Three Answers: Adrienne Barbeau
by Dick Donahue, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 2/27/2006
Three answers today are from actress Adrienne Barbeau, whose memoir, There Are Worse Things I Could Do, is due next month from Carroll & Graf.
PW: First things first. How much of your book did you make up?
AB: (Big laugh) I changed two names. Seriously, I have journals, daily journals that I've been keeping since 1967—in fact my husband always said that I should do something with them.I wrote every day for nearly 40 years; I still do, but not every day. Of course there may be things where I don't remember the specific details; in fact, some of my relatives reminded me about an incident that I hadn't recalled exactly. But I think I'm safe!
PW: With so many celebrity memoirs out there, what sets yours apart?
AB: What I hope I bring to the table is a writing style. What was more interesting to me—or more important to me—about doing the project was not what I had to say but the manner in which I said it. And I hope that it is, for the most part, witty, or at least engrossing and not dry. I wasn't interested in doing a soup-to-nuts autobiography. In fact the original title was Pieces, because I was doing just little snapshots, and then once I sold the project everyone said well you've got to write about Maude and you've got to write about Grease. So then it was a question of finding a way to make those things—which I didn't have a take on—as interesting as the things that came naturally to me, the things that I thought were "tellable." What I realized when I went back and read my journals was that my work—the shows and the movies—was what I took for granted and that wasn't what interested me. What interested me was my relationships, growing, boyfriends, everything that gave rise to the person that I became.
PW: What's the most surprising fact that readers will find out about Adrienne Barbeau?
AB: Well, I do have a chapter about my relationship with Burt Reynolds. Burt and I dated for a period of time in the mid-'70s and it was not well publicized. But you're asking, I think, more what I have exposed about myself. I didn't have any qualms about exposing myself, I guess you'd say—that's just sort of the way I am. I'm not very guarded, I guess. The one thing I do talk about in the book that we didn't talk about publicly when the twins were born were the specific fertility treatments that I used. At the time my husband just felt that that wasn't something that people needed to know. On a one-to-one basis if anybody has asked I've been very specific, but I've always said when we were dealing with the press that we used fertility treatments and they finally worked. That will be revealing, I guess.
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