Volume 43, Number 2 · February 1, 1996
Tender Buttons
By Sarah Kerr
After All
by Mary Tyler Moore
Putnam, 332 pp., $24.95
This story of a beloved TV star's repressed youth, rise to the top, subsequent vodka-laced despair, rescue by a sane young doctor husband, and late redemptive discovery of a fondness for Palomino horses has been excerpted in People, and its revelations of familial and addictive dysfunction have been autopsied in newspapers and picked over in dozens of TV interviews with the author. The author, meanwhile, timed its release to coincide with an attempted comeback—not as a comedienne this time, but as the world-weary queen of a realistic (in the stressful, crisis-laden contemporary sense) hour-long drama set at an underdog Manhattan newspaper. It makes you feel, if you pay attention, like the publicist's favorite sucker. And yet, to Mary Tyler Moore's credit, her confessions sound not opportunistic but vague and reluctant. When it comes to the theater of the day—the press-conference airing of private affairs—she is an entertainment fossil unearthed, reanimated, and driven by habit to put on a show.
Review, 3326 words
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