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.
It seemed likely that in her memoir, Minnelli would just keep singing her hits. However, the first pages of Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! instantly make it clear that she has something new to say ... Arranging her accomplishments on a single plane of vision is almost impossible, but what emerges in the attempt is a richly ouroboric body of work ... Unfortunately, the bulk of the memoir is about addiction. Minnelli discusses her substance use more candidly than she ever has before ... The title page of the memoir lists three co-authors, including the entertainer Michael Feinstein, and they’ve clearly done heavy spackling to fill out Minnelli’s recollections ... We want to know about Liza Minnelli’s life, but we were there for it. We got to see the best part.
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.
