Présentation de l'éditeur
In her stunning memoir, Wendy Lawless tells the often heartbreaking tale of her unconventional upbringing with an unstable alcoholic and suicidal mother—a real-life Holly Golightly turned Mommie Dearest—and the uncommon sense of resilience that allowed her to rise above it all.
Georgann Rea didn’t bake cookies or go to PTA meetings; she wore a mink coat and always had a lit Dunhill plugged into her cigarette holder. She’d slept with too many men and a few women, and she didn’t like dogs or children. Georgann possessed the icy beauty of a Hitchcock heroine with the cold heart to match.
From living at the Dakota in 1960s Manhattan to London’s swinging town houses and beyond, Wendy Lawless and her younger sister navigated day-to-day life as their unstable and fabulously neglectful mother, Georgann, chased her delusions, suffered dramatic breakdowns, and survived suicide attempts. With clear-eyed grace and flashing wit, Lawless portrays the highs and lows of her unhinged upbringing—and how she survived her mother’s endlessly destructive search for glamour and fulfillment—in “a searing memoir that reads like a novel” (Anne Korkeakivi,
An Unexpected Guest).
Extrait
Chanel Bonfire
chapter one
THE BIG SLEEP
Perhaps because her second marriage had only lasted twenty months, or perhaps because she was having a bad hair day, in January of 1969 my mother swallowed a whole bottle of pills and called my stepfather at his hotel to say good-bye.
Although they were still legally married, he had installed himself at the Carlyle while she sued him for divorce. After he received her farewell call, he quickly finished his Gibson, telephoned the fire department, grabbed his Burberry raincoat, and jumped into a taxi. It was a time in New York when you could say to a cabdriver, “Take me to the St. Regis,” or, “Take me to the Oak Bar,” and he would just take you there—no further explanation was needed. “Take me to the Dakota,” he said to the driver.
While my mother arranged herself on her monogrammed, baby-blue satin sheets and prepared to enter the Valley of the Dolls, and my stepfather chain-smoked and shouted at the cabdriver to go faster, goddammit, I slept in the top bunk of the bed I shared with my younger sister, Robin, dreaming of hot dogs.
We had been living in the Dakota, the late nineteenth-century, neo-Gothic apartment house at the corner of Seventy-second Street and Central Park West, for about a year and a half. And while I would later think of the place—the setting for the film Rosemary’s Baby and the future and final home of John Lennon—as a glamorous backdrop for my mother’s tumultuous second marriage and divorce, at the time it was just our rather large and wonderfully spooky apartment, in which I was about to find myself awakened by my mother’s rescuers.
I was driven from my hot dog dreamworld by a plinking sound, high and silvery—the sound of something falling, like rain but heavier and coming from inside the house. I got out of bed, carefully climbed down the bunk-bed ladder past my sleeping sister, and walked out into the long hallway of our cavernous apartment. I peeked around the corner to find four firemen in big, dark coats and hats beating down Mother’s bedroom door with axes. One of them stood on a ladder breaking the glass in the transom window above the door. The shards of glass rained down on the men below and bounced off their helmets, making a tinkly noise as they hit the polished parquet floor.
I wondered why they didn’t use a key or just knock on the door like I did. They were making a big mess, which always made Mother angry. And it was very loud and Mother hated loud noises. (“It’s because I’m a Libra,” she’d explain.)
Boy, were those firemen going to get it when she opened the door, I thought. They took no notice of me. I turned and looked the other way toward the foyer and saw my stepfather in his raincoat hustling down the hall toward me. I was surprised to see him; I ha
