Dear Cary: My Life with Cary Grant

All in all, I liked this book. I thought the first half was excellent, but the second half was merely good. Maybe it was my mood, maybe it is just the fact that Cary Grant is my favorite actor, so anything even remotely disparaging is somewhat unlikeable. That being said, it's a love story at heart, which is something I don't really get into. As memoirs go, it's pretty good. It only really deals with a small time frame in her life, that spent immediately before to immediately after her time with Cary Grant, though in the last few pages she makes a revelation in her life a few years after the divorce. And then a little afterword about recent events. There are some images spread throughout the book of letters/notes he wrote to her, and some photos at the end. The eBook was formatted fine with no obvious errors.

It's rather a scathing portrayal of him for most of the book and yet, as one delves further into it, it becomes quite apparent that she sort of cornered a man into proposing marriage when he had already told her that he had no intention of marrying again. Also, she wants us to believe that she was this young, inexperienced girl, when in fact she was a woman in her late 20's. I say she should have left well enough alone and moved on at the first sign of trouble

REALITY CHECK: This book was a shameless, self-promoting, self-flattering work of fiction and nearly everyone she writes about is dead. Dyan describes herself as an 'old-fashioned, marriage-minded girl'. Obviously, she was a highly manipulative one at that -- using the oldest trick in the book to force Cary into wedlock by "accidentally" getting pregnant. They eloped on July 22, 1965, in Las Vegas and their daughter, Jennifer, was born on February 26, 1966. Do the math. There is no mention of how they divorced soon after Jennifer's birth, and Dyan dragged "the love of her life's" name and reputation through the mud during the divorce proceedings, and how while she was gone making films, and Cary retired to be a stay-at-home-dad, she dragged him through an ugly 10 year child custody battle.At her in-person bookstore promotions, she loves to repeatedly tell the crowd that she was the only woman Cary ever trusted to have a child with.It's also interesting why Dyan would choose to write this book on the heels of her daughter's book -- "Good Stuff," a biography of her life with her famous father.