About book The Way I See It: A Look Back At My Life On Little House (2010)
I really expected more out of Melissa Anderson when I started this book. She was always my favorite on Little House on the Prairie and I really felt like all the reviews of this book were wrong that the readers had somehow missed something. They didn't. Basically Melissa "Missy" Anderson re-hashes most (but not all) of her scenes on the show. There were quite a few that she missed that I was disappointed in too. Basically she gives nothing that you would expect in a memoir. There is NO mention of her childhood, family or anything outside of her work. It is as if we are to believe that she suddenly just appeared at age 11 as she got the role of Mary Ingalls. I was also disappointed because even she points out that she read the books yet when she learns that her character is going to go blind it's a surprise? Sorry but that's what happened, at least in the show they created more life for her beyond that, in real life Mary Ingalls basically was cared for by her family after she attended the blind school. I was also disappointed to see that several times even though she is basically telling us the plotline of a certain episode (sometimes line for line) she can't seem to remember if her character lives in Winoka or Walnut Grove. There are some interesting tid-bits but there are very few mentions of who this woman is outside of the characters she has portrayed and frankly we could have gotten that from IMDB. I did enjoy hearing how she broke the rules and cut her hair during her last season of Little House and ended up having to wear hair pieces as a result (which she didn't like) and a few other tid-bits (like the fact that Karen Grassle wore a wig on set, WOW) but it would have been nice if she'd let all of her fans in on a little more of HER instead of re-prints of scripts. I was pretty disappointed. Melissa Anderson takes us through her time on Little House from beginning to end. We get to hear from her what it was like to be cast as the other Ingalls daughter (the book, being written from Laura's perspective, didn't really deal with Mary that much) and what being a child actor really entails.Funny and honest, Anderson gives us a full account on her years working Little House and what it was like when she discovered Mary was going to be blind, what working with Michael Landon was like, and watching her character be used less and less. She mentions what she sees of the Landon family life and the problems she was around for (watching Michael's daughter get upset at Magic Mountain as Michael was surrounded by fans, dealing with Michael's affair with her stand-in and watching his marriage collapse).Most memoirs are told more from the perspective of a person's life, while their works get a casual mention. Anderson turns that slightly and focuses entirely from the moment she got the job as Mary to the moment she left the show forever (with some other work tossed in during her period off the show). Chapters and sections are broken down by seasons of the show.A very nice read.
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Not much meat in this book. Very Repetitive.
—face
