My Extraordinary Ordinary Life

For Oscar-winning actress Spacek growing up in her beloved East Texas, family and simplicity were the focus. “All the things that are most important to me, I had before I left that little town,” she writes. Spacek’s first love, as she explains in this warm narrative, is actually singing, not acting, and as a teenager in the late 1960s, she moved to New York, helped by her cousin, Rip Torn, aspiring to be a folk singer. For every false start—working on the soundtrack for a Warhol film and getting cast in a Broadway musical, projects that fell apart—she found a little luck. She recorded a song that made Billboard’s Top 100 (“John, You’ve Gone Too Far This Time”) and became the face of Chanel No. 5 for a season despite only being five foot two. Just when she was giving up her dream of being “the next Joni Mitchell,” Spacek landed her first role in a forgettable film. But it got her a meeting with Badlands director Terrence Malick. The movie, where she also met her future husband, Jack Fisk, was transformative for her, professionally and personally. Although Spacek went on to work with such legends as Robert Altman and David Lynch, and earned six Academy Award nominations, it’s the home she created in Virginia that inspires her. Like a folk song, Spacek’s storytelling is tender and unhurried. (May)