One More Time

Book excerpt: Carol Burnett spent most of her childhood in a Depression-scarred Hollywood neighborhood, where she lived in a single-room apartment with her endearingly batty grandmother, Nanny, a hypochondriacal Christian Scientist with a buried past. The child of two alcoholic parents, Burnett presents a sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking coming-of-age: from her sadly hopeful mother, who was hooked on Tinseltown fantasy, to the first signs of her own comic gift; from happy weekends spent with her father, to their last tragic meeting in a public sanatorium. Featuring a new Afterword by the author, about teaming up with her daughter to bring this story to Broadway, One More Time is an intimate, touching, and astonishing narrative of a financially desperate but emotionally rich childhood on the wrong side of Hollywood’s tracks.