My Extraordinary Ordinary Life

Starred review from March 12, 2012
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.

March 15, 2012
An average memoir from the renowned actress. Beginning with her childhood in Quitman, Texas, Spacek then chronicles her move to New York City after high school to pursue a singing career. During her time in the city, she subsisted on part-time work and help from her parents. She played the guitar and sang at a local bar and took classes at the Lee Strasberg Actors' Studio. After filming her first movie, Prime Cut (1972), Spacek moved to Los Angeles. She was then cast in Terrence Malick's classic Badlands (1973), where she met her future husband Jack Fisk, who was the art director of the movie. The memoir then recalls Spacek's life during and after her big break as the lead actress in Brian de Palma's Carrie (1976). After winning an Oscar for the role of country singer Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), Spacek took a self-imposed hiatus and moved to the country to enjoy nature, horses and a calm family life. Even though she made family life her priority, she continued to act in movies while raising her daughters; Spacek almost always brought her entire family on set. She returned to acting in the '90s and won an Oscar nomination for her role in Todd Fields' In the Bedroom (2001). Much of this overly detailed book lacks a narrative arc, but the author comes off as truly down-to-earth, a value she preaches throughout the book. As the title states, the book is "ordinary" and does not have enough drama to engage readers not directly interested in Spacek and her work. For die-hard movie buffs and Spacek fans only.

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April 1, 2012
The key here is that phrase in the subtitle, extraordinary ordinary. Spacek, who hails from Quitman, Texas, got into show business by accident, playing her guitar for a group of friends while she was visiting her cousin, actor Rip Torn, in New York. She lucked into stardom with her second movie, Terrence Malick's instant classic Badlands (on the set of which she also met the movie's art director, Jack Fisk, to whom she is still married). Spacek wound up in her Oscar-winning role in Coal Miner's Daughter because Loretta Lynn, the movie's biographical subject, had been telling people Spacek should play her in the movie. Readers looking for one of those dirt-dishing Hollywood memoirs should keep looking, as this is the story of an ordinary, down-to-earth woman who has lived, quite by chance, a life that has more than a few extraordinary aspects. There's plenty of behind-the-scenes insight, but that's not what the book is about. This is one star bio that puts family above fame, tranquility above stardom.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)