Chanel Bonfire: A Memoir

A dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship grows progressively worse with deepening alcohol use and emotional denial as depicted in L.A. actress Lawless's wrought and engaging memoir of growing up in the late 1960s. Lawless's mother, Georgann, was an orphan adopted by a wealthy, abusive couple in Kansas City, Mo., or at least that's what she recounted in moments of sadistic punishment to her own daughters, Wendy and Robin. Having left the girls' father, a Midwestern actor, for the glamorous older Broadway director Oliver Rea, who installed the broken family in the Dakota apartment building in Manhattan in 1968, then largely neglected them, Georgann lived off alimony and the largess of boyfriends, leaving the girls in the care of nannies and fancy schools. Georgann went from playing the Park Avenue socialite to Sloan Square glam girl, when they moved to London in 1971, to Connecticut Yankee housewife, when they relocated to the suburbs of Cambridge in the late 1970s, and the two sisters had to learn how to be resilient at new schools and in social situations, and, above all, to keep people from knowing the truth about their erratic, suicidal, alcoholic mother, who even lied about their real father and denied the girls access to him for 10 years. As the elder, the author acted as her mother's enabler and nurse, and with great hindsight conveys her early despair. Agent, Robert Guinsler, Sterling Lord. (Jan.)