MARIEL HEMINGWAY and Sarah Ferguson both have famous relatives. Both have been in movies, on television, and in the tabloids. Both have the same eye color (blue), the same workout regimen (yoga), the same number of daughters (two), and the same publisher (Simon & Schuster). And now, suddenly, they have something else in common: Both have new memoirs out this week—Finding My Balance ($24) and What I Know Now: Simple Lessons Learned the Hard Way ($16), respectively. (Only one of them, Mariel, will be in town this week: Third Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way N.E., 206-366-3333; 6 p.m. Mon., Jan. 20.) How much do you know about these two women—and, more importantly, can you tell them apart?
1.Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, has held all of the following unofficial titles except
a.Fergie
b.Muffet
c.Fergatross
d.The Duchess of Pork
2.Which woman cursed her husband “for being a no-good son of a bitch” who didn’t love her or help her ever?
a.Mariel Hemingway
b.Mariel Hemingway’s mother
c.Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson
d.Fergie’s friend, Princess Diana
3.Mariel Hemingway, who owns and occasionally teaches at a yoga studio in Idaho, believes that simply breathing deeply is as powerful as any posture. According to Fergie, what’s the one thing that doesn’t happen to you when you stop to concentrate on your breath?
a.”Your naughty monkey-mind stops jumping from tree to tree.”
b.”Your chest warms and rises, like short- bread in the oven.”
c.”Your breath grows deeper and slower, like a warm breeze through long grass.”
d.”Everything unclogs.”
4.True or false: Both memoirists use the word “percolating” in contexts that have nothing to do with coffee making.
5.When did Mariel Hemingway think to herself: “Oh boy, I can’t deal with this”?
a.When her doctor said she had to eat less.
b.When Woody Allen told her she was not voluptuous enough to be in Manhattan.
c.When her doctor told her she had to eat more.
d.When her silicone breast implants, which she got for her part in Manhattan, ruptured.
6.Which of the following foods does neither eating-disorder survivor describe consuming?
a.fried chicken and mashed potatoes
b.buttered eggs
c.bratwurst in a blanket
d.a ham salad
7.True or false: Both memoirists attri- bute their obsessions with food to their strained relationships with their mothers.
8.Fergie feels “deprived” when she doesn’t get a good dose of
a.sausage
b.sleep
c.movies starring Mariel Hemingway
d.Friends
9.True or false: Sarah Ferguson describes the parenting agreement she has worked out with her ex-husband as “win-win-win.”
10.Match each statement with its author:
a.”The silence was excruciatingly loud.”
b.”When I am seventy and have squeezed the juice from life and drunk it down, I’ll still be galloping my horse.”
c.”I was like a Neolithic hunter-gatherer, fattening up during the warm months to prepare for a long, wild freeze.”
d.”I am in a land where the magic rises with the honey sun, and all I need to do is submit to it.”
e.”I couldn’t have felt more like a sack of potatoes than I did in that moment—a lumpy heap of helpless russets.”
f.”With every achievement, another layer of the onion that was my life was pulled back.”
g.”I had been looking at the same sparkle in the mountain granite all my life.”
h.”Little can be guaranteed in this turbulent world of ours.”
i.”I am getting to the nub of me, and I like what I am finding there.”
ANSWERS
(1) b—Muffet is the name of Mariel Hemingway’s older sister; (2) b; (3) b; (4) true—Fergie, for example, describes teenagers as “percolating adults”; (5) c; (6) c; (7) true; (8) d; (9) false—she describes it as “win-win-win-win”; (10) a, c, e, f, g—Mariel; b, d, h, i—Fergie.
