One More Time: A Memoir

Burnett, Carol. One More Time: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1986.
I just finished reading One More Time. maybe because i am at a stage in my life where i feel my life is over and wasted, as far as a career is concerned. At that stage, Burnett's work seems to be such a break. She is so focussed on her career. she also speaks about how she discovered herself - that she wants to be a stage artist, and nothing but a stage artist. it was completely by fluke, and she had absolutely no role models. her mother and father, were both failures and alchoholics, her grandmother (nanny) who acted as her mother figure was a manipulative woman with a hidden past. due to her terrible experiences in the past, she had become cunning and cynical, and she tried to go on breaking her daughter's confidence throughout. inspite of all these circumstances, Burnett comes up in life, she is writing to recreate her life for her children. i am touched by that gesture, a baring it all for her children that she undertakes, for she does not want them not to know her as she had not known her nanny and mother.

I see her as human when she writes - her fears before she gets on stage, the way she performs, the way she does not perform because of over-confidence once...so many things, comes out.

but, more than anything else, i like the way she bares the processes of writing to us, the letters that she wrote to others to unearth her nanny's secret life, the truth about her mother and herself - that their grandfather was actually mellon and not creighton as her nanny had made them both believe, the reconstructions of people that she does over the years...the taperecorders that she uses to record her immediate thoughts so that she could write it, and the feeling of being a spy on herself while she writes...she has been wonderful, actually!