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3.93 AVERAGE
3.93 AVERAGE
I've been moderately interested in this book, and actually finally picked it up because Mulgrew won an Audie for this one (it's self-narrated, which is something I usually don't prefer, but she's good).
I really enjoyed this book, hearing the story of her amazing life. The only complaint I have is that she ended the book so soon and didn't cover the last few years of her life (which is understandable). I really did want more and I hope she writes more.
I really enjoyed this book, hearing the story of her amazing life. The only complaint I have is that she ended the book so soon and didn't cover the last few years of her life (which is understandable). I really did want more and I hope she writes more.
I deviated from norm and actually listen to the Audio Version. It was read by Kate Mulgrew herself and was a great driving companion.
Well, this was fascinating. Kate Mulgrew is quite a writer, and an excellent actress which made for a very professional narration on the audio book. She tells the story of her life straightforward and unapologetically. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, even though I can’t say I developed as much admiration for her, as she seemed to have for herself.
Great for a celebrity memoir. Mulgrew is an engaging writer. The plot gets a little foggy at times, but to be expected for a memoir.
Spoilers for Born with Teeth.
To preface my reasons for picking up this memoir, (Mulgrew contrasts it with an auto-biography by joking that much of its contents may be her interpretation of events!) I had my own coming-of-age story during the glory days of Star Trek. The Next Generation was my go-to show over which I bonded with my late father, and while I joined that show mid-run, I grew up watching Deep Space Nine and Voyager from the outset. While Deep Space Nine was clearly the best written of the bunch, and while Next Generation is by far the most popular, and while Voyager clearly had issues under the production hood, I keep coming back to it over the years, and Kate Mulgrew is a big part of the reason why.
I remember during the Iraq War watching video of a convention where Mulgrew was asked a question about war, and she asked the audience if they would indulge her if she stopped talking about science fiction for a moment, and proceeded to go off the edge screaming that "this bullshit will end when this President is out." These were the soon-after-9/11-days of 70% approval ratings, when any celebrity who dared to speak out against the government was branded as an unpatriotic America-hater by Fox News and talk radio. Perhaps Kate Mulgrew was small-fry enough to miss the Dixie Chicks treatment, but it meant a lot to me that someone who starred in a show showing a future where humanity survives and prospers wasn't afraid to speak out in the real world when she felt we were going the wrong way. I kept following her over the years, and she's always presented as one of the most eloquent and talented voices from the franchise. I was eager to read her life story.
A significant focus of this book involves Mulgrew's parenting of her two boys, her agony in putting her daughter up for adoption and being deceived by Catholic charities, and her relationships with men. She has an exceptionally strong ego, which would be ignored if she were a man, and is notable here because she purposefully draws attention to it herself. When speaking to Tim Hagan, her second husband, she acknowledges that she is spread thin, can't give full focus to all aspects of her life, and calls it selfishness that she still insists on giving own person some of that valuable attention. She's told by Hagan that she must be happy in order to provide happiness to those around her. I'm not sure if that's the right answer, but it certainly is the human one, and one I struggle with myself as a parent. When cast in Star Trek, the commitment required to realize Captain Janeway required a commitment away from her young children, and as a single parent this causes significant stress for her boys, and yet she pushes herself to commit fully to work when at work and fully to her children when at home.
It is a difficult choice, one working parents are faced with every day. She notes that the television studio didn't know how to handle a working mother in the 1990s, just as they didn't know what to do with a captain's hair and breasts, and required her to be superwoman. As the reader, it occurs to me that while we're discussing Mulgrew's parenting, few people worried about Bill Shatner's young children during his time on Star Trek, or call into question the parenting skills of Patrick Stewart or Avery Brooks. Funny that.
I do have to admit that some of the details of Mulgrew's life did surprise me, mainly because she's confessing them herself and could have sugarcoated them or conveniently left them out!
I do have to blame the writing for this first one. When her younger sister is diagnosed with a brain tumor and does not have long to live, Mulgrew describes how she picked up and moved to New York City to attend an acting conservatory. The shift and implication at the time was that Penny had very little time to live, and I was so shocked that Mulgrew would leave at all! There was little mention of Penny again, and as the narration did tend to bounce around, I thought she passed without mention between paragraphs. It all continued to floor me until Penny resurfaced in the narrative and eventually passed away well over a year later. I couldn't believe her decision because it never happened or would have happened, but the confusion probably put me more on alert as I otherwise would have been.
When married to her first husband, Mulgrew demanded they separate their finances. If she's the breadwinner, she wanted her money in her name and not mixed with her spouse's money. She wants independence. There's even a scene where they're driving to their new, larger house and her husband is described as stewing as she explains to him that she's the breadwinner, and if she's paying for the house, she wants it exclusively in her name. Her take on family finances is pretty much the opposite of my own, and I'm sure her headstrong nature contributed to the failure of the relationship, but it's so impressive that Mulgrew didn't try to ignore something that admittedly showed her in a poor light. If Patrick Stewart described telling his wife the same thing, I know I'd draw a conclusion.
While the requirement to multitask as a parent and not commit 100% of your time to your children is one that any parent will understand, Mulgrew describes specific parenting decisions that raised eyebrows on my end, some intentionally. As Mulgrew herself even jokes in an interview with Rosie O'Donnell that was included following the Audible, when she arrived in Ireland with her young sons and had the opportunity to meet her second husband for their first date. She leaves her children with a local boy (a fisherman, in the interview) and drives two hours roundtrip for a night of drinks and romance! In a foreign country! Weeks later, she leaves her children alone sleeping in the hotel to meet her future husband down the street at a nightclub, at his request, and asks the hotel staff to "look in on them!" I get work commitments are hard on kids, but I almost dropped the book reading this, and then I asked myself what experiences I might have to talk about in twenty, thirty years, and whether I'd have the courage to admit to them. I'm sure every parent has a tale or two they're not proud of, but these were hard to overlook.
Romance-wise, Mulgrew meets her first fiancé on a trip to Italy with her mother in the bar of a hotel, is smitten with him, and gives him their passports at his request so they cannot leave before he shows them both a good time. Who on earth does that? Their relationship is detailed in the chapters to follow and was certainly controlling on his part. He isolates her in Italy, is unhappy that she continues to work, seems committed to marrying her and getting her pregnant as a way to keep her stationary, and even when she flees across the world to get away from him, she allows herself to keep getting drawn in, tolerating his visits to her workplaces to check up on those with whom she associates.
She never uses the words "controlling" or "unhealthy" and merely tells us what happened. Her first husband later is described as having little empathy. Her second husband appeared to have strong issues with commitment. She was married combined to both of them for decades. What struck me most about this memoir is that Mulgrew was not the hero. She made mistakes as a non-perfect parent, contributed to the decline in at least the one marriage we read about, and showed us that her ego drove her decisions. In listening to the interview with Rosie O'Donnell, some minor facts shifted in her retelling of stories, likely to lapsed time and memory, but I feel like she made a concerted effort to tell us who she was, warts and all, and if that shocked us, I think she'd be pleased. There's a absolute sincerity to this book.
I would note to prospective readers that the focus of events is a bit haphazard. This was written in 2015, a year following the dissolution of her second marriage to Tim Hagan, but the narration ends about fifteen years prior, literally before we're about to find out why he blew her off for over five years. Those looking for behind-the-scenes stories of her time on Star Trek will get a bit of information, although there were surprise omissions. In discussing the studio's obsession with her hairstyle, she omits that production originally began with her wearing her own hair down, and weeks later when decided they wanted her hair up, it required an expensive reshoot of all previous footage. Here, she gets the bun on Day 1. That story really supported the narrative, so it was odd to have it left out. Her controversial interactions with Jeri Ryan also would have supported the narratively nicely, but Mulgrew did seem to make an effort in places to avoid speaking ill of the living, and I'm sure she didn't want to stir the pot.
As narration ends fifteen years prior to publishing date, there is no reference to Orange Is The New Black. Mulgrew is working on a second book, which I believe deals with her mother's Alzheimer's disease, but it's possible she was saving the next stage in her life for future books. She mentions in interviews that this was the natural end spot for her first book. It felt like a cliffhanger. I want to know what happened the next scene!
Two subjects Mulgrew discusses, giving her first child up for adoption, and Mulgrew's surviving sexual assault were exceptionally powerful. I'm not going to comment on them further. Go read the book.
Highly recommended, warts and all!
To preface my reasons for picking up this memoir, (Mulgrew contrasts it with an auto-biography by joking that much of its contents may be her interpretation of events!) I had my own coming-of-age story during the glory days of Star Trek. The Next Generation was my go-to show over which I bonded with my late father, and while I joined that show mid-run, I grew up watching Deep Space Nine and Voyager from the outset. While Deep Space Nine was clearly the best written of the bunch, and while Next Generation is by far the most popular, and while Voyager clearly had issues under the production hood, I keep coming back to it over the years, and Kate Mulgrew is a big part of the reason why.
I remember during the Iraq War watching video of a convention where Mulgrew was asked a question about war, and she asked the audience if they would indulge her if she stopped talking about science fiction for a moment, and proceeded to go off the edge screaming that "this bullshit will end when this President is out." These were the soon-after-9/11-days of 70% approval ratings, when any celebrity who dared to speak out against the government was branded as an unpatriotic America-hater by Fox News and talk radio. Perhaps Kate Mulgrew was small-fry enough to miss the Dixie Chicks treatment, but it meant a lot to me that someone who starred in a show showing a future where humanity survives and prospers wasn't afraid to speak out in the real world when she felt we were going the wrong way. I kept following her over the years, and she's always presented as one of the most eloquent and talented voices from the franchise. I was eager to read her life story.
A significant focus of this book involves Mulgrew's parenting of her two boys, her agony in putting her daughter up for adoption and being deceived by Catholic charities, and her relationships with men. She has an exceptionally strong ego, which would be ignored if she were a man, and is notable here because she purposefully draws attention to it herself. When speaking to Tim Hagan, her second husband, she acknowledges that she is spread thin, can't give full focus to all aspects of her life, and calls it selfishness that she still insists on giving own person some of that valuable attention. She's told by Hagan that she must be happy in order to provide happiness to those around her. I'm not sure if that's the right answer, but it certainly is the human one, and one I struggle with myself as a parent. When cast in Star Trek, the commitment required to realize Captain Janeway required a commitment away from her young children, and as a single parent this causes significant stress for her boys, and yet she pushes herself to commit fully to work when at work and fully to her children when at home.
It is a difficult choice, one working parents are faced with every day. She notes that the television studio didn't know how to handle a working mother in the 1990s, just as they didn't know what to do with a captain's hair and breasts, and required her to be superwoman. As the reader, it occurs to me that while we're discussing Mulgrew's parenting, few people worried about Bill Shatner's young children during his time on Star Trek, or call into question the parenting skills of Patrick Stewart or Avery Brooks. Funny that.
I do have to admit that some of the details of Mulgrew's life did surprise me, mainly because she's confessing them herself and could have sugarcoated them or conveniently left them out!
I do have to blame the writing for this first one. When her younger sister is diagnosed with a brain tumor and does not have long to live, Mulgrew describes how she picked up and moved to New York City to attend an acting conservatory. The shift and implication at the time was that Penny had very little time to live, and I was so shocked that Mulgrew would leave at all! There was little mention of Penny again, and as the narration did tend to bounce around, I thought she passed without mention between paragraphs. It all continued to floor me until Penny resurfaced in the narrative and eventually passed away well over a year later. I couldn't believe her decision because it never happened or would have happened, but the confusion probably put me more on alert as I otherwise would have been.
When married to her first husband, Mulgrew demanded they separate their finances. If she's the breadwinner, she wanted her money in her name and not mixed with her spouse's money. She wants independence. There's even a scene where they're driving to their new, larger house and her husband is described as stewing as she explains to him that she's the breadwinner, and if she's paying for the house, she wants it exclusively in her name. Her take on family finances is pretty much the opposite of my own, and I'm sure her headstrong nature contributed to the failure of the relationship, but it's so impressive that Mulgrew didn't try to ignore something that admittedly showed her in a poor light. If Patrick Stewart described telling his wife the same thing, I know I'd draw a conclusion.
While the requirement to multitask as a parent and not commit 100% of your time to your children is one that any parent will understand, Mulgrew describes specific parenting decisions that raised eyebrows on my end, some intentionally. As Mulgrew herself even jokes in an interview with Rosie O'Donnell that was included following the Audible, when she arrived in Ireland with her young sons and had the opportunity to meet her second husband for their first date. She leaves her children with a local boy (a fisherman, in the interview) and drives two hours roundtrip for a night of drinks and romance! In a foreign country! Weeks later, she leaves her children alone sleeping in the hotel to meet her future husband down the street at a nightclub, at his request, and asks the hotel staff to "look in on them!" I get work commitments are hard on kids, but I almost dropped the book reading this, and then I asked myself what experiences I might have to talk about in twenty, thirty years, and whether I'd have the courage to admit to them. I'm sure every parent has a tale or two they're not proud of, but these were hard to overlook.
Romance-wise, Mulgrew meets her first fiancé on a trip to Italy with her mother in the bar of a hotel, is smitten with him, and gives him their passports at his request so they cannot leave before he shows them both a good time. Who on earth does that? Their relationship is detailed in the chapters to follow and was certainly controlling on his part. He isolates her in Italy, is unhappy that she continues to work, seems committed to marrying her and getting her pregnant as a way to keep her stationary, and even when she flees across the world to get away from him, she allows herself to keep getting drawn in, tolerating his visits to her workplaces to check up on those with whom she associates.
She never uses the words "controlling" or "unhealthy" and merely tells us what happened. Her first husband later is described as having little empathy. Her second husband appeared to have strong issues with commitment. She was married combined to both of them for decades. What struck me most about this memoir is that Mulgrew was not the hero. She made mistakes as a non-perfect parent, contributed to the decline in at least the one marriage we read about, and showed us that her ego drove her decisions. In listening to the interview with Rosie O'Donnell, some minor facts shifted in her retelling of stories, likely to lapsed time and memory, but I feel like she made a concerted effort to tell us who she was, warts and all, and if that shocked us, I think she'd be pleased. There's a absolute sincerity to this book.
I would note to prospective readers that the focus of events is a bit haphazard. This was written in 2015, a year following the dissolution of her second marriage to Tim Hagan, but the narration ends about fifteen years prior, literally before we're about to find out why he blew her off for over five years. Those looking for behind-the-scenes stories of her time on Star Trek will get a bit of information, although there were surprise omissions. In discussing the studio's obsession with her hairstyle, she omits that production originally began with her wearing her own hair down, and weeks later when decided they wanted her hair up, it required an expensive reshoot of all previous footage. Here, she gets the bun on Day 1. That story really supported the narrative, so it was odd to have it left out. Her controversial interactions with Jeri Ryan also would have supported the narratively nicely, but Mulgrew did seem to make an effort in places to avoid speaking ill of the living, and I'm sure she didn't want to stir the pot.
As narration ends fifteen years prior to publishing date, there is no reference to Orange Is The New Black. Mulgrew is working on a second book, which I believe deals with her mother's Alzheimer's disease, but it's possible she was saving the next stage in her life for future books. She mentions in interviews that this was the natural end spot for her first book. It felt like a cliffhanger. I want to know what happened the next scene!
Two subjects Mulgrew discusses, giving her first child up for adoption, and Mulgrew's surviving sexual assault were exceptionally powerful. I'm not going to comment on them further. Go read the book.
Highly recommended, warts and all!
Interesting memoir read by the author and subject. Quite an abrupt ending. I listened to the audiobook which was very easy to understand and quite dramatic.
2.5 stars
This may be me, but her arrogance in this book was barely disguised and as such made this a long rambling 'I am so great' monologue.
A big pass!
This may be me, but her arrogance in this book was barely disguised and as such made this a long rambling 'I am so great' monologue.
A big pass!
I was a fan of Voyager first and the excellent character of Kathryn Janeway, played by Kate Mulgrew, but after reading her story I am a huge fan of the woman herself. Mulgrew's adventures are almost unreal, her wit is hearty and warm, and her adversity admirably handled every step of the way. I am in love.
I finished this book in one sitting. She makes the most mundane life situations sound poetic. I thoroughly enjoyed that. I was hooked from the first sentence. ( the audiobook is an absolute treat )
I loved getting a peak into her life. Sometimes I felt a bit like she just skimmed over certain situation and would have loved to hear more about it but that’s obviously her choice.
I felt extremely happy at the end of the book as by then I was deeply gripped by the grief she felt over giving up her daughter for adoption.
It’s definitely a book I will recommend.
I loved getting a peak into her life. Sometimes I felt a bit like she just skimmed over certain situation and would have loved to hear more about it but that’s obviously her choice.
I felt extremely happy at the end of the book as by then I was deeply gripped by the grief she felt over giving up her daughter for adoption.
It’s definitely a book I will recommend.
I thoroughly enjoy Kate's portrayal of Red on OitNB so I was hoping to learn about her life. Bummed pretty much sums up the experience. I wish she had spent more time discussing her profession than the love interests.