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Chanel Bonfire
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Published:
Gallery Books 2013
Status:
Checked Out
Description
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).
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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
01/08/2013
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781451675382
ASIN:
B007EDY9Y4
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Wendy Lawless. (2013). Chanel Bonfire. Gallery Books.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Wendy Lawless. 2013. Chanel Bonfire. Gallery Books.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Wendy Lawless, Chanel Bonfire. Gallery Books, 2013.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Wendy Lawless. Chanel Bonfire. Gallery Books, 2013.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Grouped Work ID:
28c9b868-29ad-696c-a3f6-ca0716800908
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Needs Update?:
No
Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 18:56:43
Date Updated:
Jun 12, 2018 18:56:43
Last Metadata Check:
May 21, 2023 10:38:21
Last Metadata Change:
May 14, 2023 10:59:14
Last Availability Check:
Mar 24, 2024 10:31:34
Last Availability Change:
May 23, 2023 05:51:38
Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
Mar 28, 2024 02:11:39

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      • bioText: Wendy Lawless is an actress who has appeared on television, in regional theater, Off-Broadway in David Ives's Obie-winning play All in the Timing, and on Broadway in The Heidi Chronicles. Her work has appeared in Redbook magazine, on Powells.com, and in the local Los Angeles press. She lives in California with her screenwriter husband and their two children.
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shortDescription
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...
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Chanel Bonfire
fullDescription
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).
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reviews
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        November 5, 2012
        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. Agent, Robert Guinsler, Sterling Lord.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        November 1, 2012
        The eldest daughter of a disturbed socialite details a 1970s childhood in the shadow of excess and mental illness. "Even half-dead, Mother was beautiful," writes Lawless, who, as a child, watched her mother suffer an intentional Seconal overdose. The author's dour memoir of life with Georgann Rea doesn't get much sunnier. Rea's premature, unsatisfying marriage to theater actor James Lawless bore two daughters and instigated relocations to North Carolina and then Minneapolis, where Mother melodramatically pronounced her newfound love for Broadway producer Oliver Rea. But he soon abandoned Georgann, leaving her to dejectedly stalk their apartment "in a diaphanous, white Dior negligee, smoking, with a glass of something on the rocks in her hand." The sale of their flat afforded the family a swanky Park Avenue address. However, as a swinging single, Georgann, a larger-than-life, almost cartoonish personality who hijacks much of the memoir's sentimentality, ushered in a new age for herself, Lawless and her sister Robin. She entertained nonstop bed partners, fired the nanny, alienated her ex-husband and generally showboated herself throughout the elite communities of Manhattan, Europe and Boston. The product of a fatally flawed role model who perfected the cruel art of "playing dead," Lawless and her sister miraculously matured and went on to live fulfilling lives amid Georgann's excessively reckless, grandiose attention-getting antics. Mother's "psychotic" diagnosis comes as no surprise toward the end of this melancholy narrative. Frequently entertaining chronicle of a daughter's sad, detached upbringing--but this story's all about the mother.

        COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity
33
publisher
Gallery Books
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