Shy by Mary Rogers

This is a good read as memoirs go and I might have enjoyed it even more if I was a bigger fan of musical theater. The author had a modestly successful career in musical theater and became a best-selling author in 1972 with “Freaky Friday,” a young adult novel about a mother and daughter magically swapping bodies that spawned two movie adaptations and two sequels. By virtue of being Richard Rodgers’s daughter (of Rogers and Hammerstein fame) and Stephen Sondheim’s close friend, she was a privileged, as well as astute, observer of pivotal moments in the American musical theater. Blunt candor, with a side of sardonic insight, is the book’s operating principle, beginning with what she has to say about her parents, but including what she writes about herself, her siblings, her relationships, and her spouses. She is more generous with her offspring, who were the only ones still alive when this is published almost a decade after her death. She felt unloved by her mother, who saw her as competition, and felt her father was hypercritical disliked her broad smile, winced at her loud laugh, and frequently told her she was fat. He was chronically unfaithful, a closet alcoholic and her mother was desperate to stay married to him, so a less than ideal home life. She married young to a closeted gay man who beat her, so not a safe landing pad, but she did find long lasting love, which survived some things that often break up marriages, and there are a lot of insights about how to survive such things that are generously bestowed on the the reader.