“It permanently changed the way we think about personal behavior, and it changed laws, too.” “(The publishers) had no idea, none of us did, of the impact the book was going to have. “Up to that time, it was not a conversation people felt free to have,” says Crawford in a phone interview from her home in northern Idaho. The story of physical and emotional abuse riveted a nation the author said was unused to probing the private life of a public figure, especially a film icon, and also was unaccustomed to child abuse as a headline issue. That was the fallout, entirely positive in Crawford’s view, from her 1978 memoir of life as the adopted daughter of movie star Joan Crawford. The movie star wielding the wire hanger is gone, but “Mommie Dearest” remains, a complex cultural artifact of screen greatness and what author and filmmaker Christina Crawford calls “the conversation.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |