Living Unapologetically with Sharon Stone

Sharon Stone was five years old when her parents started her in second grade. She had already ripped off her own diaper at ten months, begun correcting her mother’s English, and was in “endless trouble” at school for rushing ahead and organizing the other children. Her father’s response when called in by the principal: “Is this true, Sharon?” She said yes. He said, “Good. Don’t tell her not to do it anymore.” Then he took her out for ice cream. That early dynamic—being the one who sees things differently, refuses to comply, and pays a price for it—runs through her entire story.

The family you don’t see in the tabloids

Stone grew up in rural Pennsylvania as the middle child of four, in what she calls a “kitchen sink Irish” household—one bathroom, lots of kids, and a practical approach to plumbing when the bathroom was occupied. Her parents had a “hot romance” that lasted sixty years, and she would come home from school to find them necking on the sofa. But beneath that surface was a much harder inheritance. Her mother had been violently abused as a child—removed from her home at nine when a gym teacher saw the welts on her back from being beaten with bramble branches—and then placed in another family as an unpaid maid and laundress. She carried that shame to her deathbed.