Brooke Shields Revisits Dark Childhood In Memoir

Brooke Shields can claim the unofficial title of “America’s Sweetheart” in large part because of her manager mother, Teri Shields.

Ms. Shields has been modeling since she was 11 months old, when she got her first gig for Ivory soap. At age 11, she starred in her first film, “Pretty Baby,” for which she faced a firestorm of negative press because she played an underage prostitute.

She was the youngest model ever to land the cover of Vogue magazine, at age 14, and after her controversial television ads for Calvin Klein jeans, Ms. Shields became the most recognizable teen in the world.

But for her entire life, tabloids pressed about her relationship with her alcoholic mother, pulling back the thick curtain of stardom and privilege to shed light on the dysfunction within. When Teri Shields died in October 2012, the mother-daughter relationship came back to center stage—and, in 2013, a then-48-year-old Ms. Shields decided it was time to tell all. She began to write her memoir, “There Was A Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me,” at home in Southampton while her two daughters, Rowan and Grier, were at camp.

“It wasn’t even really about setting the record straight,” Ms. Shields said on Saturday at Urban Zen in Sag Harbor, where she was signing her newest title. “I basically did it because I had been in the public eye with my mother for, at that point, 48 years, and for 48 years people had been saying things about us and speculating and having opinions. It’s been my whole life and our whole lives together that I just thought it was my turn to tell my version of our story.”

Getting these memories and feelings down on paper was a much different process than with her other books, most notably “Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression.” When she first began to write and recall her childhood experiences with her mother, everything just flowed, she said. When she finished a chapter, she would send it to Jill Schwartzman, executive editor at Dutton, who returned it with notes. She would address the notes and move on, so that the first time she read the book was in its entirety this past November—nine months after starting it.

Revisiting her past, particularly her childhood, was emotionally difficult for the model and actress. She said she faced her dark memories and, over time, she realized the experience was therapeutic.

“You know, we play tapes in our head of things that have happened, and we take them as a reality, because we have said it so much, or our parents have repeated it, or it’s become our label—whatever the thing is,” she explained. “And doing something like this, it makes you reprocess the same situations with a different eye. And I think it’s important to do that, because we don’t like to do it, but one would be surprised because, sometimes, its actually positive.

“You realize you don’t have anger about certain things. I really don’t,” she continued. “I have empathy instead of anger. And that’s such a relief.”