Untied.

By Meredith Baxter (Crown Archetype, 2011).

Meredith Baxter did a whole lot of drugs as a teenager, and has the sort of encyclopedic psychopharmaceutical memory which allows her to recall and describe how each of those myriad substances made her feel.

By her early 20s, Baxter was married , then divorced, with two kids, living in a virtual garden shack and trying to hold herself together while working insurance company jobs. She drifts into acting.

Her mother Whitney Blake, whose career had gone in the odd direction of her languishing for years as the housewife employer of Shirley Booth on the hit series Hazel, blows through several marriages.

Baxter’s stepfather becomes her agent, and remains so even after he’s no longer her stepfather. As part of his agent duties, he sets up a seedy rendezvous between her and a casting agent.

Baxter wanders into an acting career which takes off immediately and sustains itself even as she ages from high school roles in movies such as Ben to the short-lived and bizarrely controversial sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie to older sister status on the drama Family for five seasons to the mother role in one of the iconic sitcoms of the 1980s to Lifetime made-for-TV movies.

Baxter marries her Bridget Loves Bernie co-star David Birney, who emotionally abuses her and resents her career doing better than his. Soon there are more splits and more romances, successes to celebrate. Then there’s the defining event of the book, which demands a prologue and a couple of chapters: Baxter’s decision to come out as a lesbian in 2009, having established a lasting and happy relationship with her partner Nancy Locke.

Meredith Baxter’s autobiographical narrative voice is unabashed, unashamed, yet cooingly sweet and with crystal-clear recall. Her strong will comes from her realization of how victimized, or at least  vulnerable and subservient she was in her youth. She expresses so much distaste for the waffling and self-censorship that CBS exhibited during the short run of Bridget Loves Bernie that she clearly avoids such absurd second-guessing in her own life. Yet she’s sensitive: an introductory note explains why she’s chosen not to mention her children a lot in the book, and though she has some nasty anecdotes about her husbands, she’s also full of tales about their better sides.

Best of all, this is a flowing human story, not a disjointed collection of career highlights. Baxter doesn’t put her life aside for her work, and the two intersect fascinatingly. Chapter eight ends with the TV producer Gary David Goldberg and his wife Diana Meehan coming to dinner at the Baxter/Birney house, to discuss a role for Birney in a new series called The Bureau. Birney doesn’t get the gig, but Goldberg later calls Baxter to offer her the role of Elyse on Family Ties.

Chapter Nine begins:

Years later, Gary’s wife, Diana, said that as they drove away from our house that night, Gary told her that he found the way David spoke to me so embarrassing that he didn’t want to work with him. I couldn’t remember anything David had said that stood out; I had no sense of that night being different from any other night.

This is exactly the celebrity bio you want it to be.