Julianne Moore
“Motherhood doesn’t wipe out the person that you are."
by Amy Reiter
March 23, 2009
Julianne Moore has played a porn-star mom, an incestuous mom and seriously miserable moms in films like Boogie Nights, Savage Grace, Far From Heaven and The Hours. In real life, she says, "I'm not really any different than any other working parent," trying to balance career and family and to raise her kids — Caleb, eleven, and Liv, six — with a solid sense of their place in the world.
"I think it's imperative that kids understand that parents have to work for a living," says Moore, who lives in New York and is married to director Bart Freundlich. "And with any luck you do work that you really enjoy, too."
Moore's latest enjoyable project? A follow-up to her 2007 children's book Freckleface Strawberry. The new book, Freckleface Strawberry and the Dodgeball Bully
, aimed at kids ages 4-8, illustrated by LeUyen Pham and due out in April, finds Moore's redheaded, pint-sized protagonist confronting her fears — and a burly kid named Windy Pants Patrick — in the world's most terrifying playground game.
Babble caught up with Moore in Toronto, where she was shooting an Atom Egoyan movie — and traveling home on weekends to be with her family. After a long day of filming, Moore dialed us up to discuss dodgeball strategy, parental guilt, celebrity culture and how our friends can teach us more than our mothers. — Amy Reiter
Why is dodgeball such an icon of terror for so many people?
[Laughs] You know, people fall into two camps with dodgeball: the ones who love it, and the ones who hate it. My little eleven-year-old boy, who's a really sensitive soul, loves dodgeball. So does my daughter. And my husband will laugh at me when I say, "Oh my gosh, it's terrifying." For them it's just a ball! But I was not that kid. I was on the small side and I wasn't athletic. I would stay in the back as long as I could so the kids wouldn't hit me with the ball. But invariably I'd be the last one left, and there'd be a big kid on the other side, and then I'd get hit with the ball. So I learned to stand in the front and get out really fast. It didn't really hurt much when the ball hit you. The anticipation was the worst, which is what the character in the book finds out.
"When my son was little he would beg to go to school early."
The main character's problem springs from going to the Early Bird program at school because her parents have to work. Will the next book in the series be Freckleface Strawberry's Guilt-Ridden Parents?
[Laughs] But she loves Early Bird. Early Bird actually came from a time when my son was little and he would beg to go to school early because the teacher in charge of the Early Bird program was a great basketball player. So Cal would say "Can I please go to Early Bird?" And we'd say, no, you can't, because it meant we had to get there forty-five minutes early. Freckleface Strawberry loves Early Bird because she doesn't have to stay home eating breakfast. She gets to go to school early, and she loves school.
I guess I was projecting my own guilt.
Well, the Early Bird thing is something that all working parents will recognize, because, yeah, that's why it's there, so you can work.
©2009 Amy Reiter and Babble
About the Author
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Amy Reiter has written for Glamour, Marie Claire, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Time Out New York Kids and Wine Spectator, among other publications, as well as the anthology "Maybe
Baby." A former editor at Salon, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. |
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