Page 45 - The Costco Connection - October 2018
P. 45
SALLY’S STORY
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 40
n , on Sally Field’s
th I
birthday, her mother passed away. The death
loosed something in Field: a desire to under-
stand the pieces of herself. Her path to self-
discovery began with writing. Over the course
of seven years, she shaped those words into
the memoir In Pieces.
In the book she oers a look at her child-
hood—growing up with her mother, Margaret
“Baa” Mahoney, a studio contract actress; Jock
Mahoney, her stuntman stepfather; and an
older brother and younger half sister.
She also describes falling in love with acting
as a teenager (it was the one place where she
could hear her own voice); her early television
roles as Gidget, and as Sister Bertrille on The
Flying Nun; and her award-winning work in
Sybil, Norma Rae and Places in the Heart.
But In Pieces is no typical tell-all. At its heart, Costco Connection: Can you talk me through
it’s a mother-daughter story eshed out with the process of why you wrote this book?
details of the era of Field’s youth, including the Sally Field: I’ve always been keeping journals.
work necessary to have the career she wanted, I’ve taken adult creative writing classes at UCLA,
MeToo moments decades before the move- but I never really knew what I was doing. Then,
ment started and a desire to understand her when my mother passed away, I felt this urgency
past, even if it meant sharing personal details. to understand something I couldn’t see, like
When the Connection met with her in something in me was festering and I didn’t know
her Pacic Palisades, California, home, Field, where it was. I thought I had done all the things
a Costco member, was all casual ease in jeans I was supposed to do. I’d had those conversations,
and a white top, and just as engaging—and and yet, I couldn’t rest.
engaged—as you would hope she’d be. As we Serendipitously, a good friend of mine is the
sat in her sunny living room, Field talked about co-founder of the Omega Institute, which is a
In Pieces, the new territory of being an author fabulous organization in upstate New York. [She]
and where writing and acting intersect. called me and said, “Are you coming?” I said,
“Absolutely, I’m coming.”
She said, “Great, because I want you to give
the keynote address this year.” I said, “I can’t do
that. I have nothing to say.” She said, “Yes, you do.”
42 Costco Connection OCTOBER 2018
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