Global icon Liza Minnelli shares her story: stepping out from the long shadow of a mega-star mother and legendary film director father, fighting a lifetime battle with addiction, and emerging from it all to become an artist.
Minnelli’s account of her complicated childhood is the strongest section of her book ... It is harrowing but also wearisome stuff, a bit Liza with a zzzzz. The extended potted histories of the communist witch hunts and the AIDS epidemic don’t help.
I imagined we’d get more tales of self-destruction. What we get is more shocking, and sadder ... Is it all those lost decades of drink and drugs that account for the Wikipedia-like blandness of her memories, the many times she has to reference another’s memoir to bring specificity to her own? ... I’m not sure the story I absorbed is the story Liza wanted to tell—or maybe I got it perfectly—but the subject of this memoir, despite her lifelong war with her mother’s shadow, is still running, running, running from herself.
