WASHINGTON -- Sela Ward and I are having tea at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown. She's imparting beauty tips (don't smoke, drink lots of water), and we're swapping notes on one of our favorite restaurants in New York City -- the Pink Tea Cup, where she loves the fried pork chops, corn bread and black-eyed peas.
At some point, she rummages through her purse, her brow furrowed until she emerges with a box of Prevacid. Pausing to pop a pill, she casually confesses in her warm, honeyed voice, "I've just been having this acid reflux problem since my mom died."
Because of her Emmy-winning role as the sweet-natured, single parent Lily Manning on ABC's Once and Again, because she was so peppy and charming on those ubiquitous Sprint ads, people tend to think Sela Ward is friendly, open and enchantingly everyday.
It turns out, that's probably not too far from the truth.
She's patient, open to random sharings and profusely apologetic for being late, and distinctly comes across as an anti-celebrity. When these details are pointed out to her, she laughs and says they stem from her Southern childhood. It's a topic so dear to her that she's written a book about it, the recently published Homesick ($24.95, ReganBooks), billed as a memoir of her youth in the deep South.
"Southern women are just taught from the moment they're born to be very gracious," says Ward, looking on-screen stunning with a deep red Dolce & Gabbana pantsuit setting off her thick, raven hair. "They value things like old morals and values and courtesy. It's just woven into the fabric of my being.
"Somebody was just commenting to me at my book-signing yesterday, 'You were so gracious to everyone. You talked to every single person,' " adds Ward, 46. "Well, I don't know how not to be, you know? I mean, for me, if they took the time to come and buy a book, and some fans had driven all the way from Toronto -- what, I'm just going to sign their book and say, 'Thank you very much'?"
Stories of hometown
In Homesick, Ward says, she wanted to tell the story of the people who shaped her and her hometown, Meridian, Miss., a place so small there were only 35 in her high school graduating class. And Ward shares funny, intimate stories about her parents, electrical engineer Granberry Holland Ward Jr. and homemaker Annie Kate Ward.
"Then when Daddy was seven years old, came a day whose every detail he still remembers," she writes. "He and his sister were outside at half-past four in the afternoon, laughing and dousing each other with a garden hose, when their mother came out to tell them their father had just died. For years thereafter, he recalls, 'Wherever I was out playing, at 4:30 in the afternoon I'd run home and see if Mama was still living.' "
Essentially, the book is an ode to simpler, safer times that is likely to strike a chord among Americans in these unsettling days. She talks about building forts with her brothers in the woods behind their home, her aunt Margaret's homemade preserves and pickles, and piling her girlfriends into her red Plymouth Barracuda and driving around to the houses of the boys they had crushes on.
"It's a love letter to a time gone by and a real look at home for all of us who are so disenfranchised from our families and origins and moved away to follow our dreams," she says. "It's a way to reconnect and find those things that fed one's soul and just incorporate it in your lives today. With all the chaos in the world today, the only thing we really have some control over is our home, a safe, nurturing environment for ourselves."
She says the yearning for her home first struck her when she had children -- Austin, 8, and Anabella, 4, -- with her venture capitalist husband, Howard Sherman. The ache led her to buy a second home on 500 acres of land in Meridian, which is east of Jackson.
But it had taken Ward a while to start missing home again. She had grown up always craving life outside Meridian, and left at 18 to attend the University of Alabama, where she majored in art and won attention as a cheerleader. After college, she headed to New York for life in the big city and found work drawing storyboards at a company that did slide presentations for corporations.
Because she made only $6.50 an hour, she began modeling on the side for extra cash. Eventually, she landed such lucrative gigs (including Maybelline commercials) that she began modeling full-time. The success inspired her to move to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career.
She found her first break in the 1983 Burt Reynolds film The Man Who Loved Women (she played one of the women) and went on to win two Emmys -- one for her work in the TV series Sisters in 1994 and another for Once and Again in 2000. Along the way, she married Sherman in 1992 and made a home in Los Angeles.
'Ache in my chest'
"When you have children, you revert back to your childhood, consciously or not," Ward says. "For me, it was very conscious. I just rammed up against this very palpable ache in my chest. I wanted to reconnect with something that was very grounding for me and I couldn't imagine my children not knowing their heritage and not knowing where I came from, because it's such a part of me."
Last year, while speaking with a book publisher, the idea to write about her home suddenly struck her. She began over Labor Day, and the project soon took on a greater importance as various events unfolded -- the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, ABC canceling Once and Again and her mother dying of ovarian cancer.
"I think about her every day," she says. "We were very close. Metaphorically, the book is sort of about how you can always find a way to go home to Mama.
"First, 9 / 11, and then my mother's death really illuminated for me that we all just have the briefest moment in time to face the greatest challenge we have, which is to find an inner home for our true self," she adds. "I'd love for people to take that away from this."
EXCERPT
The following excerpt from Sela Ward's Homesick ($24.95, ReganBooks) is about her experience joining a sorority-like social club in ninth grade:
"Two of the girls, Cheri and Sally, decided they would make me wear a sign everywhere that said I'M BEAUTIFUL AND I KNOW IT. I was an extremely self-conscious fourteen-year-old, and have never felt more vulnerable. I'd never given too much thought to how I looked, and I was far too shy and insecure to be conceited. But that's not how the other girls saw me. They didn't even know me, but they were determined to take me down a peg.
"Walking around with that poster board sign hanging around my neck for a week was perhaps the most scarring experience of my young life. I allowed these girls, whose adolescent envy, self-doubt, and insecurity were at high tide, to humiliate me in order to bolster their own fragile self-image. Worse yet, I allowed them to do it because I so wanted to belong to their club.
"It took me years to get over the pain and doubt inflicted upon me in that solitary week of humiliation. Every time I would accomplish something that had anything to do with my physical appearance -- becoming a cheerleader, being elected Homecoming Queen in college, becoming a model -- I would be racked by self-doubt, haunted by the worry that I was a hollow person with nothing to offer but an attractive facade. All because of a culture -- a culture especially prized in the South, I realize -- that made a contest, and a currency, of adolescent beauty, and in the process turned generations of young women against one another. And I endured it without complaint, just to belong."