Book Review: Apparently There Were Complaints

Bawdy, interesting memoir by Sharon Gless

CBS-owned Simon & Schuster sent Autonomia an advance copy of the new memoir (on sale this month for $27) by actress Sharon Gless. I had met and interviewed the co-star of the CBS show Cagney & Lacey in 2015 at a San Fernando Valley diner. Gless first caught my attention as a stewardess in the first sequel to 1970’s blockbuster Airport. I had followed her career. After she narrated an Oscar-nominated movie about Ayn Rand, I wanted to know more.

Sharon Gless never mentions that movie in her book, a clipped, brisk life story which I finished reading over the holidays. I suppose there’s a lot of her life she left out of Apparently There Were Complaints. The memoir focuses on what’s important to her: a privileged and troubled girlhood—a stern grandmother known as “Grimmy” figures prominently into her life—in Southern California, her Hollywood career, from ABC’s Marcus Welby, MD to USA Network’s Burn Notice and various works in between and her addiction to gin and cocaine. In Apparently Ther…