![]() ![]() She has crystal-clear memories of that year of her life, which had been so fanciful. It’s understandably emotional for Davis to talk about what happened with her neighbor. What does everybody else want me to be? And how can I negate what I want as much as possible?” It was my mode of existence for the way I grew up. I felt like women-and anyone-can relate to not feeling like you can live authentically in certain situations. And ideally, people would relate to the idea of giving away your power. “I feel like I did it for little Geena,” Davis tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed in a recent Zoom interview, explaining why she decided to write Dying of Politeness. But along the way, with the help of some life experience and the inspiring example of Susan Sarandon while shooting Thelma & Louise, she found the voice that helped her become the Most Badass Badass: a woman who changed Hollywood both on screen and off. She also examines the ways in which she would lose parts of herself in relationships in order to be the woman she thought her partners wanted her to be. There are the showbiz stories of the director who made her straddle his lap during an audition, and an anecdote about Bill Murray’s toxic on-set behavior when they were co-stars. There was no trip to the police or report of sexual assault, though-something that Davis is grappling with now. When, at age 10, she told her mother about the touching, she blew a gasket and forbade her from going to the neighbor’s house again. She also relives disturbing memories of the neighbor who used to invite her inside while she worked her route delivering newspapers, and molested her. Even while he routinely veered into oncoming traffic, narrowly missing head-on collisions, her parents refused to say a word, instead strategically moving 8-year-old Geena to the seat in the car that might be least dangerous in the event of an accident. There are the occasions when she felt, as a child, she might actually die of politeness, like the time her 99-year-old great uncle drove her family home from a dinner. Throughout the book, she works through formative experiences when she diminished or failed to fight for herself, but also the “little flashes of confidence” that marked the milestones of her impressive career. She had grown up, as she writes, “a cripplingly polite New Englander who was much too tall to hide”-a far cry from the Hollywood trailblazer who was described in a 2013 headline as “ The Most Badass Badass to Ever Badass.” So much of her life existed within that tension: being shy and taught to never be a bother, even if it means failing to stand up for yourself and being someone who is enthusiastic, strong, and, certainly, opinionated. In her new book Dying of Politeness: A Memoir, the Oscar-winning actress chronicles her lifetime overcoming that training. ![]() Davis stayed silent.Įven at 1 year old, Davis embodied the family-instilled training: “I’d passed some sort of cosmic test in which I had maintained decorum and invisibility,” she says. But, as her mother often bragged, it never happened. The loud thud echoed throughout the church, and the congregation whipped their heads around in a stunned silence-bracing for the child to unleash screams of pain. After fidgeting and fussing on her mother’s lap, Baby Geena managed to clock her head on the pew in front of them. When Davis was 1 year old, her mother took her to church where they lived in Wareham, Massachusetts, a place that Davis jokes is most notable for being “on the way” to Cape Cod. Geena Davis’ mother had a favorite story to tell. ![]()
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