“Mixing irreverence with self-reflection, Shepherd (with Aimee Lee Ball) delivers not only one of the most hilarious kiss-and-tell memoirs to come out of Hollywood in years but also a moving account of her journey of self-discovery.” People

“It stands as a paean to Shepherd’s brand of Southern-fried sexual liberation.” New York Times

“Nobody kisses and tells like Cybill Shepherd.” New York Daily News

        People who have never lived through an earthquake assume that one of its salient features is noise--the sounds of splintering glass, the symphony of physical destruction, the uncanny moaning of buildings as steel and wood and concrete are strained to some implausible degree. But that’s quickly over. Far more shocking is the eerie quietude: the power failure that eliminates the humming of air-conditioning and refrigerators, the absence of music, the traffic that has come to a standstill. It’s as if a mute button has been pushed on the world. That’s what it’s like when a television series ends. The lights go out, the people scatter, the magic has died. And the Cybill show did not go gently. I did not go gently.

        Over a thirty-year career, I had died before--cacophonous, public, psychically bloody deaths engineered at the box office and at the hands of critics--but this demise was singularly painful. I’d given my name and much of my identity to the series, blurring the line between real life and fiction, much more than is customary to television. (Murphy Brown was not called Candice, and the character didn’t grow up with a wooden dummy for a brother.) Every door on our CBS soundstage had a plaque with CYBILL inscribed inside a blue chalk star, just like the one used under the opening title that pans across the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Gunsmoke was produced on that stage for eighteen years, but there was no trace of that iconic piece of American television history in the wings. As I drove off the set for the last time, I knew how quickly my presence would evaporate, how soon the studio maintenance department would remove those plaques and the billboard-sized CYBILL on the side of the stage.

        The eulogies were not kind. While the real reasons for the show’s demise were never made public, I was accused of professional paranoia and megalomania, of being, as Lady Caroline Lamb famously said of Lord Byron, “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” I was labeled a jealous egomaniac, a self-promoting bitch, and a few other well-chosen words whose invocation would have gotten my mouth washed out with Camay in my Memphis childhood. I preserved all the poison-pen notes as a record, hard evidence of what I had survived and the proof that I wasn’t paranoid. I had clearly made people exceedingly angry, committed some unpardonable transgression. It was not the first time....

        There’s a Dixie Chicks song with a wise and placating lyric that goes “You gotta make big mistakes.” I’ve made my share, and I ask for no jeremiads. I’ve been blessed with success in public life. Early on I fed readily and greedily off the seductive culture of narcissism and celebrity worship that abandons and replaces its acolytes at warp speed. Sometimes I’ve failed to hold myself accountable. Now I’m looking at my own trajectory, hoping to discern Cybill the Good and Cybill the Bad, trying to understand in order to be understood. I want to figure out how I became one of the Furies--me, the same person voted Most Cooperative at Camp Pickwick in 1959.