Born with Teeth
Ratings12
Average rating4
The most touching parts of Born With Teeth are the ones with her children and her sister. The most interesting are the occasional insights into her acting career, stage and television both. Unfortunately the bulk of the book is coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, and failed relationships with men. The relationships are described with little affection, since they are told with hindsight of every red flag and failing. The book isn't completely linear, which is frustrating at times.
If you're considering this book as a Star Trek fan, you can skip ahead to around chapter 25. Her time on Voyager isn't described in great detail but it's reasonably satisfying. If you want anything related to Orange Is The New Black, tough luck because the book ends at least a decade before that series began.
Interesting enough to kick off a new annual Book Riot challenge (“Read a celebrity memoir”) and now I want to watch Star Trek: Voyager.
A generous 3 stars. Her writing style matches her interview style which I find overly dramatic and effusive. This also ended earlier than I expected, I'm pretty sure she'd divorced Tim Hagan when this came out so it must have taken a while to publish
An easy romp into the life of Kate Mulgrew up to her mid-Voyager days. Her story isn't always sunshine and roses, her lifestyle (actress in theater and television) not one I can necessarily relate to, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Interesting, But Flaky. In this memoir, Kate Mulgrew - known best, depending on age and interest, for 70s era show Ryan's Hope, 90s era show Star Trek: Voyager, or 2010s era show Orange Is The New Black - describes her life from being literally born with teeth up until around the turn of the Millenium, when she was still filming Voyager.
And she does a remarkable job of keeping the reader interested in what happens next. Her prose has the qualities of the poet she once wanted to be.
But she plays with the timeline too much, often skipping around or losing threads entirely, only to pick them up later with no explanation. And what she makes seem in the book as merely days in some cases appears to have actually been years.
But the biggest sin, and the reason this 2015 memoir feels incomplete, is the abrupt ending. Wherein she sets up a particular meeting that had been years in the making... and then ends with a literal closed door, never revealing anything beyond the moment she stepped into that particular room.
I, as so many others, learned to know Kate as Captain Janeway. She talks about that in this book, but it's mostly what happens before Star Trek. I listened to the audiobook she narrates herself. There's some unevenness in the telling, but all in all, it's a good book.
Listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by the author.
Kate Mulgrew is an excellent writer, and a great narrator. She really performs the story more than just reads it. It covers her early career up through the time she spent working on Star Trek Voyager, and even though I didn't know much about her career, I was fascinated by her story.