If you come to her memoir, In Pieces, expecting to meet a plucky Sally Field desperate to be liked, you will not find her. Written by the actor over seven years, without the aid of a ghostwriter (a crutch often used by celebrity authors), this somber, intimate and at times wrenching self-portrait feels like an act of personal investigation — the private act of a woman, now 71, seeking to understand how she became herself, and striving to cement together the shards of her psyche that have been chipped and shattered over the course of her life ... Throughout In Pieces, she assesses herself with a clear and critical eye, often revealing unappealing parts of herself — including her temper, her insecurity, her absences from her sons’ lives while she pursued her work, her role in her two failed marriages and her flares of impatience with her mother, who dedicated the last years of her life to helping take care of Field’s sons — with minimal rationalization, sentiment or self-pity. It may not make you like her, but by the end, what we think about her also seems quite beside the point.
When I read Sally Field’s memoir, In Pieces, the first time, I didn’t move from my sofa for three hours. After I finished, I picked up my phone, which was pinging with texts from fellow Parnassus staffers asking, How’s the book? What did you think? It took me a minute to figure out how to respond. Then I texted back one word, in all caps: SURPRISING ... Field’s memoir shines brightest and stuns most when she writes about family. Revealing disturbing events from her childhood and how they impacted her life, she opens up a recurring theme of damage and healing ... Reading In Pieces feels like having a glass of wine with a wise, kind, funny friend who isn’t afraid to get real with you about the hard stuff.
Field’s memoir takes readers through almost seven decades but ends as it begins, with her mother. As Baa became ill, Field was cast as Mary Todd Lincoln, filming 'Lincoln' with Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis ... Field the writer purposely adheres to her story, which she says is about her relationship with her mother and her development as an actress.
The title of Sally Field’s memoir, In Pieces ... could just as easily refer to the book itself: chunks that never form a coherent narrative ... Field’s writing is often disorganized and baffling ... But she writes with passion about the day when, after a breakdown on the set of The Flying Nun, co-star Madeleine Sherwood dragged Field to the Actors Studio, to a class for working performers ... The pieces of her life, though, remain puzzling, especially in the memoir’s rushed conclusion, which zips through four decades in fewer than 40 pages ... Like diary entries presented semi-chronologically, the book’s pieces just hang there, especially when it comes to men ... Field...doesn’t explore why she gravitated toward men who used her.
In her first book, a memoir as soulful, wryly witty, and lyrical as it is candid and courageous, Field recounts the prolonged abuse she survived by creating 'a safe place where I could toss all the feelings I didn’t understand.' Field’s stoicism was rooted in her love for her mother, and it was her mother’s death that inspired this eye-opening and deeply affecting chronicle ... Arresting in its dark disclosures, vitality, humor, and grace, Field’s deeply felt...written memoir illuminates the experiences and emotions on which she draws as an exceptionally charismatic, empathic, and powerful artist.
