Book Review

In Pieces by Sally Field 

Reviewed by Miriam Stone 

Learning Resource and Access Specialist 

Sally Field was introduced to the American public in 1965 playing the title role in the comedy series Gidget. Gidget was a teen age girl growing up near the beach in California. For a half hour every week, we were transported to a place of sun and surf, beautiful bodies, human beings actually named Moondoggie and days in which 23 of every 24 hours were nothing short of wonderful. Then Field wrote a book and she blew that scenario so far out of the water that we will never again be able to pretend that life is a beach.

Her early memories are of her stepfather, Jock Mahoney, a closet pedophile, sexually molesting her over and over. She was forced to become complicit in this secret act because if she told, he would do it to her sister. She married her childhood sweetheart, with whom she had two children, but instead of finding happiness, she found that she traded one abusive relationship for another one. This pattern repeated as she went from one man to another. Her most famous liaison was with Burt Reynolds about whom she said…..well, I’ll let you read that in the book.

Field sees herself as a victim and although this work is fairly depressing and you may want to stop reading, you can’t. You have to go on, hoping that the next page will bring some joy into her life. Instead, this work reads like one long therapy session in which the author keeps missing the point. She doesn’t speak of the good things that her career has given to her. In fact, she has only expressed happiness one time, in her now famous Academy Awards speech in which she said, “You like me. You really like me.”

Thomas Jefferson said “honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.” These are the honest experiences of Sally Field as she remembers them. Since a lot of the people she speaks about in this book are no longer living, we must accept the truth of her statements. The question has been raised as to the purpose of this book. We can only think that it is something that Field needs to say and hope that by saying it, it gives her some measure of satisfaction.

She emerges as one of the unhappiest people that ever lived. There may be some bright spots in this work, but they are so brief, it is easy to miss them. This is a Sally Field that the public never saw and it is a tribute to her acting ability that we are only now let into her world.

One interesting thing about this book – there were almost 1,300 reviews published on Amazon and the reviews were either very positive or very negative, nothing in between. Although the positive reviews far outweighed the negative, everyone who read this book had an opinion about what they had read. Not a lot of books have the ability to do that.