There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2014: In her previous memoir, Down Came the Rain, Brooke Shields described her post-partum depression so frankly and powerfully, she probably helped a lot of women, even if she did annoy fellow actor Tom Cruise, who disputed Shields’ contention that anti-depressants are helpful. The only person she might have upset with her new memoir, however, is her late mother, Teri Shields, who, on almost every page, is outed as a serious alcoholic and “a tough broad who could fight.” (Ok, onetime boyfriend, Liam Neesen doesn’t come off so great, and ex-husband Andre Agassi isn’t going to be thrilled, either—but at least Brooke was nicer to the latter than he was to her in his memoir, Open.) Still, Shields-the-daughter also praises the complicated working-class beauty she both adored and abhorred—sections about Teri fighting for her minor daughter’s rights while on the New Orleans set of “Pretty Baby” live next to suggestions that Teri might have chosen the hotel the family stayed in because of its proximity to a favorite bar. As an adult, Brooke (who as a child called legendary fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo “uncle Frankie”) rotated between estrangement from and reconciliation with her mother; today, she thinks plenty about their relationship as she and writer/producer Chris Henchy raise their two daughters. In other words, what could have been a next-generation Mommy Dearest becomes something else: a (sometimes painfully) frank account of growing up in a seriously privileged but painfully dysfunctional family and how one might possibly break such a cycle. –Sara Nelson