It’s important to me that the original autobiography is available to anyone who wishes to read it for Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive View image in fullscreen Christina Crawford, aged 7, with her mother, Joan … ‘We don’t recognise the long-term psychological damage that is inflicted on people who are abused. It's as if she blocked all feeling out of her heart and mind- no matter how much the child in question was hurting.

Turning off the personalised advertising setting won’t stop you from seeing Etsy ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive. In 1978 Christina Crawford shocked the world with the first tell-all celebrity memoir, in which she exposed her Hollywood filmstar mother Joan as a cruel, abusive alcoholic. The reason Joan Crawford left Christina out was because she already knew her daughter was writing a tell-all book on her. Monty added, "I'll tell you that I saw Joan Crawford do everything she could to save that girl's life and job. The general public knew things between mother and daughter hadn’t exactly been dandy (the relationship was said to have started falling apart around 1968, when 29-year-old Christina took a medical leave of absence from her CBS soap The Secret Storm and a 60-something Crawford replaced her), but this was a whole new level of shock.In 2017 Crawford worked with lyricist and composer David Nehls on a stage musical adaptation of Mommie Dearest, which was produced by Out of the Box Theatrics in New York City. Casey LaLonde, Cathy’s 36-year-old son, tells me by phone from his home in Philadelphia that his mother still remembers ‘a very loving household. She cut off ties with her family, clawed her way to the top and reinvented herself as a legend without a past.

All the while, the Crawford family’s celebrity lifestyle was routinely depicted in lavish magazine photographic stories detailing the children’s plentiful birthdays and Christmases.As the author grows, there is a dynamic she has with her mother as a teen that I remember classmates having when I was a similar age. Despite this, the movie was a commercial success and remains, four decades later, immensely popular.