Book Review : Jill Ireland: Her Story of Resilience

Life Lines by Jill Ireland (Warner Books: $19.95; 352 pages)

By now, you’ve probably seen a lot of ink about actress Jill Ireland and her new book, “Life Lines,” an account of her son’s struggle with drug addiction. In these very pages, we’ve learned that Ireland is again battling for her life against cancer--a once-successful battle that was the subject of her 1984 best seller, “Life Wish.” Even so, she is making plans to play herself in a movie based on “Life Lines.” Now, after all the hype, comes the chance to actually read the book itself.

“Pain is inevitable,” Ireland writes of the break-up of her marriage to actor David McCallum and her love affair with Charles Bronson--but the phrase also describes each of the hurts and losses, great and small, that are recounted in “Life Lines.” From her short prologue--an unattended miscarriage in a German hotel room--to the sustained account of her son’s heroin and cocaine addiction, Ireland has composed nothing less than a fugue of excruciating but poignant memories: her distant recollections of a stay in a hospital at the age of 11 months (‘The sense of loss, the loneliness and isolation were more than my little girl’s mind could absorb”); the imagined outrage of her adopted son, torn from his natural mother at birth and handed to a stranger (“Small nostrils flared, seeking the smell of her, but he could not find it. The yearning grew worse”); the death of a beloved friend (“Her face was made up in a way that did not seem quite right,” she writes of the open-casket funeral. “I redid her hair, pulling it forward over her brow the way she used to wear it.”).

Along the way, Ireland tells two tales of grief in parallel narratives. One is about the devastating ill health--”ulcerated colitis and Crohn’s disease . . . a colostomy, three intestinal surgeries, a trio of heart attacks, open-heart surgery involving five bypasses, and subsequently a series of strokes”--that afflicted her charming father, Jack Ireland, whose “touch of the streets spiked my blood and strengthened my character.” And the other is about the alcohol, cocaine and heroin addiction that tormented her adopted son: “A malevolent star had cast a shadow on the light that should have shone protectively around Jason.”

Short Bursts of Prose

Ireland writes in short, intense bursts of prose, and each brief chapter is full of observation and incident: a remembered fragment of song, an endearing family ritual, a naughty limerick recited by the cherished grandfather. Surprisingly, the book is not a dirge--Ireland is a doughty and vivacious storyteller who is quick to reassure us with moments of tenderness and joy. But she is also a virtuoso at playing the heartstrings. And, sometimes, it’s all a bit too contrived, as when she sets up a 70-word chapter in order to depict her young daughter crying over a fearful separation from mother: “But, Mama, I’m just a little girl,” young Zuleika pleads. “You are my lifeline.”

At center stage in “Life Lines” of course, is Jason. Of the seven children that she has raised, Ireland writes, “Jason was the only serious casualty, an innocent bystander, shot by the stray bullets of decisions made years before he was born--marriages that did not work out, concepts of child-rearing passed on from different eras and cultures. . . .” Young Jason was a bedwetter, an asthma sufferer, a victim of dyslexia and hyperkinesia and--much later--a drug addict. And Ireland torments herself over why Jason was so afflicted--was it because he was separated from his natural mother at birth? Or because Ireland so readily acknowledged that he was adopted “in my let’s-keep-everything-out-in-the-open idealistic attitude”? At the end of “Life Lines,” however, we are given other, far more squalid and terrifying explanations of Jason’s ill fate.

By the time he reached adolescence, Jason “spun out into the world with the abandon of a banshee.” We witness his first love affair, at the age of 16, with an older married woman who introduced him to champagne and cocaine, among other pleasures of the flesh--Ireland hired a private detective to “bust” the real-life Mrs. Robinson. Later, while Ireland was undergoing chemotherapy during her first bout with cancer, she received the fateful telephone call: “The kid’s on the needle,” a doctor said of Jason. “He’s an addict.”

Trials Eerily Alike

The account of Jason’s attempt to kick his habit is no less harrowing and horrific than Ireland’s fight against breast cancer. Indeed, many of the medical and emotional trappings are eerily alike--and the recurrence of Jason’s addiction now strikes us as an augury of Ireland’s own renewed struggle with cancer. “Although the cancer monster still sat on my shoulder, I carried my burden more easily,” she writes. “The weight I could not and would never carry easily was the knot in my soul, the knowledge that my middle son was now and forever a drug addict. But for now, Jason was clean and I was taking a necessary respite from apprehension.”

The real hero of “Life Lines” is Jill Ireland herself. She mostly resists the temptation to depict herself as a rescuer or a martyr, but we come away from the book with the sense that she is a woman of tremendous strength and resilience, charm and courage. As her father said (in the last words he uttered before suffering a stroke): “You’ve been a real brick through all of this.”