Good Read - What Falls Away

So much talk has followed Mia Farrow all her life -- from her childhood as the daughter of two industry veterans, her rise to stardom on "Peyton Place" at 19, her controversial marriage to Frank Sinatra at 21, to her 12-year creative relationship with Woody Allen (and we all know how that ended...). Mia's memoir serves to cut away all the gossip that has surrounded her life and tell what really happened. Mia comes off sounding very compassionate, intelligent, but also with a bit of the naïveté of her most famous role, Rosemary Woodhouse. After reading, I felt like the goal in Ms. Farrow's book was the provide her truths -- she presented what happened, not necessarily how she felt about it. She didn't use the book to diminish Woody Allen's reputation and her portrayal of him was quite fair, all things considered. She also spent quite a bit of the book talked about her experiences with adoption and with her children. She also explains that her upbringing as one out of seven children influenced her fifteen adoptions of children from all over the world. Mia is not shy to own up to the mistakes she made over the years, not using her book to deflect responsibility. She admits that she was always rather passive and vulnerable by nature, and in the end, she hints that maybe these qualities have not been overcome. In a sense, what falls away in this book are the falsities and rumors that have surrounded Ms. Farrow for her sixty-plus years and we are allowed to see clearly the remarkable, beautiful person that she is.