In My Shoes: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

tidying up my own daughter’s room, rummaging through the board games, arts and crafts materials, pens and pencils, helping her organize it all, and I thought back to my childhood bedroom where there wasn’t a desk, there weren’t books, there were no games, certainly nothing for arts and crafts. There was a bed, and a TV, and a set of barren shelves. It was like a cell.
    Psychologists say that women who have very narcissistic mothers often take one of two very different paths in life: They either go down the rabbit hole of drug addiction, or they become overachievers. In a way I followed both paths, one after the other. They’ve also discovered that the women who become overachievers usually have a strong connection with their dads. This was always the case, at least in terms of my emotional makeup. But it wasn’t until we began to work together on Jimmy Choo that I began to feel that sense of connection being reciprocated.
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    I GREW UP WITH TWO brothers—Gregory, three years younger than me, and Daniel, three years younger than he—and the three of us went to El Rodeo School, which was just at the foot of the hill below our house. My father drove us, and my mother would pick us up. It wasn’t long, though, before I was transferred to Marymount, a Catholic girls’ school a few miles away in Brentwood, and my mother began to drive me both ways. Our most memorable trip was the morning she was trying to mask the smell of liquor on her breath with a drop or two of Binaca. She was careening along through this exclusive neighborhood in her red Mercedes convertible, head back, bottle upended, when thecap came off and about three ounces of breath freshener gushed down her throat. She had to pull over to the side of the road and vomit.
    As my mother’s drinking escalated, my father had us go around putting Post-it notes on all the liquor bottles saying, “Please, Mummy, stop drinking.” At other times he’d empty out the vodka and refill the containers with water. All the while we got the clear message that we were not supposed to talk about the drinking or about how crazy she was. The unspoken directive for the three of us children was to Keep the Family Secret and to, above all, Look Good and Act Normal.
    The allure of being a “normal” family was so strong that my father once got it into his head that we should rent a recreational vehicle and go camping in Yosemite. So the five of us, plus another English couple, went off into the woods for this very “Ozzie and Harriet” adventure. Of course, my mother got stinking drunk, tripped over a log, and fell on her face, then began to rain long, obscene curses down on me. I think if a meteorite had struck the campsite, she would have similarly blamed me. When we got back to L.A., we had to make up some lie about what had happened to her face.
    The joke, of course, was that this woman who devoted so much attention to how she looked went around the house wearing an unkempt dressing gown, no makeup, and her hair as frizzy as a fright wig. In her drunkenness she obsessed about the tiniest of imperfections, like the little fuzz balls that would appear on the carpet. Perhaps the finest moment of my childhood was the day she staggered down from the second floor, raging at me for God knows what, stooped to pick up a ball of lint, then slid headfirst and spread-eagled, all the rest of the way down. Shortly thereafter she was in a car crash, and she must havereally erupted at the other driver, so much so that the man called my father at his office to ask, “Is your wife on drugs?”
    Through it all I think my dad was simply overwhelmed, trying to keep the peace and make the best of it with three kids and a crazy wife. I didn’t have to go too far into some Freudian fantasy to believe that getting away from my mom and being alone with my dad would make things better. I always wished they would get divorced and that I could live with him.
    Divorce was not a