Cady McClain Releases Memoir "Murdering My Youth"

[JamesG]

Cady McClain on Her Shocking Memoir
Apr 16, 2014
by Michael Logan


Perfect timing! Former "All My Children" and "As the World Turns" sensation Cady McClain has joined CBS's "The Young and the Restless" as grieving mom/town pariah Kelly Andrews, just as she's published her brutally frank memoir, Murdering My Youth (available on Amazon and www.cadymcclain.com).

The two-time Emmy winner tells TV Guide Magazine all about it.







Murdering My Youth, your shocking survival story, is a fantastic but tough read, marked by years of family madness, alcoholism, abandonment and domestic violence.

You were also sexually abused by your father. Was it hard to get it all down on paper?

Pure torture. It took me five years to write this book. In fact, I originally wrote it as a fiction piece because I wasn't ready to say, "This happened to me."

I really struggled with the idea of forgiving my parents but I persevered. I had to get the story out of me.







Plus, you were a child actor and the sole support for your family. Do you ever really recover from that?

For years I could not return to L.A. and spend more than two days there without freaking out and needing to leave quickly, because that's the town where I was put on sale. I know my story is bigger than life — not everyone was a kid in showbiz — but I wrote the book for anyone who was forced to grow up in chaos and violence. A child's innocence should never be for sale.

I really wanted and needed to understand what had happened to me. It didn't really sink in until 2012 when I fully realized that my parents had spent all of the money I had made as a child actor — and it was a lot! It wasn't until I started writing the book that I thought, "What the f--k did happen to all that money?"

And so I dug into my old boxes of crap and found the original incorporation papers and found out that I had been paying the mortgage on our house and that my parents were taking salaries. Finding out the truth — 100 percent of the truth — was essential to me. That's how I know who I am. That's how I keep myself from going nuts or turning into a drug addict.







You don't write about your early years at AMC with much happiness.

It was tough. It was brutally hard. Michael Knight always made me laugh, God bless him, but you're right. I wasn't a happy person then. I was going through a lot of s--t and there was a lot of fallout.

Maybe it was a happy time for other people there but I didn't have a lot of joy in my heart back then.







The book concludes when you are 25. Will there be a sequel?

I wanted to end the book when my mom died, which was the most dramatic and profound thing that ever happened to me. The years after that? [Laughs] Oh, dude, I got into a lot of trouble! I decided after a life of so much pain and childhood crap that I was going to have fun and, oh boy, did I!

That is a different book and, if I ever write it, it would have to be called something like Days of Being Wild. I turned into a wild child who set out to have fun but instead I got really hurt and really screwed up and made some really stupid choices.

That was part of the reason I starting writing Murdering My Youth so many years ago. It was my attempt to say, "Whoa! Slow yourself down, girl!"







It's important to say that your book, despite all of the horror and the hell, is a real hoot! It's very zippy and entertaining and hugely funny.

Did your sense of humor help get you through those years of crisis?

I guess my take is: "If you don't laugh at it all, you might as well just kill yourself." [Laughs] Is that too dark? Actually, I believe that pain is the wellspring for all humor. When we recognize something in a situation that we relate to, we laugh. Embarrassment also makes us laugh and I've had so many embarrassing moments in my life I laugh a lot!

Even now, when I read through certain bits of the book, I laugh out loud. It's just the best feeling. The ridiculousness of it all gives me a certain kind of joy. My goal was not to make high literature, but a damn entertaining story, with a little wisdom thrown in there to boot!

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Cady-McC...r-1080566.aspx

[80sTrivia]

Wow, I never knew this about Cady's life. Sounds like a very interesting memoir, with insight on what it is like to have been a child actor in Hollywood...