The Real Story of My Mother and Me
October 13, 2014
Shields was prompted by the death of her mother, Teri, in 2012, at age 79, to do some defensive soul-searching about their complicated, interdependent relationship. In this conversational, limpid effort, the actress and former model traces her mother’s life—starting with Teri’s working-class Newark, N.J., upbringing and distant parents—as well as her own. As a beautiful, lively young woman working at odd jobs in New York City, Teri met and briefly married a well-connected scion of Italian aristocrats who was eight years her junior; their only child, Brooke, was born in 1965. From her first modeling job for Ivory soap as a toddler to her heyday as the poster girl for Calvin Klein, Shields, with her distinctive “European look,” let her mother make decisions for her, without much thought to a “career” but with an eye to money and trips they took together. Some of those decisions were highly criticized, such as her starring at age 11 as a prostitute in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby. Shields admits to feeling “abandoned” when her mother drank, and eventually the actress found some independence by attending Princeton. Some degree of self-awareness emerges, though Shields’s prose is lackluster.