cover image The Second Seduction

The Second Seduction

Frances Lear. Knopf Publishing Group, $19 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-679-41345-5

Founder and editor-in-chief of Lear's magazine, the author had a horrific Dickensian childhood. Born to an unwed teenage mother and orphaned in infancy, she was traumatized by her adoptive father's suicide, her adoptive mother's unloving rigidity and years of incest with a stepfather. In a luminous, unsparingly candid account of one woman's triumph over destructive forces, Lear writes about her manic-depressive illness, three suicide attempts, recovery from alcoholism in her 60s, sexual affairs with women and men and three failed marriages. With husband number three, television producer Norman Lear, she felt like ``a wife-of in Hollywood.'' She portrays him as overbearing but is otherwise tight-lipped about their relationship. This memoir, written in razor-sharp prose, tells how, against the odds, she carved out a sphere of personal freedom and creative independence. 100,000 first printing; Literary Guild alternate. (May)