Golden Book

I recently read a literary gem. Devoured four hundred and forty six pages in just over twenty-four hours. The sun rose and set. I didn’t notice. I was drunk on the beautiful prose unraveling the story of one person’s life – a person I never imaged could touch me so deeply. When I turned the last page, I sat in stillness for a while, soaking in the afterglow of a truly great book. I wanted to tell everyone about it, but it is only a month later that I’m finally writing this review.

Goldie Hawn’s A Lotus Grows In The Mud is not a biography detailing the dizzyingly inane highs and lows of life in Hollywood. In fact, it only makes the briefest mention of her movies and that too, in relation to the lessons she has gleaned from the experience. This book is a personal and deep reflection on the life of a woman who is journeying through her life with her eyes and heart wide open. It’s raw honesty and it touched me to the very core. She shares her wisdom without sounding the least bit preachy, her sense of humour with every intention at laughing at herself and her compassion in the hope of giving her readers an ‘aha’ moment. The writing, the work of both Hawn and Wendy Holden, a journalist with the Daily Telegraph is as moving as the story itself. It’s like eating a warm moist chocolate cake that gets richer with every bite.

"Each of us goes through transitions and transformations," Hawn writes in the preface to A Lotus Grows in the Mud. "The important thing is that we acknowledge them and learn from them. That is the idea behind this book. Not to tell my life story, but to speak openly and from the heart."

A Lotus Grows In The Mud left me satiated for a long time after I slipped it into my bookshelf. Even as I write this now, I keep looking over my shoulder at it and feel the irresistible urge to plunge into its pages all over again.