The bloom’s off this rose
SEND YOURSELF ROSES:
Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles
By Kathleen Turner
272 pp. Springboard Press $24.99
Reviewed by Donna Davis
Several years ago The Playwrights’ Center of San Francisco asked me to be in a staged reading of a new play. I was happy to participate, but after the first rehearsal I withdrew from the project. The script was not a play, from my point of view; it had no form, the characters were not believable, and the dialog was unconvincing. The playwright protested that I had to be mistaken. She knew the dialog was good because it was all transcribed from actual conversations in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. She was apparently unaware of the distinction between reporting and art. Send Yourself Roses, Kathleen Turner’s memoir, reminded me of that experience.
I was eager to read this book because I enjoy Turner’s work as an actor. She creates varied characters with truthfulness and conviction. Watching her on stage, I also had a clear sense of her own personality’s being engaging, and, judging by this book, it is. She has enthusiasm, humor, intelligence, and some measure of objectivity.
The subtitle of Send Yourself Roses is “Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles.” This is unpretentious and promising, and there are some gems in the book, mostly related to specifics of her work. There are also many pages of what appears to be an effort to make the reader like her, and in my case at least, it was a failed effort. I liked her better before I read the book.
My impression is that most of the text is transcribed from conversations with Gloria Feldt, the friend who helped her write the book, just as it was in the play I withdrew from. I believe I would like both of these women, but I don’t think either one is a writer. The book is poorly organized, repetitious, and, for me, often boring, even though there are exuberant sections that hold one’s attention. I am admittedly a reader with a bias—I am also a theatre worker. I wanted to know more about how she worked and with whom she worked; I wanted production anecdotes and a fuller discussion of her approach to acting, directing and teaching.
A significant part of the book is about how challenging it is to live with and, even more impressively, work with rheumatoid arthritis. Powerful as that material is, its effectiveness is undercut by the helter-skelter quality of the writing. Turner describes the physical challenge of going on the set or the stage while in great pain, but her explanation of why she didn’t want her co-workers to know about the illness is unclear and unconvincing.
The effectiveness of many good lines is blunted by surrounding them with too much explanation, as if she doesn’t trust the reader to get her point. In writing about dealing with her illness and the drugs that were damaging to her mental health, she said, “I was projecting my struggle onto other people and finding that they came up short.” This is a clear statement of the problem and of her understanding of it, but it is overshadowed by the elaboration which precedes and follows it.
Turner is most captivating when she is specific about her work. In writing about a production of Gemini, she says, “I kept rehearsing and working on it, but I just couldn’t get this scene right. One night on the stage ... it came to me that I was sabotaging my own performance because I so wanted the audience to like me and not to think I was anything like that girl! ... I had two choices: to be liked or to be a good actress. I chose acting.” This book would be more satisfying if she had applied the same criterion to her memoir.
The alienating factor, for me, was that Turner tells the reader over and over what kind of person she is. She is strong, she is courageous, she has great integrity, she is a risk-taker, she is beautiful, she is adventurous, she is honest, she is devoted to her daughter, she goes after what she wants. All of these things are true, but she didn’t need to tell us so because the content of her stories makes it all clear. Ultimately, it became a case of the lady protesting too much, which made the whole book feel like an effort to send herself roses.
Donna Davis is an actor, director, and drama coach in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more about Donna at her website.
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