Chanel Bonfire
A Book Club Recommendation!
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4.5 • 20 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
In this searing and darkly witty memoir, Wendy Lawless recounts her unconventional and often heartbreaking childhood with a glamorous but unstable, alcoholic, and suicidal mother—a real-life blend of Holly Golightly and Mommie Dearest—and the resilience that allowed her to survive.
Georgann Rea didn’t bake cookies or attend PTA meetings. She wore mink, smoked Dunhills from a silver holder, and moved through 1960s Manhattan society with icy elegance and reckless abandon. Beautiful, volatile, and emotionally absent, she chased romance and status while her daughters navigated a world shaped by addiction, neglect, and repeated suicide attempts.
From the Dakota in New York City to London’s swinging town houses, Wendy and her younger sister learned to read the shifting moods of a mother whose pursuit of glamour masked deep instability. With unflinching honesty and sharp intelligence, Wendy explores alcoholism, mental illness, mother-daughter trauma, and the complicated love that binds families together—even when survival requires distance.
A powerful coming-of-age memoir that reads like a novel” (Anne Korkeakivi, An Unexpected Guest) about dysfunctional family dynamics, childhood resilience, and rising above emotional chaos, this is the story of a daughter who refused to be defined by her mother’s unraveling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship grows progressively worse with deepening alcohol use and emotional denial as depicted in L.A. actress Lawless's wrought and engaging memoir of growing up in the late 1960s. Lawless's mother, Georgann, was an orphan adopted by a wealthy, abusive couple in Kansas City, Mo., or at least that's what she recounted in moments of sadistic punishment to her own daughters, Wendy and Robin. Having left the girls' father, a Midwestern actor, for the glamorous older Broadway director Oliver Rea, who installed the broken family in the Dakota apartment building in Manhattan in 1968, then largely neglected them, Georgann lived off alimony and the largess of boyfriends, leaving the girls in the care of nannies and fancy schools. Georgann went from playing the Park Avenue socialite to Sloan Square glam girl, when they moved to London in 1971, to Connecticut Yankee housewife, when they relocated to the suburbs of Cambridge in the late 1970s, and the two sisters had to learn how to be resilient at new schools and in social situations, and, above all, to keep people from knowing the truth about their erratic, suicidal, alcoholic mother, who even lied about their real father and denied the girls access to him for 10 years. As the elder, the author acted as her mother's enabler and nurse, and with great hindsight conveys her early despair.
Customer Reviews
Wow
As the 65 yr old daughter of a narcissist mother I understood the daughter too well. The perfect, polite, smart, mature daughter that parented her mother. It was sad and funny and hard to read at times. I feel like I could have coffee with Wendy and share some stories ☹️but they might scare the other folks 😂. Not a happy book but a well written chronicle of a life lived with disfunction, abuse and alcoholism that is all too familiar to some of us.
Great memoir
Wendy survived terrible things and shared her life with us in this great memoir.