HONEY, BABY, MINE: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding), by Laura Dern and Diane LaddWhen Diane Ladd is diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and given six months to live, her daughter Laura Dern looks at her and thinks, “You can’t die.” Determined to increase her mother’s lung capacity and life span, Dern gets the doctor’s permission to take Ladd on daily 15-minute walks, distracting her mother by asking questions about the past.
Transcripts of those conversations are the beating heart of “Honey, Baby, Mine,” the actresses’ joint memoir, which also includes photographs, recipes, memorabilia and short, interspersed chapters written by each woman.
They commiserate over the timeless frustrations of their industry, while also reflecting on what has slowly changed.
Dern recalls visiting her mom’s sets as a child, catching the acting bug when Martin Scorsese asked her to appear as an extra in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” Allowing a child on the set was still frowned upon nearly two decades later, when they worked together on “Rambling Rose” (for which they became the only mother-daughter pair ever to have been nominated for Academy Awards for the same film) and had to advocate for their director to be allowed to nurse her baby at work.
By the time Dern co-starred in the 2017 TV mini-series “Big Little Lies,” actors’ children were so commonly present that, she writes, “we had effectively created a … day care.”