Nonfiction Book Reviews

I picked up Home: A Memoir of my Early Years by Julie Andrews from the library because I grew up watching Sound of Music and it remains to this day one of my all-time favorite movies.

I discovered a lot of interesting information about her in this book, although it wasn’t quite all that I was hoping for. Because of my love of Sound of Music, I had hoped that she would go through to that part of her life, but it stops short of her starting work on Mary Poppins, which was the movie she completed directly before Sound of Music. So I was rather disappointed about that, although if I hadn’t expected anything about Sound of Music, that obviously wouldn’t have been a big deal to me. The subtitle was, “A Memoir of my Early Years” but I was still hopeful.

The other thing that struck me strange was how the book ended. She’s married to a guy that she had known and had been friends with since the age of 14. They had dated for a long time, eventually moved in together, and eventually after that got married. She never hinted at any sort of trouble between them. She talks about having a baby girl together. Life is great. The book ends with them literally flying off into the sunset (they were off on their way to California for Julie to shoot Mary Poppins). You never would have guessed from what she was writing, that her marriage was anything but idyllic. Except because of comments made earlier in the book, you know that 11 years later, she’s divorced from her first husband, and married to the second one. ??? Perhaps she was trying to protect the first husband by not going into personal details, I don’t know, but it made for a rather confusing ending, because I kept waiting for an explanation as to why her first husband and her divorced. I never got one.

Other than those two items, I really enjoyed the book. I hadn’t spent a lot of time previously exploring Julie’s life, so I don’t know how much of the information in the book had been known before to Julie fans, but to me, it was all new, and all quite good to read. It’s amazing how much she’s gone through in her life - you would never have guessed it, looking at her and how she comports herself in the movies and in interviews. Her mother was a drunk and not at all a stabilizing influence; Julie spent most of her childhood taking care of herself; they were very poor and as a teenager her family almost completely depended on her to bring in the income to keep them off the streets; her stepfather was a drunk too who couldn’t keep down a job and who tried to molest Julie as a child - it was not a picturebook childhood, to say the least. It’s amazing to me that she can portray such an amazing motherly persona as an actress, with virtually no role model to get the inspiration from. Her childhood story is quite depressing, although Julie relays it all with the famous British stiff upper lip - she didn’t bemoan and groan that childhood as others might have done. She simply talked about it as “that was the way it was” and there wasn’t much else to it.

If you’re looking for a great biographical read on one of the best known actresses/singers out there, you’ll really enjoy this book. She’s a talented writer (she wrote the book herself, which is rather unusual for star autobiographies) - I give it 4.25 out of 5 stars. Also, if you want more information, she has a website - The Julie Andrews Collection , which has lots of info on the children’s books that she’s written.

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