There are cardboard boxes piled high in Sally Field’s living room. “I’m a terrible pack rat,” says the Oscar-winning actress, laughing, as she settles into a corner sectional couch at her Pacific Palisades, California, home.
But while she’s moved so many times in her life that she’s lost count, these aren’t boxes for yet another trek—at least not yet. They’re filled with pages she will hand-sign to be bound into 28,000 copies of her very first memoir,In Pieces, out now. The raw and revealing life story, which includes details of how she overcame her painful, abusive childhood, is yet another triumph for the beloved two-time Academy Award winner, who has three children and five grandchildren from her two marriages.
Field, 71, is in cropped jeans and a white blouse, her bare feet in well-worn Birkenstock sandals, which she props up on a wooden coffee table, where a collection of Emily Dickinson poems sits atop a pile of books. She looks—still, somehow—impossibly young.
“It’s genetics,” she says, of the “constantly girlish quality” she’s had her entire life.
“I’ve heard people say that I’ve always been the girl next door, the all-American girl,” says Field, taking off her black-rimmed glasses and rubbing her eyes.