In 2018, after having her lungs exposed to pesticides, Diane Ladd was told she had only six months to live. Ladd (whose film, television, and theater career has resulted in her working with everyone from Tennessee Williams to Martin Scorsese) might be best known today for the many times she’s shared the screen with her real-life daughter, Laura Dern. Highlights include David Lynch‘s Wild at Heart and (a pre-White Lotus) Mike White’s TV show, Enlightened.
To start with the good news, it’s now 2023 and not only did Ladd beat her diagnosis but she’s continued to act, with recent projects including Isle of Hope and Gigi & Nate. It’s not for nothing, though, that Ladd’s health started to get better. Having been told that walking could improve her mom’s lung capacity, Dern and Ladd started to go on walks together, with Dern using the opportunity to ask her mom questions and to use storytelling as a distraction to keep her from trying to sit down.
Honey, Baby, Mine is the result they didn’t plan on: a book that collects their discussions as transcripts (Dern recorded the conversations), so it actually reads like a script between the two actresses. Each chapter is a different talk. Sometimes the topics are different. Other times there’s overlap, or the conversation branches off of what was discussed the day before.
Nothing is off limits. Ladd might try to avoid walking, but she never avoids a question (and without having to say anything, Ladd’s progress can be tracked by how much less often she asks to take a bench break as the walks go on).
Over the course of the book, you learn that this isn’t the first time Ladd’s proven a medical diagnosis wrong. The title of the book comes from a song (“Crawdad Song”) Ladd used to sing with her dad.
Those looking for celebrity anecdotes won’t be disappointed (Shelley Winters was Dern’s godmother, and Ladd met Spencer Tracey the first time she visited a film set), but the book is bigger than that, addressing life questions that any parent-child can relate to, or maybe not, which, in that case, that’s kind of what this book is for, too, outside of being of interest to fans of Dern and Ladd. If these are questions you’ve always wanted to ask a loved one, but nerves got in the way, Dern and Ladd show how it can be done if both parties are willing to be open with each other. That Dern and Ladd are willing to share their private conversations with the world is so that others don’t regret not speaking up, and they don’t sugarcoat. Some of the conversations are rougher than others (like when Dern and Ladd discuss what it was like being single, working moms, with Dern able to share what it was like as a daughter and a mom) and some don’t tie up nicely (like when Dern and Ladd try to resolve an old argument about a haircut).
It’s just the two of them for these walks. No one ever joins them. At the end of each chapter Ladd and/or Dern includes a postscript, like a talking head written after the fact, but there are no other voices, which makes sense, and if Dern and Ladd weren’t famous that would be the end of it, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes wonder if a person described in the book was actually named in the conversation, or wonder about the follow-up conversations Dern might’ve had with her dad (Bruce Dern) after talking with her mom. Ultimately, though, that’s just nosiness and this isn’t a biography.
What’s also interesting is that, because these are conversations between a mother and her daughter, Dern and Ladd aren’t talking with fans in mind. While that means these conversations are vulnerable, it also means they’re not explaining for an audience that doesn’t share a history with them or know anything about their lives. I went into this book knowing some of the bullet points, and what some of their conversations might be about, but I’d be curious to know if the experience was different for readers unfamiliar with Dern and Ladd outside of the roles they’ve played.
Honey, Baby, Mine is on sale now from Grand Central Publishing.
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