My review of My Mother's Keeper on Goodreads

When this book was published, I was in the 6th grade and I snapped it up immediately upon encountering it in a hotel convenience store while vacationing with my parents at the Epcot Center in Miami Florida.  It provided great reading for the airplane trip home.  I was already a long time Bette Davis fan by the time I read this book at age 12.  I was shocked and appalled at the author's assertions and not at all sympathetic having already read and sympathized with Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford. This meek attempt at trumping that book read like a desperate, media hungry rendition of Ann Blyth's character in Mildred Pierce. Veda, the ungrateful daughter of that film stopped at nothing to wreck her doormat mother's nerves. . I watched a clip from an interview Bette did on Good Morning America in the early 1980s where she speaks glowingly with love beaming from her aura about her daughter and their relationship. Was she completely in the dark about BD's true feelings or was BD a two faced snake in the grass that spun a yarn of BS at her husband's behest for motives of financial gain?  My feeling rests on the latter theory.  Bette Davis had a chance to tell her side of the story when she published her last autobiography, This n' That in 1987 which she dedicated to her faithful nurse and confidante
Kathryn Sermak.  In it she devotes a letter to BD on the last page. Addressed to "Hyman", the letter succeeds in writing the bitch off once and for all but between the lines, it is rife with a mother's bewilderment at having raised a daughter she inevitably knew nothing about. I have cursed the essence of BD ever since.
 Knowing a little more than the average consumer about the character of Bette Davis, I found her daughter's overblown claims of "abuse" to be a study in histrionic hyperbole.  We all know that Bette had a sharp tongue that left its targets to fend for themselves in a game of survival of the fittest,  but it's a shame that the dowdy dimwitted daughter wasn't intelligent enough to rival it.  She withered under the shadow of celebrity and cigarette smoke wafting from her mother's presence and used the 200+ pages to recount arguments with her mother ranging from ludicrous to laughable on the scale of sentiment. It is unbelievable to assume that the author's intention was to warrant sympathy from the reader. My gut feeling after reading the horrific waste of

trees is that BD Hyman was too negatively influenced by her husband who she married at age 16 and her fundamentalist born-again Christian cult of a faith that she espoused as a way to "recover" from the scars she purportedly suffered at the other end of a jab from Bette's hand gestures.  Bette Davis never recovered from the scandal begat by the publishing of this book and the damage it did to her relationship with her beloved daughter.
Bette's adopted son Michael discredited BD's account of her childhood. Bette's adopted daughter Margot, named for her character in All About Eve was sent to live in an institution after she was diagnosed as developmentally disabled which they called retarded back in her day. To date,  BD Hyman has since spoken out against homosexuality as if it's any of her business.