Add this copy of My Side: the Autobiography of Ruth Gordon to cart. $105.50, new condition, Sold by GridFreed rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from San Diego, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1976 by Harper & Row.
Add this copy of My Side the Autobiography of Ruth Gordon to cart. $84.20, new condition, Sold by Just one more Chapter rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Miramar, FL, UNITED STATES, published 1976 by Harper.
Add this copy of My Side: the Autobiography of Ruth Gordon to cart. $104.94, new condition, Sold by Just one more Chapter rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Miramar, FL, UNITED STATES, published 1986 by Plume.
This book is not linear! Ruth Gordon flits and darts, shoots forward in years, alights and stabs, zooms backwards as though we are on a switchback at the fair. She is an eccentric writer. At best she seduces us into her world, and we are there! Sometimes it is just a sentence that brings poignancy up close, as when she kissed her dead Mother: "The first time I'd ever kissed her and no response. Her life had been to respond; my response was to go." (p.456). At her
worst she is self-indulgent.
Her many friends are a stellar cast: Alexander Woollcott, Noel Coward, Lillian and Dorothy Gish. She has acted with the greats and gives lovely vignettes: Dame Edith Evans' advice and her generosity when Ruth Gordon got her standing ovation at the end of The Country Wife: ("You'll have to make a speech...)"
It was absorbing to read about the making of Harold and Maude, the movie which defines Ruth Gordon's genius, but her union with Garson Kanin is only just touched upon in places, which is disappointing. She is frank about their relationship, even down to the difference in their ages, and comes across there as a feisty, interesting, unpredictable woman.
It needs an intelligent and 'whacky' person like Ruth Gordon to bring this kind of writing off. She very nearly does it, but at the final judgement, she might just miss.
