According to the author, the Mother Goddam of movies for four decades was something else offscreen. The paranoid figure saw herself as a feminine version of Gulliver. "Never relax," she warned B.D., "or the Lilliputians will climb up your legs and devour your soul." No defect goes uncharted, from the star's alcoholism to violent maledictions from her fourth husband, Actor Gary Merrill: "The only people who can be around you for long without wanting to kill you are faggots."

Physical catastrophes of old age, among them strokes and a mastectomy, follow like biblical punishments. If pity is contained in these pages, it is intended for the author, not her subject. B.D. now lives in the Bahamas, 3,000 miles from Hollywood, but My Mother's Keeper has distanced her even further from her mother, and from reticence and common decency.