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Published Jan 2013
304 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
By the time Wendy Lawless turned seventeen, she'd known for quite some time that she didn't have a normal mother. But that didn't stop her from wanting one...
Georgann Rea didn't bake cookies or go to PTA meetings; she wore a mink coat and always had a lit Dunhill plugged into her cigarette holder. She went through men like Kleenex, and didn't like dogs or children. Georgann had the ice queen beauty of a Hitchcock heroine and the cold heart to match.
In "a searing memoir that reads like a novel" (Anne Korkeakivi, An Unexpected Guest), Wendy Lawless deftly charts the highs and lows of growing up with her younger sister in the shadow of an unstable, fabulously neglectful mother. Georgann, a real-life Holly Golightly who constantly reinvents herself as she trades up from trailer park to penthouse, suffers multiple nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts, while Wendy tries to hide the cracks in their fractured family from the rest of the world.
Chanel Bonfire depicts a childhood blazed through the refined aeries of the Dakota and the swinging town houses of London, while the girls' beautiful but damned mother desperately searches for glamour and fulfillment. Ultimately, Wendy and her sister must choose between living their own lives and being their mother's warden—the hardest, most painful, yet most important decision each of them will ever make.
"As the elder, the author acted as her mother's enabler and nurse, and with great hindsight conveys her early despair." - Publishers Weekly
"Frequently entertaining chronicle of a daughter's sad, detached upbringing--but this story's all about the mother." - Kirkus Reviews
"Mothers, in spite of what we wish desperately to believe, are sometimes very, very bad at taking care of children. Wendy Lawless survived her mother's flagrant horror show to bear witness and record her astonishing childhood. Chanel Bonfire makes an undesirable truth more vivid: some mothers just plain suck." - Susanna Sonnenberg, New York Times bestselling author of Her Last Death and She Matters
"Chanel Bonfire is both terribly funny and terribly tragic, often at the same time. With remarkable clarity, wit, and grace, Wendy Lawless recounts a childhood defined by her wildly unstable mother, a woman who can morph from Grace Kelly to Joan Crawford in the blink of an eye. I laughed a lot, teared up once or twice, and called my mom to say 'I love you' once I finished." - Cristina Alger, bestselling author of The Darlings
"What a heart-breaking memoir. I will never look at a blue nightgown the same way again!" - Tim Gunn, New York Times bestselling author of Gunn's Golden Rules and Tim Gunn's Fashion Bible
"A searing memoir that reads like a novel, as Lawless's beautiful, unstable mother careens through the swinging sixties and seventies in New York, London, Paris and Morocco, two captive blond daughters in tow, before bottoming out in Boston. What astonishes is the author's ability to tell her often hair-raising story of survival not only with lucidity and fluency but wry humor." - Anne Korkeakivi, author of An Unexpected Guest
This information about Chanel Bonfire was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Wendy Lawless is an actress who has appeared on television, in regional theater, Off-Broadway in David Ives's Obie-winning play All in the Timing and on Broadway in The Heidi Chronicles. Her essays about being a mom in Hollywood, including "Whatever Happened to Musical Chairs?" have appeared in the local Los Angeles press. She lives in California with her screenwriter husband and their two children.
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