Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. A lot of celebrities write memoirs and do

interviews to promote them, and I think you can tell by listening to them which memoirs are

guarded, self-mythology, written to add a deeper level to a very carefully crafted image,

and which are really, truly, open and honest memoirs, flaws,

pockmarks, screw-ups, and all. Today's book is the latter. It's written by Sharon Gless,

one of the stars of the 80s cop procedural Cagney and Lacey. Her book, apparently, there were

complaints, gets into her time in the business while dealing with her alcoholism.

And she tells NPR's Rachel Martin, who you can tell in this interview is a big Cagney

and Lacey fan, about how that affected her character.

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This is how actress Sharon Gless describes the character she played in the 1980s TV hit Cagney and Lacey, Detective Christine Cagney.

She was difficult. She was selfish. And those are the good things.

And with that, I knew this interview was going to be a good time, even though the subject material was sometimes tough.

Feeling abandoned by her family as a child, finding loneliness and a drinking problem,

Sharon Glass lays it all out in her new memoir.

It's called Apparently There Were Complaints.

Now, if you grew up watching Cagney and Lacey like me, you're probably already way into this conversation.

But for the uninitiated, let me just say Cagney and Lacey was a huge deal.

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