Chanel Bonfire

November 5, 2012
A dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship grows progressively worse with deepening alcohol use and emotional denial as depicted in L.A. actress Lawless's wrought and engaging memoir of growing up in the late 1960s. Lawless's mother, Georgann, was an orphan adopted by a wealthy, abusive couple in Kansas City, Mo., or at least that's what she recounted in moments of sadistic punishment to her own daughters, Wendy and Robin. Having left the girls' father, a Midwestern actor, for the glamorous older Broadway director Oliver Rea, who installed the broken family in the Dakota apartment building in Manhattan in 1968, then largely neglected them, Georgann lived off alimony and the largess of boyfriends, leaving the girls in the care of nannies and fancy schools. Georgann went from playing the Park Avenue socialite to Sloan Square glam girl, when they moved to London in 1971, to Connecticut Yankee housewife, when they relocated to the suburbs of Cambridge in the late 1970s, and the two sisters had to learn how to be resilient at new schools and in social situations, and, above all, to keep people from knowing the truth about their erratic, suicidal, alcoholic mother, who even lied about their real father and denied the girls access to him for 10 years. As the elder, the author acted as her mother's enabler and nurse, and with great hindsight conveys her early despair. Agent, Robert Guinsler, Sterling Lord.

November 1, 2012
The eldest daughter of a disturbed socialite details a 1970s childhood in the shadow of excess and mental illness. "Even half-dead, Mother was beautiful," writes Lawless, who, as a child, watched her mother suffer an intentional Seconal overdose. The author's dour memoir of life with Georgann Rea doesn't get much sunnier. Rea's premature, unsatisfying marriage to theater actor James Lawless bore two daughters and instigated relocations to North Carolina and then Minneapolis, where Mother melodramatically pronounced her newfound love for Broadway producer Oliver Rea. But he soon abandoned Georgann, leaving her to dejectedly stalk their apartment "in a diaphanous, white Dior negligee, smoking, with a glass of something on the rocks in her hand." The sale of their flat afforded the family a swanky Park Avenue address. However, as a swinging single, Georgann, a larger-than-life, almost cartoonish personality who hijacks much of the memoir's sentimentality, ushered in a new age for herself, Lawless and her sister Robin. She entertained nonstop bed partners, fired the nanny, alienated her ex-husband and generally showboated herself throughout the elite communities of Manhattan, Europe and Boston. The product of a fatally flawed role model who perfected the cruel art of "playing dead," Lawless and her sister miraculously matured and went on to live fulfilling lives amid Georgann's excessively reckless, grandiose attention-getting antics. Mother's "psychotic" diagnosis comes as no surprise toward the end of this melancholy narrative. Frequently entertaining chronicle of a daughter's sad, detached upbringing--but this story's all about the mother.

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