Page 48 - The Costco Connection - October 2018

SALLY’S STORY
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 43

“ [Writing is] like putting all
the pieces of yourself on a piece
CC: Does having a book published feel like a of paper. It allows you to
risk on par with risks you’ve taken in acting?
SF: This feels bigger, because it’s personal. In hear all of the di erent sides
a lm, depending on the role, you do your work of yourself.”—Sally Field
and you can be very raw and vulnerable, but
there’s also a whole lot of other people responsi-
ble for it. [With] this there’s nobody to hide
behind. It’s nobody but me.

CC: You’ve kept journals all of your life. Why
has that been important to you?
SF: I think it’s important to write, no matter
what. Keeping journals of your thoughts or
your frustrations, or just inging yourself on
a page, even if it makes no sense and no one
will ever see it, it’s so important for your own
health. It helps you sort yourself out.
It’s like putting all the pieces of yourself
out on a piece of paper, because we’re all in FAR LEFT: © JOHN RUSSO; LEFT: COURTESY OF SALLY FIELD
pieces, even if you had the most perfect of
childhoods. It allows you to hear all of the
dierent sides of yourself. When you embrace
that, you go, “Oh, I don’t feel so scared any-
more. It’s just fear. It’s going to be ne.”

CC: Early in the book you wonder whether
your grandmother “spent her life seeking the CC: They say to be a good writer you need to
forgiveness” for things she and her daughters read good writers. I wondered if reading good
never discussed. You have three grown sons. scripts throughout your career served you well
Does the silence stop with you? in the writing process.
SF: I think it is a conversation with myself that SF: Screenwriting is such a dierent animal,
I needed to have, because I was writing it for even though I have been lucky enough to read
seven years. It became an obsession. Not know- some exquisite screenplays that would just
ing where it would take me, not knowing really take your breath away.
what I was looking for and certainly with no I remember one of the rst books I read
clear idea that I was going to publish this. I was Gone with the Wind. It was so powerful to
think it allowed me to be as raw as some of it me, because it was a female character who was
is because I never had an idea of it being on angry. It was my late adolescence and I could
a bookshelf anywhere. not own how deeply angry I was. I could see
I would talk to [my youngest son, Sam,] a woman who used this anger so beautifully.
about the book constantly. My older two sons, Since then, books and words are hugely
Eli and Peter, read it for the rst time maybe important to me.
three months ago. What I saw was interesting:
rst of all how frightened I was to have them CC: In the epilogue you write that you asked
read it and how lovingly they all received it. I your mother to haunt you. Has she visited you?
think they allowed it to open a new dialogue SF: No, but oddly I realize maybe it isn’t
between us. haunting, it’s that she never really left. I
I do realize that it isn’t just women who became aware of it the other day. My middle
get handed down history. In a lot of ways, this son, Eli, [and his wife] decided to move to
inability to speak out, inability to talk about Vancouver, British Columbia. I found myself
things, to recognize that something in you is feeling like Baa was with me. I found myself
damaged and hurting … is just as prevalent in saying, “We’ll go up there with him,” because
little boys and men as it is in women. that’s what she would say: “Oh, take me with
you.” I just feel like she’s with me dierently
than I felt when I started this seven years ago,
when I felt a real absence of her.

OCTOBER 2018 Costco Connection 45

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