Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by Liza Minnelli
Autobiography is in everything we choose to show of ourselves. It’s also, in ghostlike photonegative, in everything we don’t or can’t say. You can’t run away from you. And actors, who run from themselves for a living, can be counted on to produce the most withholding and also unintentionally revealing memoirs. What they don’t, won’t, or aren’t able to tell us about themselves speaks volumes.
Add to that hall of mirrors the labyrinthine confusions of addiction, fame, natural and unnatural forgetting, and the persistent denials of self and others so common to sufferers of childhood neglect (which tends to be the best possible training ground for a life on stage or screen), and it can often feel that an actor’s or singer’s life, no matter how spectacular in lived reality, can itself be summed up as follows: I performed, therefore I am.
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