Sam Greisman, the youngest of Ms. Field’s sons, said that he had been broadly aware that she had been abused by her stepfather, and that he knew she’d had “a childhood where no one was allowed to talk about anything.”

Mr. Greisman, a 30-year-old filmmaker, said that when he was growing up, Ms. Field “was already a woman with a very established career. I never felt like I saw her unsure how to handle something. She always seemed so together.”

Reading “In Pieces” and seeing the full breadth of his mother’s life had given him a greater appreciation for her, he said. “To see her as someone who grew up confused and made mistakes and went through these traumas, it made me feel more connected to her.”

Now comes the part when Ms. Field will share her stories with a mass audience, and she could hardly predict how her readership will receive them, or how she might receive her readership.

Though the frankness of “In Pieces” might resonate in a #MeToo era, Ms. Field was reluctant to offer up her book as a paradigm for others who might want to disclose their survival narratives.

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“People should tell whatever story they want to tell,” she said. “This is just my story and it happened the way it happened.” Outrage at the abuses that others have suffered is warranted, she said, but it “is the first part of it, it’s not the fix. Outrage has to come first and it can’t just be quieted and go away.”