Book Review: Here’s the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice by Maureen McCormick
Here’s the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice by Maureen McCormick
Publisher: William Morrow
Release Date: October 14, 2008
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
For countless adolescents across America who came of age in the early 1970s, Marcia Brady, eldest daughter on television’s The Brady Bunch, was the ideal American teenager. But what viewers didn’t know about the always sunny, always perfect Marcia was that Maureen McCormick, the young actress who portrayed her, was living a very different and not-so-wonderful life.
In Here’s the Story, Maureen takes us behind the scenes of America’s favorite television family;and reveals with poignancy and candor how she landed on the dark side, caught up in a fast-paced, drug-fueled, star-studded Hollywood nightmare that led to the biggest, most important battle of her life. This brave, hard-hitting memoir exposes a side of a beloved pop-culture icon the paparazzi missed. Yet ultimately it is also a story of success and survival; an empowering, engaging, shocking, and emotional true tale of a young woman’s lifelong battle to come to terms with the idea of perfection . . . and with herself.
Did you know that September 26, 2019 was the 50th anniversary of the airing of the first episode of The Brady Bunch? In honor of that, I plumbed Maureen McCormick’s Here’s the Story from the depths of my TBR shelf to read.
As you probably know, Maureen played Marcia Brady on The Brady Bunch. She will be forever associated with that iconic role. The book starts before she was born, with the marriage of her mother and father. It goes up through to her time on Celebrity Fit Club in 2007, which was right before this book was published.
The main thing I learned about Maureen is that she did a lot of cocaine. Like A LOT. It actually gets kind of repetitive, reading about this one time she was super high on coke and this other time she was super high on coke, etc. However, I admire her candidness. She is not afraid to share the mistakes that she’s made and there were other major ones besides her drug abuse. I was also surprised at how screwed up her family is. Her brother basically kidnapped and brainwashed their elderly father. That was quite a saga that had me feeling angry and sad on her behalf.
Maureen doesn’t go into too much detail about her time on The Brady Bunch. There are a few anecdotes but it’s more of a recitation of the timeline. I imagine that was because she can’t remember much of it being that she was so young and it was such a long time ago.
I think this book will appeal to those of us who grew up watching The Brady Bunch (I watched reruns of it after school) and have a certain nostalgia for it. If you didn’t, I don’t think this book will interest you that much.
