Minka Kelly grapples with her upbringing in her poignant new memoir

It’s not that Kelly is shielding herself from scrutiny. Vulnerable, self-aware and admirably introspective, she confronts her childhood trauma to decipher how it shaped her — first into an aimless teen and industrious 20-something, then into a middle-aged woman still unpacking that pain. At one point, Kelly and her mother lived in a Los Angeles apartment complex storage unit. Later, Maureen disappeared for months while her daughter was passed from one erratic household to another. At 16, Kelly’s mother skipped town and signed away custody of her daughter to a stranger. As Kelly writes, “The harmful lessons sometimes picked up in the process of practicing that resiliency can take a lifetime to exorcise.”

For all its candor, Kelly’s book is short on details about her acting career. Although she provides intriguing insight into the mind of “Friday Night Lights” creator Peter Berg and opens up about a tumultuous romance with co-star Taylor Kitsch, who played Tim Riggins on the show, she mostly uses her Hollywood experience as a backdrop for the familial strife behind the scenes. Other than Kitsch, Kelly is not interested in dishing on her romances that have fueled many a tabloid headline. It’s clear she’d much rather reflect on her less glamorous early 20s, when she climbed her way out of poverty by working as a scrub nurse.

Kelly begins the book with a bleak memory, when at 17 she used a fake ID to dance for cash at an Albuquerque peep show. “I’ll go to high school during the day and come here in the evening,” she explains. “I feel queasy, afraid I might be crossing a threshold, the one that lured my mother down a rabbit hole, but I’m desperate.” She then rewinds to her childhood and chronologically lays out her story. “This narrative,” she says in an author’s note, “tells my experience from the point of view of a scared and traumatized child.” Those early recollections, as a 7-year-old tagging along for mother’s stripping shifts, are vivid. Recalling her visits to a particularly seedy club, she writes: “The room reeked of makeup and Victoria’s Secret lotion mixed with spilled whiskey and stale cigarette smoke.”

Even with the help of a professional she credits in her acknowledgments, Kelly’s clipped prose isn’t always so colorful, as she too often leans on stilted dialogue recollections and ham-handed turns of phrase. But the lack of lyricism can be forgiven in light of her raw soul-searching. Case in point: She expresses guilt for not speaking out when Harvey Weinstein made an inappropriate advance at her. “When all the #MeToo details emerged, I realized I’d been complicit in protecting him,” she writes. “I was also complicit in making him feel okay about the gross proposition he’d made. At the time, the only safe route I saw was to say I was flattered.”

When it comes to the questionable characters who have shaped her life, she approaches them with empathy. There’s her father, former Aerosmith guitarist Rick Dufay, whom she portrays as an absentee dad with his own dreams and intermittent interest in her existence. Her surrogate father, only referred to as David, is first depicted as commendably dedicated to a girl to whom he had no biological or legal connection, then exposed for unforgivable actions.

Still, in this journey of working-class consternation, female empowerment and adulthood actualization, Kelly’s mother is never far from her gaze. She describes Maureen as a complicated woman haunted by mood swings, an impulsive edge and deep-seated demons. Despite their eventual estrangement, Kelly reconnects with her when Maureen receives a fatal diagnosis.

Looking back on her troubled upbringing, Kelly explains her “survival mechanism”: “It wasn’t ‘forgive and forget’ but ‘avoid and bury.’” With such an exceptional excavation, she seems to have put that mantra in the past.

Thomas Floyd is a writer and editor for The Washington Post.