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A Memoir
by Vanessa Schneider
A spare, heartbreaking memoir and tribute to Maria Schneider, the 1970s movie starlet who catapulted to fame in the controversial film Last Tango in Paris—only to live the rest of her life plagued by scandal—as told from the perspective of her adoring younger cousin.
The late French actress Maria Schneider is perhaps best known for playing Jeanne in the provocative film Last Tango in Paris, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and released to international shock and acclaim in 1972. It was Maria's first major role, alongside film legend Marlon Brando, when she was barely eighteen years old. The experience would haunt her for the rest of her life, traumatizing her and sparking a tabloid firestorm that only ceased when she began to retreat from the public eye nearly two decades later.
To Maria's much younger cousin, Vanessa Schneider, Maria was a towering figure of another kind—a beautiful and fearsome fixture in Vanessa's childhood, a rising star turned pariah whose career and struggles with addiction won the family shame and pride in equal measure. Here, Vanessa recounts the challenges of their overlapping youths and fraught adulthood and reveals both the tragedy and inevitability of Maria's path in a family plagued by mental illness and in a society rife with misogyny.
Unsentimental and suffused with deep love, My Cousin Maria Schneider is the story of a talented artist and the cousin who admired her, and of exploitation and how its lingering effects can reverberate through a lifetime.
"A touching tribute... Maria Schneider, with all her adventures and struggles, deserves to be better remembered, and her cousin shows us why. This stunning tale of Maria Schneider and her battles is stark yet consistently loving—and unforgettable." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Schneider writes dispassionately though not without affection, providing a blunt perspective on her complicated relationship with her cousin, a woman haunted by addiction and exploitation who sipped champagne until the end. The result is a bittersweet and gritty salute to a misunderstood screen legend." —Publishers Weekly
"A terrific translation by fellow actress Ringwald makes this concise, harrowing book a powerful read." —Library Journal
"Translated by actress Ringwald, this is an intriguing addition to the growing body of literature reexamining women's agency through a post-#MeToo lens." —Booklist
"With devastating power and great originality of style, this gorgeous memoir shows the film industry's brutality toward young women and the ways in which shame can waft into a sensitive girl's bedroom like a draft under a door. In Molly Ringwald's luminous translation, Vanessa Schneider's love letter to her famous actress cousin—and to her own 1970s French bohemian childhood—delivers the emotional impact of great fiction while also faithfully telling an important true-life story about misogyny in our time." —Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can't Sleep and Also a Poet
"Composed like a posthumous love letter to her cousin, Vanessa Schneider's memoir captures their sisterly bond with tenderness and grace. It is an exquisite portrait of a tragic heroine, whose story offers a heartrending example of the cruelty of powerful men" —Violaine Huisman, author of The Book of Mother
This information about My Cousin Maria Schneider was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Vanessa Schneider is a French journalist and author of the bestselling and award-winning memoir Tu T'Appelais Maria Schneider, published in France in 2018. Vanessa is also the author of two novels, La Mère de ma mère and Do Not Go Crazy. Tu T'Appelais Maria Schneider is the first of her books to be translated into English. She is currently a staff writer at M magazine in France and regularly contributes to the programs C dans l'air on France.5 and As We Talk on France International.
Molly Ringwald's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Vogue, and she is the author of the bestselling novel-in-stories When It Happens to You. She previously translated Lie with Me, a novel by Philippe Besson.
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