Out of the Corner, by Jennifer Grey
Continued from Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22 and Part 23
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Chapter 22, titled "Unbridled", tells about events into 2021, when she and her husband Clark Gregg divorced.
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Grey's book is not much about the movie Dirty Dancing. Rather, the book mainly tells about growing up in a family of actors, about her effort to become a successful actress, about her romantic experiences with men, about her addictions to intoxicating substances, about her physical and mental disorders and about her joy in being a married mother. That movie did play an important part in her life, but now that she is in her sixties and looks back, that movie was only a minor part.
In her book's final chapter, she shares some of the wisdom that she acquired during her 60+ years. She ponders particular problems of being a woman.
I came from a long line of women who became mothers and wives at the expense or the career they'd wanted. The story my mother's mother told was "I didn't get to be a pianist." And my mom knew she didn't want to be like her depressed mother, so she was going to do it all differently, but then gave up her career to be a mother and a wife to my Father.
There was something imprinted on me by my foremothers that I was resolved to outfox. I thought I'd be able to override the system. I decided I'd be like my dad and not my mom and would somehow not fall prey to her undesirable epigenetics, and yet, there I was. A domestic goddess/mother superior. There'd never been a woman in my family lineage who got out from under that destiny I didn't know how to get from under, either, and began to doubt it could be done.
Women have an uncanny ability to adapt to please others, to refrain from privileging themselves out of fear of what might ensue. It takes a certain fortitude to tolerate the risk involved in stressing an established relationship to see if it can handle accommodating some much-needed change.
And if in time we become angry or depressed or just feel like we're somehow slowly withering on the vine from adapting so much to the lives of others, we are promptly shamed, either from within or from without. To give voice to our desire to free ourselves from our habituated reflexive over-adaptability to others might render us unlovable to our mates or bad mothers, right? That's what we think. So we disappear into servicing and raising our young, muting our dissatisfaction, because it feels shameful to be ungrateful when you're being taken care of. ...
I'm struck by how many married women I intimately, especially mothers of small children, are right now feeling hopelessly stuck in their lives. They don't dare let themselves consider what they might wish for or what they would want their lives to look like if they could make a change. ...
And I have become willing to tell the truth in the second half of my life like I never had before. There's an exhilarating relief in my willingness to face my fear of the unknown. I've relinquished the dollhouse as destination, as container of the dream, and it's really all the unknown all the time now. ...
... when I look in the mirror today — a softer, wiser, albeit perhaps not quite as sharp version of myself, due to the natural aging process -- can I just hold on to myself, my inherent value, and accept myself even now?
Even in the face of these turbulent times: When I feel tossed about, struggling to get my bearings in this changeable landscape, where change is the only constant? The inevitable impermanence of everything. Career peaks and valleys, other people's opinions of me, marital status, financial ebbs and flows, body image, aging. With every new chapter, we are faced with fresh challenges to our sense of identity and self. Every phase. As far as I can tell, every age is rife with struggle as well as with incomparable delight, and every end is pregnant With a new beginning.
Although Jennifer Grey played the movie role of Baby Houseman, those two lives are different. Houseman would attend college and study some subject like international relations. Maybe she would spend a couple years in the Peace Corps. Then she would develop a life-long professional career in academics or government. Houseman would not become addicted to intoxicating substances.
Perhaps Houseman, like Grey, would marry late in life, become the mother of one child, and eventually divorce her husband. In that regard, the two women's lives might become similar, in their forties.
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The book does not say anything about any sequel to the movie Dirty Dancing.
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I enjoyed reading the book. I recommend it to anyone who loves the movie.
Readers of the book have rated it on the Amazon website as follows:
This is the end of my series of blog articles about Grey's autobiography.
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