Sunshine Girl: An Unexpected Life

The Emmy-winning star of ER and The Good Wife reflects on family chaos and toxic men in this thoughtful memoir. Margulies spends much of the book on her unsettled upbringing with her divorced mom, Francesca, a seeker who dragged her and her sisters back and forth across the Atlantic and had a string of sketchy boyfriends, while her father, Paul Margulies, the adman behind Alka-Seltzer’s immortal “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is” jingle, fretted from a distance. Acting later brought fame and money, but Margulies felt undermined by her toxic 10-year relationship with an actor who goes unnamed in these pages. Once rid of him, a happy marriage and motherhood ensued, along with guilt over endless hours spent away from her family on the Good Wife set. Margulies’s narrative is full of piquant anecdotes—such as the time her mother brought home a man she met at a nightclub, along with his pet monkey—and subtle, evocative character studies that suggest how her rapt attunement to her family’s mercurial personalities and self-actualizing impulses nurtured her own creative ambitions. The result is an entertaining and revealing portrait of how a young girl becomes an accomplished actor. Photos. (May)