Here's the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice » (Bargain)

Born in 1956, Maureen McCormick began her career at the age of six after winning the Baby Miss San Fernando Valley beauty pageant. She appeared in numerous commercials for brands such as Mattel and Kool-Aid, and performed in early episodes of Bewitched and My Three Sons before landing the starring role as Marcia Brady in the groundbreaking sitcom The Brady Bunch, which aired in prime time from 1969 to 1974. McCormick is also a singer and voice-over actor who has made a number of appearances in television and movie roles during her long career. She recently returned to television as a cast member of VH1's Celebrity Fit Club and won! She lives in Southern California with her husband and daughter.

Marcia Brady, eldest daughter on television's The Brady Bunch, had it all---style, looks, boys, brains, and talent. No wonder her younger sister Jan was jealous! For countless adolescents across America who came of age in the early 1970s, Marcia was the ideal American teenager. Girls wanted to be her. Boys wanted to date her. But what viewers didn't know about the always-sunny, perfect Marcia was that offscreen, her real-life counterpart, Maureen McCormick, the young actress who portrayed her, was living a very different--and not-so-wonderful--life. Now, for the very first time, Maureen tells the shocking and inspirational true story of the beloved teen generations have invited into their living rooms---and the woman she became.

In Here's the Story, Maureen takes us behind the scenes of America's favorite television family, the Bradys. With poignancy and candor, she reveals the lifelong friendships, the hurtful jealousies, the offscreen romance, the loving support her television family provided during a life-or-death moment, and the inconsolable loss of a man who had been a second father. But The Brady Bunch was only the beginning. Haunted by the perfection of her television alter ego, Maureen landed on the dark side, caught up in a fast-paced, drug-fueled, star-studded Hollywood existence that ultimately led to the biggest battle of her life.

Moving from drug dens on Wonderland Avenue to wild parties at the Playboy mansion and exotic escapades on the beaches of Hawaii, this candid, hard-hitting memoir exposes a side of a beloved pop-culture icon the paparazzi missed. Yet it is also a story of remarkable success. After kicking her drug habit, Maureen battled depression, reconnected with her mother, whom she nursed through the end of her life, and then found herself in a pitched battle for her family in which she ultimately triumphed.

There is no question: Maureen McCormick is a survivor. After fifty years, she has finally learned what it means to love the person you are, insight that has brought her peace in a happy marriage and as a mother. Here's the Story is the empowering, engaging, shocking, and emotional tale of Maureen McCormick's courageous struggle over adversity and her lifelong battle to come to terms with the idea of perfection---and herself.

Publishers Weekly

Marcia Brady is one of America's perpetual sweethearts, frozen in time as a sunny teenager with relatively superficial problems and a loving family. But McCormick, the actress who played her for five seasons on TV's iconic The Brady Bunch, has struggled with depression, cocaine addiction, bulimia and a family history of tragedy and insanity. McCormick gives a strong performance narrating her own story, her voice betraying her own frustration about the years she lost to drug abuse, or her great emotion at being reunited with her beloved mother's family in Iowa after she got sober. McCormick's girlishly sweet voice is sometimes difficult to reconcile with the strong survivor who is telling this story. But this is an absorbing and well-told tale. McCormick has come through hell and back, and her story will have listeners cheering. A HarperCollins hardcover. (Oct.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.