Ezra's Bookshelf

Shy

by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green · 304 pages · ~5.5 hrs

Biography & Memoir

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Mary Rodgers, who composed 'Once Upon a Mattress' and wrote the novel 'Freaky Friday,' dictated these memoirs to Jesse Green before her death in 2014. Her perspective was unique: daughter of Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein), mother of composer Adam Guettel, and witness to Broadway's golden age from the inside. Rodgers recounts her childhood in the shadow of a brilliant but emotionally distant father and a mother who enforced strict propriety. Her father's infidelities, her mother's coldness, and the impossibility of meeting their expectations shaped her profoundly. The book is characteristically frank about sex, therapy, and the sexism that constrained women's careers even in artistic circles. Rodgers's wit never turns sentimental, and she recounts her own failures as honestly as others' shortcomings. Her career as a composer was cut short partly by self-doubt, partly by industry assumptions about women. Her later work as a children's author and television executive receives attention, as do her multiple marriages and complicated motherhood. This is a memoir of theater royalty that refuses to polish the crown.

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