Brooke Shields writes book about her relationship with her mother

NEW YORK (WABC) -- She earned her first paycheck before she was a year old, and by the time she turned 11, Brooke Shields was a star, pushed into the spotlight by her mother.

Teri Shields took a lot of heat for that, and now her famous daughter has written a book to set the record straight.

It's called "There Was a Little Girl, The Real Story of My Mother and Me'.

There's an old saying that, 'What doesn't kill you, just makes you stronger", and those words came to mind as I read this week's cover story in People and that new book by Brooke Shields.

The memoir is shocking at times, and also very sad, but written with love and understanding.

The one-time "Pretty Baby" is today a beautiful mother, and her girls Rowan and Grier appear with her in the new book Brooke Shields is promoting this week, a book she wrote about her mom.

"There were extreme lows and extreme highs, and you thrived and coveted the highs; and you waited out the lows," she said.

Her mother was an alcoholic who refused to get sober.

"My mom's drinking created a source of constant anxiety um, fear: fear that she wasn't going to be alive, fear that she was going to do something to embarrass herself." said Brooke.

Both mother and daughter were in the spotlight after Brooke became famous at such a young age.

"My mother and I were enmeshed, and that attachment, that umbilical cord cutting whatever symbol people want to use, never really happened, and I was the first one to say

it was fine," she said.

But it wasn't fine. "And I didn't know how to make room for anyone else," said Shields.

Which became a big problem, she told me, and caused her to wait until the age of 22 to lose her virginity to first love Dean Cain.

"I wasn't able to release myself and be free with him. And, not just physically, emotionally," she said.

Teri Shields cast a long shadow, right up until her death in 2012.

"I loved my mother more than even myself, and that was the biggest piece of my life that I needed, and it wasn't until my husband that I actually said I could do both," Brooke said.

At the wedding of Brooke Shields to writer Chris Henchy, her mother got drunk and later almost dropped the couple's first child when Teri Shields became inebriated in the hospital shortly after Rowan's birth.

It's all part of a very honest book, but one that is also balanced and fair, and as I said, written with love.