Sylvia: A Memoir of Hollywood Star Sylvia Sidney is a short memoir of a brief friendship between the author Sally Miller and film star Sylvia Sidney just before Ms. Sidney died in 1999. Stories of Sylvia's past are revealed in each chapter.

Sylvia is also about the house in rural New Jersey that connected the two women, with many black and white photographs complementing the stories. Throughout the first chapters we watch the house develop personality with Sally's unusual decorating and lifestyle, but with Sylvia always in mind.

A beautiful garden tour is the icing, the completion of the house. Like the 1949 movie of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, the chapter bursts into color photographs at the end (no peeking)!

Then we find ourselves drawn into yet one more story, this one with a twist. The new discovery brings more revelations of Sylvia's and Sally's lives, and the ending chapter will both surprise you and satisfy you.

On another level, Sylvia is about Sally Miller and her holistic healing from ovarian cancer. After refusing chemotherapy and radiation treatments in 1996, Sally set out to heal her body from her surgery and accept whatever happened. On the journey she found her authentic self, personified by a house intimately connected to Sylvia Sidney and to the past.

116 pages • 70 black & white, 25 color photographs • 7" x 8 1/2" • $19.00 ISBN 0-9758581-0-6

Review, Princeton Packet, December 2004