-par. Christina has a tendency to ramble a bit in an uninteresting way. She also seems to not understand which parts of her life to skim over a bit. I mean, did we really need to know exactly when in a funeral her husband hands her a paper cup of water? No. Additionally, she obviously had a bad editor, as there are quite a few spelling and grammar mistakes, which is odd for a mass market paperback.
Overall, it’s worth a read if you’re into memoirs or the inside Hollywood scoop. All others should probably give it a pass though.
3 out of 5 stars
Source: Swaptree
Book Review: The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls
Summary:
Jeannette Walls, a successful writer for MSNBC, hid the real story of her childhood for years. In her memoir she finally lets the world know the truth. She was raised by an alcoholic father and an incredibly selfish artist mother, both of whom were brilliant. Yet their personal demons and quirks meant Jeannette was raised in near constant neglect and also suffered emotional and some physical abuse. The memoir chronicles her changing perception of her parents from brilliant counter-culturalists to an embarassment she wanted to escape.
Review:
Jeannette’s memoir is incredibly well-written. She manges to recapture her young perceptions at each point in the story from her idolization of her father at the age of five to her disgust at her mother at the age of fifteen. Often memoirs about bad childhoods are entirely caught up in the writer’s knowledge as an adult that this was all wrong. While this is most certainly true, it makes for a better experience for the reader to almost feel what it is like for a child to become disillusioned of her parents. Children naturally love their parents, and abused and/or neglected children are no different. It is just for them instead of just realizing their parents are human like children from normal families do, they also realize that their parents screwed them over. Jeannette subtly and brilliantly presents this realization and all the pain that comes with it. She doesn’t want to believe her father would endanger her when he’s drunk. She doesn’t want to believe that her mother makes her children eat popcorn for three days straight while she herself pigs out on all the king-sized chocolate bars she can eat. Yet Jeannette cannot escape the facts.
This memoir is also different from other bad childhood memoirs in that Jeannette never loses compassion for her parents. As her awareness grows throughout the book, she also struggles to understand how her parents ended up the way they did. [Spoiler Warning] A particularly moving scene is when the family goes to visit Jeannette’s father’s mother in spite of his protests. Jeannette walks in on her grandmother claiming to be mending her brother’s pants while they are still on him, but actually groping him. Jeannette’s reaction, after saving her brother from the groping, is to wonder if maybe this is why her father drinks so much. Maybe her grandmother did the same thing to her father, and there was no one to save him. Maybe these are really the demons he is fighting. To realize this, to even care about it after everything her father has put her through is truly remarkable. [End Spoiler]
Jeannette is an excellent writer and an incredible human being. Readers will be astounded not only at her unique, messed-up childhood but also at how she overcame it and simultaneously maintained sympathy for her parents who so wronged her. Jeannette is an inspiration in multiple ways, and her memoir is definitely worth the read.
4 out of 5 stars
Source: Library
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This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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