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Charles Taylor
As celebrity bios go, Isabella Rossellini's Some of Me at least has the virtue of quirkiness. As the title implies, Rossellini is only offering part of her story. In this case, though, it's more than a case of simply holding a few things back. Rossellini warns us up front that what's here may or may not be verity: "Don't expect confessions, revelations, not even the truth," she writes. "It's a habit of mine to embellish and color events until I lose sight of what really happened. Even when I was a child my grandmother always had to ask me ... 'Truth or fantasy?' If you want to eliminate my grandmother's kindness and put it more bluntly, I lie. I always did."
Some of Me proceeds anecdotally (how could it not, since Rossellini seems too young to have written a memoir), and for a while, her stories are enough to keep the book engaging. Put it this way: Rossellini's light and charming manner would make a perfect late-night talk show interview. If she reveals anything about herself, it's that she leans more to the Mediterranean than the Scandinavian side of her lineage. She's amusingly truculent toward the people who ask her what it was like to grow up as the child of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini. Since she never knew anything else, she asks, how could she say? And though she's blunt, palpably (and justifiably) angry when she writes of how Lancôme dropped her because they thought she was becoming too old to be their model, there's no malice when she writes about the men in her life, like David Lynch and ex-husband Martin Scorsese.
But although Rossellini claims to have inherited her mother's passion for cleaning and order, the narrative has a scattershot quality. Rossellini's own idiosyncrasies aren't enough to sustain the book and the imaginary conversations she constructs between herself, her father and her mother get to be a bit much. Sometimes, it's better for stars to remain a mystery. -- Salon
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