Keith Ryan Cartwright

Special to Nashville Tennessean

Sally Field spent more than seven years writing a memoir she never intended to release.

As an actress, she has won three Emmys, two Oscars, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, in 2015, President Barack Obama honored the now 71-year-old with the National Medal of Arts.

Her memoir is not about that.

Although, yes, it’s in there.

With the honest feedback of her agent, Molly Friedrich, and later her editor, Millicent Bennett, Field wrote a deeply personal and haunting account of her childhood.

And, for the first time, she tells the story of being sexually abused by her stepfather, a pattern of hollow relationships — void of any sort of true feelings or emotions — which includes her time with Burt Reynolds, who recently passed away at 82, and a longing for loneliness that has stayed with her throughout her adult life.

More:Sally Field on stepfather's abuse: 'I couldn’t expect protection to come from my mother'

Last week, Field spoke candidly with The Tennessean.

Prior to your mom passing away, you were able to have a conversation with her. How important was that conversation, and could you have written this without it?

No. No. I could not have. All of these pieces that I lay out — that I ultimately couldn’t put together — I couldn’t solve the puzzle. It was something that I really began to write for myself because I felt so discomforted. I honestly felt like I had tickets on a boat that was sailing and I couldn’t find the boat, and I didn’t know where it was. It was this constant gnawing at me.

Let’s talk about your stepfather (Hollywood stuntman Jock Mahoney). I know how you could call him cruel and frightening and I even understand, at times, how he could be “magical,” but you also said “this was power.” You’re not referring to him having power over you, you had the power. What power did you have?

What I’ve learned in my lifetime of trying to untangle this web of abuse is that it’s such a complicated thing for a child and especially because, in my life, it wasn’t just one incident. It went on throughout my childhood and as I entered adolescence your brain begins to develop. Even though it was before I had a real sense of sexuality, I had a sense of femaleness. I had his focus. It was something about me that was powerful at that moment. That’s what I felt. It was just flashing feelings of that.

There’s a theme of feeling alone, a theme of loneliness that continues throughout much of your life. Has writing a memoir helped you to better understand it? Or make sense of that?

I can see it more clearly and how embedded it is in me. But I also know I wrote in the book about how I feel safe being alone, so again it’s a very complicated issue of humanness. Part of me is longing to be alone and I feel calm. And then the other part of me is dying to be with people. You have to grapple with all of those different pieces of yourself. When you don’t have a real easygoing dialogue between all the pieces of yourself, then that negotiation gets difficult. That’s what human beings do, they negotiate with themselves. There’s part of you that wants to go home and read a book and there’s part of you that wants to go out and be part of a big group and laugh and talk and have a couple of drinks, so you have to negotiate with each other — the pieces of yourself. You say to yourself, "Well, we’ll go home tomorrow night but tonight we’ll go out and we’re going to have a good time."

This is a deeply personal story. Are you comfortable (with the process)? Is it scary?

I have to tell you, this has just begun for me. I’m not on the road yet. ... I’m just beginning. I know it’s going to be — I’m going down the rabbit hole. ...

It’s ironic that you are going down this rabbit hole, as you called it, and beginning Monday it will be a very public story for someone who really does long to be alone.

Right, except for the contradictions that I am. That most people are. I think everybody is. I do long to be alone, but I’ve been an actor for 54 years of my life or 55 years of my life. Even before that I was always onstage. There’s flip-sides to the coin and all sorts of degrees in between. Part of me wants to reach out to other people. Wants to have a dialogue and feel connected. My way of doing that was always onstage. It was the only way I could hear myself, or in front of the camera acting.

With the passing of Burt Reynolds, how did you find out and what feelings did you have?

My son Sam called and said “brace yourself.” Burt was an important person in my life, but for a very short period of time. But nonetheless, he was important. I was sort of flooded with nostalgia and memories. I can’t say I really felt sad because I find myself saying a line — it was something I felt like I had said before, but it was something Mama Gump had said before, so it was very weird — I said to my son, “It was just his time Sam. It’s just his time.” And that’s what Mama Gump said. It was Burt’s time. I had not spoken to him in a long time, but I had the feeling he was suffering physically. He’s such a really athletic, physical man that I don’t think he liked being sort of impaired. His back was hurting him. His legs were hurting him. He was walking with a cane. Knowing Burt the way I did, he hated that. He was in his early 80s. He had one hell of a life. I guess I just felt that — glad he’s not hurting any more.

There’s a line you wrote about Burt that stuck with me: “He wanted me to be who he thought I was, and not who I truly was.” That was very early on in your relationship. Were you guys ever able to feel something deeper? It seems so hollow.

Right, yeah. No. Never. But I don’t say that was totally his fault. I’m also trying to show I could not get out of the patterns that had been ingrained in me. I couldn’t feel because of how deeply trained I was to behave in a certain way. We were a perfect match of flaws. That wouldn’t happen today — what we had, I wouldn’t allow it. I just couldn’t see my way out of it.

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The (NY) Times article likened your relationship with Burt to “trying to re-create a version of her relationship with her stepfather.”

I don’t think that’s completely accurate, but it is in a way. It is in a way because my childhood survival pattern — what I had been taught as a child — and, I think this is what I talked about: There’s a saying about child psychology that what is fired together is wired together, so when a child has two very separate and different complicated feelings that are happening at the same time — for instance, I would be terrified of my stepfather when he would be really physical and pick me up off the ground and I was a tiny little thing and I was terrified. But I’m also being seen and I’m being appreciated like I had done something wonderful, so there’s two separate very strong emotions going on there — fear and love. To be seen. To be loved. As a child, that kept being repeated — that to be loved I had to also be terrified and I had to disappear. That’s what I was taught by my stepfather. It’s hard to detangle that. People usually spend their whole lifetime trying to detangle the webs that they get caught in, in childhood. In adulthood, they’re served by those mechanisms. At the time, I would only feel that I was being loved if I was also terrified and I would vanish. I would disappear. I wouldn’t be in the room.