Shields Brooke - There was a little girl: the real story of my mother and me

A PLUME BOOK

THERE WAS A LITTLE GIRL

BROOKE SHI ELDS is an award-winning actress and a New York Times bestselling author. She starred in iconic films such as Pretty Baby, The Blue Lagoon, and Endless Love. She is a renowned model and starred in the long-running TV show Suddenly Susan and the critically acclaimed Lipstick Jungle. She has appeared on Broadway multiple times and wrote and performed her one-woman show, In My Life. She wrote the New York Times bestseller Down Came the Rain and also penned two childrens books. She lives in New York City with her husband, writer and producer Chris Henchy, and their two daughters.

Praise for There Was a Little Girl

A well-crafted and insightful read from beginning to end.... A thoughtful, poignant, and provoking story about a girl and her mom.... A remarkably clear-eyed examination.

Associated Press

This story of Brookes career as a model and actress unfolds from the perspective of an adult child of an alcoholic. Her voice in this memoir is unguarded and raw and deals head-on with the damage alcohol causes in intimate relationships. For a celebrity of her stature to write so honestly and intelligently about emotional wounds is a refreshing change. The book will appeal not only to Shieldss fans, but also to readers who seek out memoirs about surviving dysfunctional families. Brooke Shields is still our sister, just more real and imperfect.

BookPage

A raw, honest tale of a mother and daughter that will appeal not only to celebrity watchers but to mothers and daughters.

Library Journal

Shields writes with considerable reflection; shes done the hard work of making sense of the contradictions in her mother, and now we get the benefit of her sharing what shes learned.

Kirkus Reviews

1. Youve been interviewed a thousand times. Do you ever find yourself tripping into the set response in your daily life and you have to say, Wait a minute, Im not being real, Im being the persona, or Im giving them the answer that they want and that I can give easily?

My real friends never ask me the typical tabloid or PR types of questions, but sometimes I will retell a story I may have told on TV to a friend and I lapse into a bit of a showman. In storytelling, there will be times when Ill be talking to someone and I know how it works. I know where the funny is, so I will jump into that, but Im very cognizant of it. The argument can then be that Im never real, but it is actually the opposite. I am not being fake at all. I am embracing the theatrical part of myself. I just know which parts of the story will be enjoyable to people. And theyre all real parts of me, you know?

2. Do you like talking about your celebrity or your career with friends? When we met, you were probably ten years old and I was nine. We were talking about our summer, and I said I was at camp. You said you were on Mike Douglas. And I thought, Okay, thats a different kind of summer activity. But youve always had a really great group of real friends and youre a real person, which, when I think of how long youve been famous for, its shocking that theres anything real about you. Honestly, people want these stories. When someonemaybe another mother at schoolsays to you, Tell me about Blue Lagoon, is your thought something like, Okay, I have to perform this a little bit, or is it, Yeah, this is fun to talk about?

Its really fun for me to talk to people who I know Im safe with. If these conversations started at kindergarten at my childrens school, I would be thinking, Oooh, people dont know what to talk about. Its fairIm the elephant in the room. Okay, let me be the elephant and Ill be the first one to [makes elephant trumpet sound].

So now when anyone asks about my career or my work, theres absolutely no threat. Im not worried that theyre going to look at me differently. There will always be people who cant help themselves, and I know who they are and I dont fault them. People are human, and who knows how they experienced me before they met me.

3. Obviously you were very well protected by your mother. You were also normalized by Dwight-Englewood and by Princeton.

That was my moms doing, and she and I both fought for it. She did everything she could to keep my life as normal as possible and make sure I had companions around me to make me feel like a regular kid. At her memorial, one of the lawyers who had known us forever came up and said, It was unprecedented. Your mother would ask for three airline tickets. You couldnt get one ticket, but she was like, Well, Im taking her and she needs a friend. So Im taking my stepsister, Diana, taking her all over, to Japan and Manila and all these places, and I think my mom knew that was really important to me.

I always had this cant-let-them-beat-me attitude. Whether it was my moms mottos, Never let em see you sweat, or Fuck em if they cant handle it, or just my own stubbornness. Whatever it was, if I was pushed against, I just went further. And that attitude helped me stay grounded, strangely enough.

However, having my first daughter obliterated me. It took away all my power. All of a sudden I was experiencing something so foreign, which I had no response for. I had no resources to rely on. It was not simply about being the good girl, or being polite, or doing my job. A little human being was involved. It was not just me and my mom. It was me and a stranger and no mother for me. The rug was pulled out. And with the level of depression I experienced, I was just waiting to figure out how to slip away. It was so acute. Becoming a mother didnt ground me at all. At least in the beginning. I had felt so much more grounded on my own than with my baby.

4. Because you had this strong, particular kind of mother, it must have been really intimidating to suddenly have to take on the role of mother yourself.

I resented it. I truly resented it. It had nothing, strangely, to do with my baby. Because Id been spending my whole life taking care of my mother, and now my mom was not capable of helping, and there I was having to do all the mothering again. And yet, having babies was the only thing I always knew I wanted. I have always wanted a baby and I have always wanted to be a mother. And then all of a sudden I was looking at her like, What can I do for you? I needed to be mothered. I felt incapable of all of it. It was very shocking, very literal to me. But once I got help and the right medication, I became more balanced. Then it was such an escape for me to have kids because I could say no. I had an excuse. Because Im never someone who says noGod forbid I wont be likedbut suddenly I realized, they were the priority. I didnt have to show up for anybody but my children, and that in turn helped me be selfish and look to my own needs for the first time in my life.

5. I found that having kids opened up my social world a lot, and it seems like for you growing up it was just you and your mother. Youd have your fathers family who would come in, but in specific little chunks, so it wasnt like you had a normalized suburban backyard existence or even an urban lets-go-to-the-playground life. Has that been an eye-opening thing?

First it was like a shiny penny, because this real-life stuff is fun. Playdates and mommy-and-me groups and the park, and then you see the inertia of it, and the conversation becomes so vapid. Youre just talking about pacifiers and suddenly you think, Oh God, I dont want to do that. I dont fit into that. So then I considered that maybe Im more of the carry-the-kid-to-every-art-opening mom, and that worked for a while because I loved having Rowan in tow. But then that gets to be too much at times and the older they get, the more they need routine. I did the same thing with the school. I think you jump in and its all-consuming with the families and the kids and the volunteering at school events. I went in thinking I had to be ber-momthat I could have a career and be a full-time mom. You want to prove to yourself and the community that you can do it all. Eventually, over time, you realize you cant be everything all the time, but you can try to be your most. Socially it levels out as well. You go from thinking you have to be friends and liked by all the moms and then you realize you dont. You settle a bit. Ive got a solid but varied group of families as friends and I genuinely like the parents, and the kids genuinely are friends, and we all play well togetherI dont need too much more. I used to love that feeling of chewing up something in my mouth and giving it to my kid, like that mama bird. It was like a badge of honor, you know? And it was like I am better than everybody because Im cool and nurturing. Then the reality of being a parent kind of kicks in when theyre not babies anymore, and then you realize,