It was a stretch, even for Ada Mae. I didn’t get the job, obviously, but the casting director never forgot it. Three years later, they needed a girl who could cry on cue to play a running gag in a sitcom on a popular children’s cable network. I’d done a little more work by that point. More commercials, and I’d won a few regional pageants. I’d even done a guest spot in a country crooner’s music video that had seen decent circulation. Even still, Ada Mae saw a sitcom deal as the pot of gold at the end of the ever-loving fame rainbow. It would mean a consistent salary she could skim off the top of, an accompanying record deal she could micromanage, and most important, a way out of her marriage to my dad.

All because she told someone I could cry on demand.

Lemon martinis out of lemons, indeed.

Except, I can’t cry on cue. Back then, I felt everything so much it never took a lot of effort, but I couldn’t just turn on the tears. I needed to feel first and there were always plenty of feelings to be had.

In short, it was exhausting but very real.

I emancipated myself from my mom and her lies when I turned seventeen, then I spent a good five years making a whole lot of mistakes all on my own. Drinking and partying all over Hollywood, until three weeks before my twenty-third birthday, when I had a massively public breakup. I’d been betrayed by my best friend and humiliated in the limelight. It probably didn’t have to end my career, but I was tired, so I let it.

Totally alone and disgusted with my life and the people in it, I was fully ready to lie down in the sweet grass and let the fairies take me, when … I changed my mind. Or rather, I made up my own mind for the first time in my life. I was done with Hollywood and with feeling like garbage. I was finished giving and giving and giving. And I quit. Retired? Regardless, I packed up my things, rented a truck, and drove halfway across the country to my dad’s place in Michigan.

Daniel Springfield gave me exactly five days to wallow in a second-story guest room, listening to his old Carly Simon albums on repeat, before he dragged me out of the house and made me go to work with him. He handed me a mallet, face mask, and goggles and said, “This wall needs to come down. When you’re done, I have some cabinetry that needs tearing down next.”

It was so much better than crying and the best kind of drained I’ve ever felt.

It took demolishing three more houses before I was ready for the careful work of historic restoration. A lifetime of furious hurt and bitterness was a lot to reconcile.