In Pieces

November 5, 2018
Actress Field’s candid memoir exposes her constant loneliness and lifelong struggle to understand herself and her relationships with others. Field writes about her early family life growing up around Los Angeles, which included being sexually abused by her stepfather beginning at age 12, and maintaining an uneasy relationship with her alcoholic mother. She tells of her early acting career and her popular sitcom roles in Gidget and The Flying Nun when she was 17 and 20 respectively, and reveals that she hated the script for The Flying Nun and initially refused the part. Her stepfather bullied her into taking the role, which she disliked throughout its three-year run. At 22 in 1968, Field married her high school boyfriend. The marriage ended six years later, and it was then that Field met Burt Reynolds while filming Smokey and the Bandit. The three-year romantic relationship with Reynolds was unhealthy from the beginning: “Gently, Burt began to housebreak me, teaching me what was allowed and what was not.” Field’s stories about the earlier years of her career entertain, but the descriptions of her more recent projects feels rushed, as she barely mentions her roles in Steel Magnolias, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Forrest Gump. Ultimately, Fields paints a moving, complex self-portrait.

Starred review from September 15, 2018
Sally Field loved Gidget's other side of the glass world because her early 1960s TV character had a kind and reliable father, the stark opposite of Field's sexually predatory stepfather. In her first book, a memoir as soulful, wryly witty, and lyrical as it is candid and courageous, Field recounts the prolonged abuse she survived by creating a safe place where I could toss all the feelings I didn't understand. Field's stoicism was rooted in her love for her mother (who was always glowing like honey in a glass jar ), and it was her mother's death that inspired this eye-opening and deeply affecting chronicle. As Field vividly shares behind-the-scene tales about her Academy Award-winning role in Norma Rae ( If I could play her, I could be me ), her Emmy-winning performance in Sybil (which opened a national dialogue about child abuse and mental illness), and her indelible performance as Mary Todd Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, among many other performances, she reveals the damaging relationships and unending demands she endured, her battle to free herself from the typecasting her early sitcom success bestowed, and her revelations at the Actors Studio, where All the pieces, the voice, the parts of me came together. Arresting in its dark disclosures, vitality, humor, and grace, Field's deeply felt and beautifully written memoir illuminates the experiences and emotions on which she draws as an exceptionally charismatic, empathic, and powerful artist. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Sally Field is beloved, which is pull enough, but the struggles she reveals, especially in light of the #MeToo movement, are galvanizing and will be avidly discussed on every form of media.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)