Making It So: A Memoir

by Patrick Stewart

But once they survived the experience of jumping out and their parachutes opening, they became utterly fearless.

It’s taken me decades of analysis, beginning in the late 1980s, to understand and cope with the impact of the violence, fear, shame, and guilt I experienced as a child. The first and most important step was to acknowledge to myself that these things had happened at all.

All I know is that when I was five, I was very happy. By the time I was seven, I no longer was.

It has taken me decades to process my feelings toward my father. I was well into my sixties before I was able to acknowledge publicly what I had witnessed and endured as a child. When I finally did, I used my platform to raise awareness of domestic violence and direct money and attention to Refuge, a UK organization devoted to women and children

Though I was only thirteen, I was self-aware enough to take measure of my life and recognize that it was changing because a series of authority figures—Ruth, Mr. Dormand, and Mr. Besley—had demonstrated great confidence in a lad from an ordinary family.

had never breathed a word to anyone about my experience at twelve years old, stepping onto a stage for the first time and finding that I felt safer there than any other place I had ever been.

As I would discover over the years, it’s a perilous business to keep telling someone you love them as required by the script, because if you say it often enough, you start to believe it in real life.

part of me believed in my heart that these people were right—I wasn’t good enough. Those feelings dragged me down for years.

“You brilliant man,” she said. “You saved the scene. We couldn’t have gone on and it would have been calamitous.” Summoning all the nonchalance I could fake, I said, “Well, there was nothing else to be done.” “Nonsense,” she said. “What you did was beautiful. Thank you.” Our hands were now joined. I bowed forward over them, let go, and left the room, glowing with pride.

Michael is the TNG actor perhaps the least like his character—a sweet, extraordinarily handsome man who plays a scary, martial, grumpy alien.

This was Gene at his best, creating an alien species simultaneously scary and funny,

It’s a major injustice to me that Brent has never won an Emmy for playing Data, not to mention the androids Lore and B-4 and the bizarre Soong family of mad scientists.

Sunny discovered that the state of Nevada would not accept a ceremony presided over by an online-ordained minister—even one with a knighthood and the ability to create magnetic fields or repel an orc army—as legally binding.

especially liked Worf’s pacifist reappearance with a white goatee.)