1
I remember at the reception you said to me, 'I'm the daughter of a father who's been married five times. Mother killed herself. My sister killed herself. My brother has been in a mental institution. I'm twenty-three and divorced with two kids.' I said, 'Brooke, either you've got to open the window right now'--we were on the tenth floor--'either you've got to open the window right now and jump out, or say "I'm going to live, " because you're right, it's the worst family history that anybody ever had, and either you jump out the window or you live.Brooke Hayward
2
I contemplated the phone for some time. Never had I heard her so oddly gay and forthright; as a matter of fact, we hadn't discussed sex since adolescence. Her entire inner life was secretive and mysterious, and no one dared violate it. She sent out powerful "No Trespassing" signals and I had learned to honor them. It crossed my mind that my sister was drunk.Brooke Hayward
3
This book is a personal memoir; but it is also a larger story-about carelessness and guilt, and the wreckage they can make of lives.Brooke Hayward
4
Out of perverseness, I jumped on the subway and went down to a sound stage on Fourth Street to watch the shooting of Kay Doubleday's big strip scene in Mad Dog Coll, a gangster film that can still, to my embarrassment, be seen occasionally on late-night TV.. Kay Doubleday was in my class at Lee Strasberg's; it was in the interest of art, I told myself, to watch her prance down a ramp, singing and stripping her heart out.Brooke Hayward