Life Is Not a Stage: From Broadway Baby to a Lovely Lady and Beyond

By Florence Henderson

Book Overview

For millions of people around the world, Carol Brady is synonymous with motherhood, but growing up as the youngest of ten children in rural Indiana in the aftermath of the Great Depression, Florence Henderson lived a life quite different from that of the quintessential TV mom she later played on television. Florence's father was a dirt-poor tobacco tenant farmer who was nearly fifty years old when he married Florence's twenty-five-year-old mother, and was nearly seventy when Florence was born. Florence's childhood was full of deprivation and abandonment. Her father was an alcoholic at a time when there was no rehab or help for the disease. Their home rarely had electricity or running water. When she was twelve, Florence's mother left the family to work in Cleveland and never returned. Florence opens up about her childhood, as well as the challenges she's faced as an adult, including stage fright, postpartum depression, her extramarital affairs, divorce, her hearing loss, and heart problems. She writes with honesty and wisdom of how her faith and ability to survive has brought her through rough times to a life of profound joy and purpose.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1599953889
• ISBN13: 9781599953885
• Release Date: September 2011
• Publisher: Center Street
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.8" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Lovely read with real depth

I really enjoyed reading Florence Henderson's life story who died two years ago. She writes honestly in the same way as the late Mary Tyler Moore did in her 1995 memoir on the ups and downs of her life and no sugar coating. She is best known for playing the mother and wife in the tv show, The Brady Bunch. There is a lot more to her than that. In later life she trained as a hypnotherapist and writes movingly of how she could feel and see the spirit leave the body of her last husband when he died, who was also a hypnotherapist she met later in her life. She was married twice and had 4 children; two sons and two daughters from her first marriage. She was a working mother and the main breadwinner it seems and she worked hard on stage and in TV and was one of the first lady presenters on the Today show back in the 1960s. She also had her own tv chat/lifestyle and cookery show in the 1980s and so on. She liked to be positive in how she lived life but she did suffer intensely from depression after the birth of two of her children. Medics didn't know much about it then. but we know today that hormones levels, eg., progesterone, can collapse or decrease severely in some women after giving birth. Florence was a great lady and a great mum and good wife as much as she could.