Just Jennifer

Chanel Bonfire by Wendy Lawless (Gallery, January 2013)

In her memoir, actress Wendy Lawless writes about growing up in the seventies and eighties with a Joan Crawford like mother.  Gerogann Rae was adopted into an abusive home in Kansas and her main goal became to escape her life; she married Jimmy Lawless, an actor, at a young age and gave birth to her daughters, Wendy and Robin (Robbie) within two years of each other and followed her young husband to North Carolina and then to Michigan while he pursued his career.  Georgann quickly became bored with her lifestyle and married millionaire Oliver Rae who moved her and her daughters to the Dakota Hotel on the Upper West Side in Manhattan and provided a good life for the girls, including private school, but again, Georgann grew disinterested and filed for divorce, moving the girls across town, but not before she made her first of several suicide attempts.  The emotional and occasional physical, abuse continued as the girls grew into teenagers, living in London and Connecticut, and finally Boston.  Wendy, the older child, tried to protect Robbie whose clashes with Georgann were more often and more violent than Wendy’s.  As Wendy grew to realize that she was not responsible for her mother, and that her mother had lied to her many times over the years, she sought help and began to build a life for herself, though she would carry the scars of the damage her mother had inflicted for many years.

Told with brutal honesty, Wendy juxtaposes her abusive upbringing with a lifestyle that, by all appearances, was one of a privileged child and teenager.  She spares no details as she describes her fight to regain  some semblance of normalcy and to escape the cycle of abusive and self-hatred.