Copyright Variety
If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. Diane Ladd — the three-time Oscar-nominated character actress beloved for roles in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” “Wild at Heart” and HBO’s “Enlightened” died yesterday at 89. In the wake of her passing, she and daughter Laura Dern‘s 2023 joint memoir, “Honey, Baby, Mine: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love,” takes on a newly poignant resonance as both a Hollywood history lesson and a final conversation between mother and child. The book is available on paper and hardback, Kindle and an audiobook version on Audible narrated by Dern and Ladd. The book was born out of Ladd’s diagnosis with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 2018, during which she was given months to live and was her ultimate cause of death. Dern urged her mother to walk for her lung health, and during those daily strolls, they recorded 14 sprawling conversations about love, ambition, parenting, regret, fame, faith and survival. Across chapters, Ladd revisits her Mississippi childhood and early auditions, the car crash that killed her first daughter, the sexism and pay inequities of mid-century Hollywood and the unconventional career rebuild that led to her late-in-life acclaim. Dern, meanwhile, opens up about growing up on sets, navigating fame as a second-generation actor and the emotional cost of being raised by two working parents in the public eye. The memoir is laced with the pair’s banter but it doesn’t shy away from harder truths. At one point, Dern admits she’s avoided asking certain questions for fear of hurting her mother. Ladd responds, “Of course it hurts. That’s how you know it matters.”
