Here is the blurb from the dust jacket:
"On the deepest, most personal level, I needed to work out who my parents were and what they had been to me. I knew that I couldn't get on with my work and the rest of my life until I had.
I had written so much about inner peace, balance, and harmony in cosmic terms, when all of it really came down to fallout from Mom and Dad on this earth. What a joke. You think you have a handle on God, the Universe, and the Great White Light until you go home for Thanksgiving. In an hour, you realize how far you've got to go and who is the real turkey"
At the age of fifty-seven, after nearly four decades in Hollywood, Academy Awardwinning actress and entertainer Shirley MacLaine is still moving us to laughter and tears in major film roles, still high-kicking on stage in live performances -and still searching for the truth within herself. In this, her most intimate memoir yet, she examines with courage and candor her feelings about aging, relationships, work, her parents, her daughter, and her own future as an artist and as a woman.
"There was a hidden agenda in our family. Warren and I were not only driven to fulfill our parents' unrealized dreams but, in the process, to prove Mother correct in her aspirations for us in spite of our father's fears and his harshly critical attitude toward our efforts .... We had to do it. We bad to be there. We couldn't disappoint her, or the audience, or ourselves .... In other words, there was no way Warren and I wouldn't become stars."
In Dance While You Can, Shirley examines the powerful familial forces that have shaped her life, legacies of a strong-willed mother whose own longing to be acknowledged propelled Shirley and her brother, Warren Beatty, to success, and of a father whose fear of failure inspired her always to prepare for the worst. She reflects on her relationship with her daughter, Sachi, and their separation during some of Sachi's childhood years spent in Japan with her father. With affection and humor she recalls her own formative years in a Hollywood that made magic, not just money, learning her craft beside legendary stars like Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford, and Debbie Reynolds, whose life in part inspired Shirley's bravura role in Postcards from the Edge.
Finally, Shirley writes with honesty and incisive detail about her decision to return to the stage with a new show. Finding it both frightening and liberating, she reveals how it felt to lose her footing, and her confidence, when a series of devastating injuries forced her into knee surgery-and how she grew from the insecurity of aging and emotional anguish to stand on her own two feet with a new, more mature and centered perspective.
Illustrated with thirty-two pages of personal family photographs, here is a rich, revealing look at a woman in the prime of her life and at the height of her powers as an artist. Astonishingly frank about what it is to be alone at this time in her life; her sexual identity and sometimes wobbly self-esteem; how she has struggled to cope with fears of success and failure; how she deals with creative pressures; and her constant quest for understanding her deeper identity-this is the down-to-earth book Shirley MacLaine's readers have long awaited.
SHIRLEY MacLAINE'S accounts of her professional and personal journeys have each been national and international bestsellers, beginning with the publication of Don't Fall Off the Mountain in 1970. Five additional autobiographical works have followed: You Can Get Therefrom Here (1975), Out on a Limb (1983), Dancing in the Light (1985), It's All in the Playing (1987), and most recently, Going Within (1989).
Back cover photo of Shirley MacLaine, her mother Mrs. Kathlyn Beaty, her daughter Sachi Parker, and her dogs Sultan and Shinook. (1988 by Clyde Wm Smith. Photographed at Shirley's home near Seattle, Washington.
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