“For years and years my mother had known,” Field writes of her thinking then.
The moment is devastating, but it ends with the pair in an embrace, with a new understanding.
Field beams with empathetic recognition.
Credit: Invision/AP/REX/Shutterstock
“They’re from my generation, right?”
she asks, warmly.
But it’s important.
We all have to get to someplace else, I think.
It’s really, really hard."
“But even then, when she passed away, something in me would not be quieted.
Quite the opposite.”
But she initially balked at the idea.
“People came to me [saying], ‘Won’t you write a memoir?
We know who just can write it for you,'” she remembers, smirking.
“I’d go, ‘Eh, no I don’t think you know what this is.'”
She adds, “At the time, I didn’t know what it was.”
“I couldn’t understand why I felt like I was the one that was dying.”
But Sally Field the author is as present on the page as the young Sally Field she writes about.
How did I get naked?
Did I do that?
“The things you see and feel just come flying out of you and so cathartically.
You see it so clearly.”
The conversation turns to the impact of working through such a personal experience so publicly.
Fittingly, it’s where we really start talking about acting.
“Part of me feels that it’s always been out there,” she admits.
When “action” was called, Field cried uncontrollably, far beyond the script’s bounds.
“My own childhood, my own survival system, played into acting so beautifully,” she says.
She writes of reading the script forSybil, “I knew her.
She belonged to me.”
AndNorma Rae’s “struggle to stand up, her fight for respect, was the same as mine….
When she found her voice, I heard mine.”
Each role spoke to Field’s very core.
Is this common for an actor?
“I’ve always thought about this,” she quickly responds.
“It’s like it was in my DNA, somehow, to play some of these characters.”
She then considers an alternate example.
“[Was] part of his personality developed through, like,The Searchers?
I don’t know.
Certainly, acting fools with your psyche.”
“Oscars speech but she examines her heavily publicized affair with the late Burt Reynolds in great detail.
(The book was completed beforeReynolds’ deathon Sept. Field’s account is bracing.
“I don’t want to give the press any more fuel,” she says.
The #MeToo movement comes up next.
“In the era that I was raised in, it was incredibly difficult to see how to maneuver.
You just put your head down and didn’t know that you had the right to not feel humiliated.
“Why was the confidence of her youth so ephemeral?”
she asks of her mother in the book.
“Why is mine?”
“I’ve never wanted to know the answers.”
She believes, even if the book doesn’t explicitly give them, that she did find some answers.
She takes a long pause.
“No,” she admits, softly.
“I don’t know why.
I don’t know why.”
For all theshow-business intrigue, all the revelations,In Piecesis grounded by Field’s relationship with her mother.
Her time onGidgetcontrasts with the agonizing distance she feels between them.
They reconnect as Field enters single motherhood.
(Field had a third child, Sam, with her second husband, Alan Greisman.
They divorced in 1993.)
It wasn’t enough, however, to heal the wound of what happened when Sally was a child.
This filmed shortly after Margaret died.
“They were for my mother.”
But the last thing we talk about is her mother.
(“Till then, Baa.")
That’s what I felt for all of us.”
She then concludes, poignantly, “Their lives are part of mine.”
Watch any Sally Field performance and see for yourself.
