I'd recently seen some media of Brooke Shields talking about her childhood, so she was in the back of my mind when I was hunting for another audiobook to listen to on my commute. Memoirs read by the author are some of my favorite audiobooks, so I was happy to pick up There Was a Little Girl (2015) by Brooke Shields and get to listening. In addition, halfway through this book, my husband and I watched Pretty Baby, a Netflix documentary about Brooke Shields.
In There Was a Little Girl, Shields writes about her childhood, her acting gigs as she grew up, her marriage to Andre Agassi, her second marriage, and how her career has changed and matured over the years. But the focus of this book is on Shield's relationship with her mother--something I knew nothing about before reading this book.
Shield's parents were divorced when she was very young, and although Shields still saw her father, she had a much closer relationship with her mother. It was her mother who got her into modeling and acting, and the two were inseparable. In fact, the two were enmeshed. Shields' mother was an alcoholic. Shields spent most of her life, including her childhood, navigating around her mother's drunkenness. Yet, Shields deeply loved her mother and also didn't want her simply dismissed as a bad, alcoholic mother.
I thought this book was very interesting and informative. I knew some of the films and shows Shields has been in, and I knew she had been married to Andre Agassi, but other than that I knew nothing about her. It was interesting to get her perspective, and her book felt very honest and readable.
One thing I found interesting was how Shields defended some of the choices her mom made for her when she was a child. Pretty Baby was a movie made in 1978, a very different time. But I remember stumbling upon it when I wasn't much older than Shields was when she filmed it. And I was disturbed. She was a child who was being sold. She kissed a man and she was nude. But Shields defends it--although she did say she would never want her daughters in a similar movie. It is probably the most artistic film she's been in and she's proud of it. She also said that she was too young to even understand how she was being sexualized. It wasn't sexual to her. She also defended the Calvin Klein ads saying that she had to memorize a lot of lines and the worst of it was taken out of context. I don't buy either explanation although I can believe that Shields didn't find it sexual.
College was the first time that Shields was able to separate, even a little, from her mother. Shields devoted herself into getting into Princeton, and she gained admission after an interview that went very well. Shields did say that she got in despite being a favorite star, which I don't buy completely. It sounds like she had a good interview that helped her, but she wouldn't have even gotten that late interview if she wasn't a star. Anyway, college allowed Shields to start thinking for herself, and her fellow students were very good about not telling the press about her.
Shields was only able to separate from her mother with the help of Andre Agassi. It was something of a sneak attack where his team came in and emptied out the building Shields and her mother shared. But it turned out that Agassi was controlling in his own way, with his own demons. They were not right for each other and split up. FYI, I may be interested in reading Agassi's book just to see the other side of this relationship.
Shields book continues through the death of her mother, and how it affected Shields. I thought the book was an honest, interesting glimpse into the unusual life of a child star.
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