The Key Is Love: My Mother’s Wisdom, a Daughter’s Gratitude
Marie Osmond, Marcia Wilkie
Category: Nonfiction:
Memoir: Celebrities; Parenting & Families
Synopsis: Osmond
recalls her mother’s parenting style and discusses her life as a mother and
daughter.
Date finished: 5
June 2013
Rating: ***½
Comments:
Celebrity memoirs are never great. That’s sort of Celebrity
Memoir 101. If you like the celebrity, you’ll like the book.
I know very little about the Osmond family. I was too young
to know about the Osmond family as a performing group and likewise with the
Donny and Marie show (I didn’t even know it was a T.V. show!). What I did know
of Marie Osmond was when she became a country music star—actually, she was more
on her way out by the time I knew of her. I did know, however, that the Osmond
family was a large Mormon family. And that appeals to me.
I expected this to be a nice, light, book that was
uplifting, if not well written. I was disappointed. For days after finishing, I
couldn’t figure out why I didn’t get the warm fuzzies I’d expected. Was it me?
No, it wasn’t. The fact is, the bits of reminiscence about Olive Osmond were
warm and friendly and reminded you that the Osmonds were one of the last great
old-fashioned American families. They even handled fame and its demands—as a
family, no less—in a humble, yet savvy way.
Where I was sorely disappointed, however, was that Marie
apparently didn’t apply her mother’s parenting style with the same success. I
don’t know about you, but I’m constantly on the lookout for actors who have
till-death-do-us-part marriages, performers who don’t get into drugs and
alcohol, and celebrities who raise their children with boundaries and instill
character. I like to see celebrities who can handle success and fame and the
demands with integrity and grace. In that respect, Marie Osmond falls short of
my ideal. She becomes just another celebrity with “celebrity problems” and her
kids are your typical “celebrity kids.” Now, I know how hard it must be to
raise good kids when you have great material means, and when you can’t be home
because of performing or travel commitments. I appreciate how hard it must be
on a marriage, too. There are stressors in celebrity families that the average
family doesn’t deal with. I understand and sympathize with that. And yet,
that’s where this memoir failed me. It was just another story of a celebrity
family that falls apart at the seams and then picks itself back up again until
the next tsunami comes through (to mix three metaphors).
I also feel like I need to gripe about the way the book was
written. I sort of got the impression that the book was written for fans only,
with no consideration for “non-fans” who might pick it up. (That, or it relied
on the content of previous books—and who but a fan would know there were
previous memoirs?) Even a simple chronology would have helped. She’d mention a
marriage or allude to a remarriage, and I had no idea what or who she was
talking about. I was probably a hundred pages in before I realized she’d had a
marriage between her marriages to “Steve.” She’d also mention something huge in
passing (like her son Michael’s death), and you never knew if she was going to
address that in depth or not. She usually did, but it would be dozens of pages
later. In short, the book needed an editor with vision. It was a meandering
mess.
So, I don’t know. It just fell short. It was honest without
being a tell-all (tell-alls are creepy). There was just an overall tone of
immaturity and self-justification, and I detected a great deal of “mommy guilt”
that hasn’t fully been dealt with. She uses her mother as a yardstick, and I
don’t think she knows that she doesn’t quite measure up.
Would you recommend
this to a friend?
No.
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