rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2022-07-31 02:50 pm
rachelmanija) wrote2022-07-31 02:50 pm
A Personal Memoir, by Sandy Dennis
I bought this book at a library sale for fifty cents and by accident - I thought it was a memoir by Sandy Denny the 1960s singer, not Sandy Dennis the 1960s actress. I almost donated it unread when I realized, then decided to read the first chapter just to see, as I often enjoy showbiz memoirs.
It is not a showbiz memoir. She never even mentions her film career or how she got started in acting, and mentions her career in theatre only in brief, glancing anecdotes that are about things other than acting, like how she fell in love with the set of an unnamed play she performed in on Broadway for a year. So this is another bait-and-switch book - a double bait-and-switch, at that - but a marvelous one, the kind in which what you get is different but unexpectedly much better than what you were promised.
Dennis wrote this book, which is very short, mostly while she was dying of cancer. It's partly about dying, not much at all about cancer, and mostly about her beloved cats (she had forty rescue cats), and how cats come to her; about her garden and her sadness at a nearby forest getting cut down; about strange shimmering moments, observed with great delicacy and precision but left unexplained.
Her book reminded me a bit of Ray Bradbury and a bit of Banana Yoshimoto and a bit of Tove Janssen, sometimes earthy and sometimes ineffable. What it did not remind me of was any other memoir by an actor. She says that she's always been a very secret person; few people knew she was writing a memoir, and the manuscript was only discovered after her death. The blurbs on the back, all by famous showbiz people she knew, are stunned and touched and bewildered to have read an unexpected masterpiece by someone they loved but never felt they quite knew, and whose inner life they discovered for the first time in these pages.
Content notes: Skip the first page of the chapter titled "The I Will Remember" if you don't want to read a description of a dead cat, hit by a car, that she finds and buries in her backyard.
It is not a showbiz memoir. She never even mentions her film career or how she got started in acting, and mentions her career in theatre only in brief, glancing anecdotes that are about things other than acting, like how she fell in love with the set of an unnamed play she performed in on Broadway for a year. So this is another bait-and-switch book - a double bait-and-switch, at that - but a marvelous one, the kind in which what you get is different but unexpectedly much better than what you were promised.
Dennis wrote this book, which is very short, mostly while she was dying of cancer. It's partly about dying, not much at all about cancer, and mostly about her beloved cats (she had forty rescue cats), and how cats come to her; about her garden and her sadness at a nearby forest getting cut down; about strange shimmering moments, observed with great delicacy and precision but left unexplained.
Her book reminded me a bit of Ray Bradbury and a bit of Banana Yoshimoto and a bit of Tove Janssen, sometimes earthy and sometimes ineffable. What it did not remind me of was any other memoir by an actor. She says that she's always been a very secret person; few people knew she was writing a memoir, and the manuscript was only discovered after her death. The blurbs on the back, all by famous showbiz people she knew, are stunned and touched and bewildered to have read an unexpected masterpiece by someone they loved but never felt they quite knew, and whose inner life they discovered for the first time in these pages.
Content notes: Skip the first page of the chapter titled "The I Will Remember" if you don't want to read a description of a dead cat, hit by a car, that she finds and buries in her backyard.
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So until I misread Sandy Dennis as Sandy Duncan, and then I was very confused by “while she was dying of cancer” (and even more so by the photo). I’m better now.
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That's so cool. She sounds like a good person to get to know, even posthumously.
(I know her as an actress but no more than the films I have seen her in, to the point where I didn't know about the cats.)