Shy

Mary Rodgers Guettel (1931 to 2014) spent her life moving between writing, composing, and the stage, yet she often joked that she was stuck in the middle of her family: the daughter of one composer and the mother of another. Her father was Richard Rodgers, a celebrated American composer, and her son is Adam Guettel. Mary was a composer in her own right, and her musical Once Upon a Mattress continues to be revived, making it one of the few Broadway hits by a woman that still get staged.

This memoir traces how she got there, from a resentful child hemmed in by privilege and the shadow of a formidable parent's talent, to a theater star, an author of books for young readers including the now-classic Freaky Friday, and later a philanthropist who served as Chairman of the Juilliard School.

Written with Jesse Green, the chief theater critic of The New York Times, the book is punctuated by Mary's own annotations, admitted contradictions, and Green's interjections. Together they give the life story a layered, conversational quality.

Alongside the career story runs a second narrative: a woman freeing herself from disapproving parents and a sexist era so that she could pursue art and romance on her own terms. It serves both as firsthand testimony about the Golden Age of American musical theater and as the account of a woman building a meaningful life.