Interesting, But Flaky. In this memoir, Kate Mulgrew – known best, depending on age and interest, for 70s era show Ryan’s Hope, 90s era show Star Trek: Voyager, or 2010s era show Orange Is The New Black – describes her life from being literally born with teeth up until around the turn of the Millenium, when she was still filming Voyager.
And she does a remarkable job of keeping the reader interested in what happens next. Her prose has the qualities of the poet she once wanted to be.
But she plays with the timeline too much, often skipping around or losing threads entirely, only to pick them up later with no explanation. And what she makes seem in the book as merely days in some cases appears to have actually been years.
But the biggest sin, and the reason this 2015 memoir feels incomplete, is the abrupt ending. Wherein she sets up a particular meeting that had been years in the making… and then ends with a literal closed door, never revealing anything beyond the moment she stepped into that particular room.
This review of Born With Teeth by Kate Mulgrew was originally published on October 20, 2018.