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Out of My Mind: An Autobiography

Kristin Nelson Tinker began to paint in 1962 at the young age of seventeen, after seeing a collection of American primitive paintings at the home of her future in-laws, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. The eldest daughter of the legendary football star Tom Harmon and actress Elyse Knox, who appeared in fifty feature films before retiring to raise her children, Tinker grew up in a Hollywood family of competition, achievement, and celebrity. Before she was twenty, she had married Ricky Nelson and was appearing regularly in America's favorite TV show, "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet." Thus began an eventful journey through the decades of postwar America, following a pattern of feeling and experience that will resonate powerfully with readers of Tinker's generation. She uses paintings and family photographs, as well as diary entries, her own poems, and well-chosen selections from contemporary songs and poems to tell the story of her life: of growing up in the 1950s in a formidable family that — like the nation at large — papered over the reality of emotional pain and conflict with the image of happiness; of a marriage to a gifted man who got lost on the way to adulthood; and of her later struggles as a single parent, her intense emotional crisis and recovery, and her increasingly strong belief in herself as an artist. In more than one hundred joyous paintings, she portrays thirty years of American dreaming: weddings and birthdays; Halloweens and Christmases; rambling houses and broad suburban lawns; hippie idylls and lively LA street scenes; vacationing on Martha's Vineyard and ice skating in New York; rock concerts, football games, and backyard basketball; volleyball and barbecues on thebeach and fireworks bursting over the water; along with a moving record of the great (and, occasionally, the not-so-great) moments in her family history.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 230
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780810936911
  • Genres
  • art, memoir
  • Release date
  • 1997