Journey
A Personal Odyssey
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
As an actress, Marsha Mason has had a varied and very successful career. Winner of the Golden Globe award as best actress and a four-time Academy Award® nominee, she has worked in film (perhaps most notably in the movies Cinderella Liberty, Chapter Two, and The Goodbye Girl), television (most recently as Sherry on Frasier), and the theater (having performed in London's West End, on and off Broadway, and in regional theater around the U.S.).
While the path she followed to achieve her success was seldom an easy one, Marsha Mason never wavered in her determination. She wanted to be an actress -- that much she knew even as a young girl growing up in a modest neighborhood in St. Louis. For her, acting would be an escape, a chance to be someone other than the girl who seemed always to disappoint and anger her parents, the ticket that would take her out of their provincial, strict Catholic household and transport her to another world somewhere between reality and fantasy.
Now, in Journey, Marsha Mason retraces the path she followed out of her difficult childhood. She moved to New York City, where she worked as a waitress and go-go dancer before landing a role in the then popular daytime TV soap opera Love of Life. After that, her world started to change, as one success led to another.
The biggest change, however, came when she met Neil Simon, Broadway's most successful and powerful playwright, the creator of such long-running shows as Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple. Cast in his play The Good Doctor, Mason found herself drawn to the charismatic Simon, who was still struggling with the pain of losing his wife, Joan, to cancer. After a brief, whirlwind courtship, they married, and nothing was ever the same. The couple moved to Hollywood so Mason could pursue film work, and Simon began writing a string of films to star his new wife. Her journey had indeed taken her far, as she realized an undreamed-of level of success. There was, however, a price to pay.
The marriage to Simon ended so abruptly, and left such a major void, that for quite some time afterward Marsha Mason seemed to have neither direction nor focus in her life. Finally deciding to leave Hollywood and to undertake an entirely different career raising herbs on a ranch in New Mexico, she began a new stage of her journey -- the one that frames this very personal and involving memoir -- by packing up a lifetime of memories and setting off with friends on an odyssey that finds her today a successful farmer with a still active career as an actress.
Marsha Mason's Journey is revealing of the demands and sacrifices of the life of a successful actress, and at the same time inspiring, as she traces a lifetime spent in search of an elusive happiness. As an adult child of alcoholics, she has come to understand the forces that shaped her life and propelled her along a path that was as inevitable as it was debilitating. And now, from her present vantage point, she is able to look back with a new understanding, one that enables her to take comfort in the success she has found and find joy in learning to celebrate life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There are two journeys in Mason's emotionally raw and revealing autobiography. Framing the actress's life story is her physical move away from Los Angeles and from her stalled Hollywood career to Santa Fe, where she goes to make peace with herself in 1993, with the help of the "Two Garys" (her first husband and his longtime lover). During the move, she sifts through her life with nonlinear flashbacks in what amounts to a second, inner journey. Disconnected from her violent and alcoholic parents, Mason moved to New York City at an early age to act on stage. Her first marriage, to Gary, at 23, lasted five years. Her second marriage proved somewhat more lasting. In 1973, 22 days after auditioning for Neil Simon's The Good Doctor, she and the playwright married. Simon had lost his first wife of 20 years to cancer only three months before; his unresolved grief would haunt the marriage. Shortly after their wedding, Simon told Mason he didn't want to be married to an actress, so, with a rising career and one Oscar nomination (Cinderella Liberty) under her belt, Mason gave notice on the opening night of Richard III and didn't work until Simon wrote 1977's The Goodbye Girl for her. Her complicated, loving but hurtful and frustrating eight-year marriage to Simon is the most fascinating part of her memoir. However, Mason's piecemeal recollections can be exasperating, forcing readers to wait for more details before a complete picture forms. With years of therapy behind her, Mason demonstrates a keen sense of her own conflicting inner voices, but the pace is slowed by the extensive dialogue she attributes to each of these 12 selves (e.g., Anna, her inner child; G.A., her guardian angel). This is a heartfelt and self-effacing biography of dysfunction and recovery, not a movie star memoir--but fans will find Mason's soul-searching fascinating and her hard-earned happy ending a just reward.