Laura Dern and mom Diane Ladd are bringing some of their most deeply personal conversations about life, love, and career to the world in the form of their newly released memoir, Honey, Baby, Mine.
The actresses have been close all their lives, even becoming the first real mother-daughter pair to be nominated for Oscars for the same film (Rambling Rose in 1992), but the basis for their book is more heartbreaking than you'd think.
In an interview with People, Dern, 56, opened up about the genesis for their deeper relationship, which came about in 2018 when her mom, now 87, was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease.
She was given six months to live, and the Oscar-winner attributed it to the pesticides that were sprayed around her mother's Ventura County, California home.
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"The doctor told us the one thing that can help her is getting her to walk to breathe deeper," Dern explained to the outlet.
This led to her joining Ladd (who was on oxygen) on their slow walks around their Santa Monica home, engaging in much more intimate conversations than they'd ever had before.
They discussed their lives as mothers, Ladd's divorce from Dern's father Bruce Dern, which the Marriage Story actress said "grew into a profound deepening of our relationship."
Since then, Ladd's condition has improved and the two decided to share their chats in the form of their memoir with the support of some of their most famous friends like Reese Witherspoon and Hugh Jackman.
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They described their most difficult conversation as the one about Dern's older sister Diane's death in 1962, who died in a drowning accident when she was just 18 months old.
"The worst was to talk to her about her sister's death, which I hadn't really done because I didn't want to put her through that," Ladd described.
"But I wasn't doing her a favor by not sharing that—to go back there and talk about a pain that one never truly ever gets over. The actuality of what it felt like and what her father and I went through."
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