IN PIECES

By Sally Field

Illustrated. 404 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $29.

Aside from what else she has meant to American culture over the past half century, Sally Field is notable for being perhaps the most misquoted actor of her generation. When she won her second best-actress Oscar — for her performance as a young widow during the Great Depression in 1984’s “Places in the Heart” — Field delivered a gushing, unguarded acceptance speech that ended with a line that has been mocked and parodied ever since, incorrectly remembered as “You like me! You really like me!” (What she actually said was: “I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect. The first time I didn’t feel it, but this time I feel it. And I can’t deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me!”) The sentiment, if not her exact words, has endured because it affirms what we believe to be essentially true about Hollywood stars: that they are black holes of need, starving for as much love and attention as they can suck out of the universe.

But if you come to her memoir, “In Pieces,” expecting to meet a plucky Sally Field desperate to be liked, you will not find her. Written by the actor over seven years, without the aid of a ghostwriter (a crutch often used by celebrity authors), this somber, intimate and at times wrenching self-portrait feels like an act of personal investigation — the private act of a woman, now 71, seeking to understand how she became herself, and striving to cement together the shards of her psyche that have been chipped and shattered over the course of her life.

Field was born in Pasadena, Calif., in 1946, the second child of Richard Field, a pharmaceutical salesman, and the actress Margaret Field (nee Morlan), a stunning beauty who appeared in dozens of mostly forgettable films. When Field was 3 years old, her parents separated, and she and her older brother moved with their mother into the home of their maternal grandmother in the hills above Pasadena. It was here that Field became enveloped in a matriarchy, cared for by her mother, her grandmother, her great-aunt and her great-grandmother. “It was a kind of no-man’s land,” she writes. “A world filled with women who would straighten up if a man walked in, who would set aside the triviality of their own work and quickly move everything out of the way. But the men, whoever they were, never stayed long, and when the door slammed behind them, the house seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.”