In Goldie Hawn’s new “unconventional memoir,” A Lotus Grows in the Mud, the movie star writes that, in 1965, she glanced in the mirror and looked “no better than a long-necked baby bird fallen from the nest, waiting for its mother to rescue it.” She looks about the same these days, although older, of course, and more squashed-looking in the face. But all the mothers in line at Third Place Books on Saturday (the crowd was mostly mothers, their children in tow) kept remarking that she looked great. “She’s as darling as her daughter,” one woman said. Hawn was dressed in bright orange boots and an off-the-shoulder orange sweater. She sat in front of a wall of copies of her book and two large posters of the book’s cover, which features her face partially obscured by pink and orange flowers. There were pink and orange flowers on the signing table too.

And, on the whole, the women in the crowd dressed according to that scheme: shirts and pants in electric pink, rose pink, subdued pink, salmon, peach, pumpkin, even pink with peach stripes. They would come up to the table and Hawn, with a fixed look of constant surprise on her face, would shriek something—“Awesome! I love it! Thank you for coming! Aw, god! I love it! God bless!” (that’s an actual quote)—and then hold out a hand or both hands. Sometimes she would raise a hand straight into the air and wave it around and whoop and then, as the hand came back down, use it to tease the hair on the top of her head. She signed books without looking at them. Occasionally she’d be looking into the distance, squinting. At moments, she seemed barely present. Cameras had been flashing the whole time, and at one point Hawn looked up and said, absently, “Are we taking pictures?”

A Lotus Grows in the Mud is exactly what you’d expect, except that the text is printed in blue and the page numbers are in purple. It is full of bad metaphors (“Stardom and the baggage that came with it is what drove a wedge between us”), blunt polarities (“Sometimes the choices we make are good, and sometimes they are bad”), obvious but apparently hard-won insights into stardom (“Through my long journey of self-discovery, I have come to understand that my Oscar is not who I am”), more details about how great it is to have an Oscar (“I can’t say that it hasn’t been lovely having my gilded statue sitting in the various places that I have put it over the years”), her opinion of an analyst (“With his help, I have just enrolled in the University of Goldie Hawn, the best college I ever attended”), and her opinion of Kurt Russell (“Kurt Russell was sent to us by God”). Also, there’s advice.

Not that she ever needed any: “All I have to do, it seems, is giggle and grin, wiggle and shimmy, always dressed in the snazziest outfits, and I get by.”