Review Roundup: Liza Minnelli Releases Memoir 'Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!'

Liza Minnelli's memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, is available now, from March 10, 2026. In Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, Minnelli writes candidly about her upbringing as the daughter of filmmaker Vincente Minnelli and entertainer Judy Garland, her rise to international fame, and her experiences with recovery and substance use disorder. The memoir also reflects on her relationships with fellow artists and cultural figures, as well as her family, including her sister Lorna Luft.

Read the reviews below!

Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times: Twelve years in the making but readable in an afternoon or two, “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!” has been plucked, buffed and powder-puffed within an inch of its long life by the Great American Songbook champion Michael Feinstein and two veteran newspaper writers.

Fiona Sturges, The Guardian: The book is written with journalists Josh Getlin and Heidi Evans and drawn from extensive conversations between Minnelli and her close friend Michael Feinstein. If that sounds like too many cooks, the resulting book is surprisingly cohesive and spry. Beneath the classic arc of fame and success turned sour is a more unusual tale of a woman battling the trauma of her childhood and struggling to step out of the shadow of her unpredictable mother.

Joanne Kauffman, Wall Street Journal: Ms. Minnelli is similarly blunt about her inattentiveness to fiscal matters (for a time she was all but bankrupt) and about her drug use. There were years of denial, the stints in rehab and the relapses. (After one too many in a New York bar, she ended up in a drunken stupor on the sidewalk; pedestrians simply stepped over her.) Ms. Minnelli has long faced serious medical problems, including encephalitis, related to her drug use. It is harrowing but also wearisome stuff, a bit Liza with a zzzzz. The extended potted histories of the communist witch hunts and the AIDS epidemic don’t help.

Helen Brown, Telegraph: Minnelli is blunt about the trauma of her childhood, but – perhaps because her mother was as hooked on winning public sympathy as the pills she stashed under her mattress – she doesn’t indulge in self-pity. She’s great on the Technicolor charms of her old Hollywood neighbourhood, trick-or-treating at Gene Kelly’s house and receiving cash gifts from Frank Sinatra (with whom her mother also had an affair). You feel the intensity of her resolve to grow up differently to Garland (whose unpaid bills she would dutifully zip around to settling from her late teens), and simultaneously, the agony of realising that she was repeating old patterns. She began to pop Valium after her mother’s death, and soon she was slugging back booze, too.

Sam Wasson, Air Mail: Add to that hall of mirrors the labyrinthine confusions of addiction, fame, natural and unnatural forgetting, and the persistent denials of self and others so common to sufferers of childhood neglect (which tends to be the best possible training ground for a life on stage or screen), and it can often feel that an actor’s or singer’s life, no matter how spectacular in lived reality, can itself be summed up as follows: I performed, therefore I am.

Hadley Freeman, The Times: Minnelli never learnt how to protect herself from monsters because she was brought up to adore them. She was, she writes, “the original nepo baby”, and she is still the living emblem of all the privilege and pain that comes with that. No one sensible would envy Minnelli’s life, but if there’s a more enthralling celebrity memoir out this year, I’ll eat my bowler hat.