AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Carol Burnett, One More Time . The TV comedienne's 1986 memoir of her impoverished childhood and youth, a painful story (her parents were alcoholics, her grandmother a bizarre eccentric) told simply and without a trace of self-pity. Page after page of One More Time contains stingingly plain-spoken sentences that leap off the page and embed themselves in the memory: "The war was one giant movie we all were starring in." "He was sick in a charity hospital." "Those were the times they didn't fight." "The worst was Christmas." Who knew, or even suspected, that Burnett could write so well? Not me (TT).