Mommywood by Tori Spelling with Hilary Liftin Simon Spotlight Entertainment HK$200
The greatest battle of Tori Spelling's life has been for authenticity. The only daughter of television mogul Aaron and his preternaturally lustrous second wife Candy, Spelling has cleverly extended the career her father gave her (she played Donna Martin in his prime-time smash-hit Beverly Hills, 90210) into a series of reality TV shows (So NoTORIous, Tori & Dean: Inn Love, Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood) and best-selling memoirs. Of the last, Mommywood documents her desperate stabs at personal integrity with her second husband and the father of her two children, actor Dean McDermott.
Raised in the largest single-family residence in California, Spelling is the product of a rarefied universe. Her father had snow imported for Christmas, and when, as a 12-year-old, she asked her mother if she was pretty, she replied: 'You will be when we get your nose done.'
The relationship between Spelling and her mother is no less conditional 24 years later. 'Mothers are supposed to think their children are gorgeous no matter what,' she writes, having seen her first child on an ultrasound screen. 'What if I didn't? What if I'd inherited some mutated gene from my mother that caused us to feel nothing but disappointment in our offspring? Oh my God, did I have the Joan Crawford gene?' (After a brief rapprochement, Spelling and Candy are again estranged.)
In search of what is promoted as familial joy, Spelling and her family move into an ordinary suburban home on what she refers to as 'Beaver Avenue' in Westwood, Los Angeles. There, they awkwardly partake in Halloween celebrations and make attempts at assimilation. But how possible - and how sincere - are Spelling's efforts given that she is famous and a film crew is trailing in and out of her house almost every day? Surprisingly, the insecurities she expresses are not contrived.
Spelling documents her son's telling preference for his father ('I walked in and ... I could be the plumber. Not even - a plumber at least has cool tools,') and her frustration with her husband's superior parental instincts ('I'm not the primary care-giving parent in our minds'). She is as blunt about her failures to conform to the all-American archetype. When her stepson tells her that his mother called her 'the ugliest living thing in this world', her response is hurt, but measured. (For her part, Mary Jo Eustace, whom McDermott abandoned after 12 years of marriage and the adoption of a new-born girl, documented the experience of being left for Spelling in 2007's The Other Woman: 21 Wives, Lovers and Others Talk Openly About Sex, Deception, Love and Betrayal).
