By Dennis Moore, USA TODAY
Six Oscar nominations, including a best-actress trophy.
Isn't that enough to turn an accomplished actress into a red-carpet diva? Not Sissy Spacek. She would rather reminisce about childhood summers in the hills of Northeast Texas.
She will share her stories in her first book, a memoir titled Barefoot Stories, to be published in spring 2012 by Hyperion.
PHOTOS: A Sissy Spacek gallery
"I hope it's going to be a little different from the usual celebrity memoir," she says. "I want it to be a collection of non-fiction short stories, so it's not linear. You can pick it up just anywhere and read a story about some part of my life with images and photographs and artwork and things that I have done and collected and mean something to me."
Don't expect Spacek, 61, to ignore her acting career, which ranges from 1976's supernatural thriller Carrie to the civil-rights-era drama The Help, slated for summer release.
But during her first interview about the book, it is clear that the stories that mean the most are those from her 17 years in Quitman, Texas, before she left for New York to pursue singing and acting.
She tells tales that are amusing, charming and leave the listener yearning for simpler times. Like her story about a family ritual.
"Before my dad would let us go barefoot, he would have to decide that it was warm enough for us to take our shoes off. All of the other kids in town would be running around barefoot from Easter time. Every day my (two older) brothers and I would look at each other and think maybe today's going to be the day.
"We'd go out into the backyard and Dad, he'd be real serious. He'd kneel down and feel the ground and we'd wait with bated breath to see if that was the day. Most days it wasn't the day, but finally he would give us the sign that we could take our shoes off.
"I learned that sometimes waiting for things and wanting things is even better than getting them."
She says she learned all the truths that are most important to her before she left that little town in Texas.
"There certainly have been a lot of funny things that have happened to me along the way" — such as surreptitiously riding a cow before getting the horses she so badly wanted — "but I have always felt so rooted in my childhood. And it really helped me face the challenges and the adventures that we all face during our lifetime. And I hope that when people read it, they will think about their life and their childhood."
Spacek doesn't know what all of her stories will be, but she does know they are not intended to be instructive. "I don't want to teach any lessons, because I don't know that I know more than anybody else."
Spacek says she always has been fascinated by books: novels, books about art, poetry, even self-help. She has started reading Jeannette Walls' Half Broke Horses. And she just got her friend Rodney Crowell's memoir about growing up in Texas, Chinaberry Sidewalks. Crowell is a singer/ songwriter who produced a record that Spacek made after her Oscar-winning turn as Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter, released in 1980.
"Of course (writing) is something that is very new for me, so at this point I know everything," Spacek says, laughing. "Talk to me in eight or nine months and I will be humbled and brought to my knees."
Spacek lives in the Virginia countryside and is married to film director and production designer Jack Fisk. They have two daughters, Schuyler, 28, and Madison, 22.
Spacek stays rooted in the South in her latest film, an adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's best-selling novel The Help. She plays Missus Walters, the surprising sly mother of the overbearing, racially insensitive Hilly Holbrook in 1960s Jackson, Miss. Spacek calls Missus Walters "the conscience of the story. She represents the audience in dealing with Hilly."
And now the actress becomes the author. "It's just another creative medium," she says about telling stories about her life. "We all should do this for our children — just so they know we weren't perfect."qtdz
Usatoday.com
No comments:
Post a Comment