LORNA LUFT

Life will force you to make changes you never wanted to make.

My mother was a phoenix who always expected to rise from the ashes of her latest disaster. She loved being Judy Garland.

Even at al my mother's concerts, I had never seen people go crazy the way they did with the Beatles.

It was at one of the parties at our house that The Rat Pack got started.

A star needs all the rest she can get.

Dodi got a lot of criticism when he began dating Princess Diana. No one seemed to think he was good enough for her.

The only difference between the Bel Air of the '90s and the Bel Air of my childhood is that now the nannies are Latina instead of British, and the cars European instead of American.

When I look back at The Judy Garland Show, I have such mixed feelings. It broke my mother's heart when they canceled it.

I used drugs as a social activity; a way to have fun with friends.

Instead of joyfully looking forward to my birth, my mother began systematically preparing for her own death. She was fatalistic.

When I got a call from Los Angeles to do the Tonight Show, I considered it more of an inconvenience than an opportunity.

Fabio kept asking me out, but I knew we'd never get his ego through the door.

Although I loved Liza as a little girl, it would be true to say I really didn't know her.

I spent an entire evening seated between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, being charmed from either side. It was pure Hollywood magic.

My mother was electric onstage, and I vividly recall the extraordinary power she had over her audiences.

Barry Manilow has gone from being the love of my life to being a friend for life.

When you're Judy Garland and you want something, you just pick up the phone and call somebody. Anybody.

When my mother signed at MGM, that was the only kind of contract you could sign. There was no such thing as an independent agent.

I have spent much of my adult life flinching with pain as I tried to pull out the threads that bound the shadows of my past to me.

There are some family traditions I don't want my children to carry on.

The world fell apart. Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy. Why were people shooting all the Kennedys? Had the country gone mad?

One trait of addictive families is that we never recognize our own addictions.

Liza is in the tabloids almost as much as our mother was. She has struggled with her own ghosts and shadows.

Dinah had all the class.

The sicker mother got, the stranger the people surrounding her became. I called them The Garland Freaks.