My Lives
Not many people may remember it today, but five years ago, Roseanne (Do we really need more than one name?) wrote a book called, no surprise,Roseanne. It dealt rather benignly with the members of her family, making them seem more madcap than malevolent. Well, a different Roseanne must have written this book, which is not surprising since she claims here to suffer from multiple personalities. This is a very angry book, and it's written from the perspective of a woman who claims to have been sexually and physically abused by both parents and abandoned by the rest of her family when she decided to go public with her revelations. She savages her ex-husband so wittily you almost feel sorry for the guy: "[Bill] moved on his own to L.A. to be a Sunset Strip hippie. Finding the work too demanding .ÿ20.ÿ20. he took a job as a night clerk in a motel." The first producer of her show, with whom Roseanne continually fought, fares worse: "hack son-of-a-bitch" is the least of her epithets about him. And, of course, her parents come in for the most vehement attacks of all. Anyone who has seen Roseanne plugging her new book on the talk shows (only those who interviewed her were allowed advance copies of the book) might well have noted that the woman with the number-one rated television show in the country seems profoundly depressed, and she categorically states that nothing has helped her state of mind--not the money, not the fame, not her reasonably successful marriage to second husband Tom Arnold. Though laced throughout with Roseanne's bitchy, funny take on the world, this book reveals a very sad woman, which, if even half the things she says about her life are true, she has reason to be.Ilene Cooper