Glimmer: A Story of Survival, Hope, and Healing

By Kimberly Shannon Murphy

Winner of the 2024 Andy Award for Memoir and Narrative Nonfiction

A Zibby's Top 10 Book of 2023

A USA Today Best Book of 2023

A USA Today Book Club Pick

Foreword by Cameron Diaz

“Reading Kimberly Shannon Murphy’s searing and vividly told memoir is like watching a gripping work of cinema verité: each scene demands our attention as the plot moves towards its dramatic conclusion. A powerful and inspiring story of suffering and shame, resilience and redemption.” —Gabor Maté M.D., New York Times bestselling author of The Myth of Normal

A raw and heartening memoir of one woman’s journey from surviving childhood sexual abuse to becoming one of the most successful stuntwomen in Hollywood.

“Piece by piece, the on-site medic tweezes the shards of candy glass from my face. I don’t mind the stinging. I don’t flinch.”

As an award-winning stuntwoman, Kimberly Shannon Murphy was intimate with pain. For years, she propelled her body through dangerous spaces—medicating the trauma of her childhood sexual abuse with the adrenaline rush that came from pushing herself to the absolute limit. But as Kimberly learned, no matter how much you suppress your past, it always catches up with you.

In Glimmer, Kimberly details her remarkable journey to the top of her field as a Hollywood stuntwoman for many A-list celebrities, including Cameron Diaz, Charlize Theron, Angelina Jolie, Taylor Swift, and Sandra Bullock, while carrying the pain of her childhood of sexual abuse in a family that refused to acknowledge its reality. In her beautifully written, unflinchingly honest memoir, Kimberly reflects on her past and present, chronicling her path to recovery and calculating the long shadow of trauma.

Glimmer is the story of one woman’s quest to reclaim her life and to shine a spotlight on the dark topic of intergenerational familial abuse. As Kimberly reveals, being strong isn’t about getting your black belt, leaping out of four-story buildings, or putting 200-pound stuntmen in chokeholds—it’s about waking up every single morning and choosing to love yourself, no matter your history.

A heroic and hopeful story of stolen innocence, pain, courage, and survival, Glimmer is an emotional roadmap for others who have suffered abuse and childhood trauma, offering them hope, healing, and inspiration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9780063228283

Kimberly Shannon Murphy

Kimberly Shannon Murphy is a leading Hollywood stuntwoman who has served as a double for numerous A-list actresses, performing in 133 feature films and television shows, including Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Captain America, The Eternals, The Old Guard, Bird Box, The Hunger Games, The Lone Ranger, Salt, Enchanted, Marvel’s Agent Carter, Euphoria, Big Little Lies, and Westworld. A Taekwondo black belt, she received the 2020 Taurus World Stunt Award for Best Fight in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She is a two-time Screen Actors Guild Award winner for Best Stunt Ensemble and has been recognized with numerous award nominations, and since 2018, has also worked as a stunt coordinator. Kimberly currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the stuntman and stunt coordinator Casey O’Neill, whom she met on the set of Knight and Day when the two were doubling for the film’s stars, Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise. They have an eight-year-old daughter, Capri. 

Book preview

Prologue

New York, 2007

Thirty years old

Splinter by splinter, the medic tweezes candy glass from my face. I don’t mind the stinging. I don’t flinch. My heart is beating slowly now. My body is contained in the tight skin of my motion capture suit. All around me in the cavernous warehouse where we’re filming I Am Legend, people are freaking out. The stunt coordinator is huddled with the rigging crew in charge of my descender. The first AD crouches at my feet: "Oh my God, are you sure you’re okay?"

Ten minutes ago, I did a high fall through a glass window. We’d done everything right, just like in rehearsals, which went perfectly. But this time, my wire didn’t stop me five feet above the ground like it was supposed to; I flew past my end mark, landing face-first in a pile of broken shards.

The stunt coordinator is insisting that I go to the ER, but I shake my head and repeat calmly, so they will take me seriously, No, I’m not going to the hospital. I want to do it again. Then I return to studying my shredded-up palms. I could be meditating on my yoga mat, I feel so centered. I close my eyes and imagine I’m an ancient stone statue, damaged by the elements but still whole.

When the medic is finished pressing dozens of tiny Band-Aids over the cuts, I find the makeup artist. Tsk-ing as she works, she does her best to reaffix the hot pink motion capture dots that were washed from my face with all the blood and hydrogen peroxide.

I’ve never seen anyone work in this condition before, she says, shaking her head. If you weren’t playing a creature, it would never work. What she means is we’re all lucky I’m not doubling for the beautiful lead actress on this one. I’m playing a monster, so it’s okay that I look like one. When she thinks I’m not paying attention, I catch the makeup artist mouthing, What the fuck? in the mirror to the mortified assistant who waits to lead me back to set. They think I’m crazy, but I feel proud. It’s acceptable to wear my pain on the outside here. My blood shows my toughness, my resiliency. They actually pay me to do this.

We do the stunt three more times. I hear: We got that. Cut. Print. That’s lunch.

Quietly, I approach the stunt coordinator and ask if it’s okay to get stitched up now.

"Uh, yeah! he says. I’ve been trying to get you to go all day."

I find myself returning to the set that evening. My skin is a sunset of bruises, my right eye is nearly swollen shut, and stitches zigzag across my face. I really am a creature now.

Kimberly, what are you doing here? everyone asks.

Just making sure you don’t need me! I say, enjoying the alarm in their voices.

It hits me, with thudding obviousness, that I’m lying. I’m fully aware that my work is done for the day. I’ve come back to set because the connective tissue between my present and my past is poking through again. Instead of worrying, like any normal person would, that I’ll be scarred for life, I’m exuberant, parading my injuries. Like I used to, when I was cutting. Look! My outsides match my insides! See what I can survive?

Fuck. Time to go back to therapy.

Three years into my career as a stuntwoman, I thought I was over wanting to get hurt on the job so I could feel the power-high of handling it. I thought I’d transcended the inner programming of my past. I was done letting him win, done with all the crying out. I thought being successful at work meant I was okay now.

The thing about incest: it messes with your mind and makes you forget who you are, who you were, and what you were meant for in this world. You can spend your whole life trying to imagine: Who would I be, if they’d never put their hands on me?

Part I

Splitting

LONG BEFORE I HAD MY memories, I had my dolls. I collected them, or more like they collected me. Every birthday, Mom gave me a Denise or Anna or Rebecca lying in a little pink coffin box with a cellophane lookout window. They were porcelain, expensive for us. Each came with a birth certificate, though some weren’t given proper names, just labels—Irish Beauty, Victorian Style Doll, Lovely Girl on Swing. . . . I propped them on plastic stands on my dresser, and there they stood for years, wide-eyed and never resting in their hoopskirts and fairy gowns and communion dresses. I didn’t play with them like my plastic Kimberly Cheerleader doll. I cared for and protected them, dusting their ringlets and petticoats every week. I think I envied them for getting to be pretty and also safe. Still we were a lot alike—perfect on the outside, hollow on the inside. We had bodies but no free will; histories we couldn’t speak of but carried in our fibers. So much of me was missing then; so little made sense.

To show you my childhood, I will not fill in the blank spots, the holes where the memories fell through, even sometimes as they formed. The spaces between the words are the explanations I didn’t have, the world as I felt it.

1

Eighties Parties

Parties were what the Tylers—Mom’s side—did best. When there was something to celebrate, you didn’t have to have a real conversation. With corks to pop or rugs to cut or songs to sing, it was just so easy to unknow what, way deep down, you knew.

* * *

Anniversary Party, 1983

Six years old

August in Oceanside. I close my window to the breeze. I like being sealed up. Every birthday and Christmas, I ask for curtains to hang around my four-poster bed, but it’s too expensive. Except for my Lois Greenfield dance calendar and my dolls, my room is bare. Everything about our half Cape house on Skillman Avenue is practical and plain, like Mom. For a long time, we didn’t have many pictures up. Then Grandpapa gave us a bunch of old maps, which Dad hung in the playroom with pushpins. I liked it better before.

There are exceptions to Mom’s practicality. For parties, church, and dinners with her parents at Earle Avenue, she curls our hair and lines her eyes in shimmery turquoise like Princess Diana. Collette and I wear bows and scratchy dresses, sometimes even hats and corsages. If my grandparents call us pretty or beautiful, Mom is a success, and everything’s alright. If Grandma Gen greets me with, Kimberly, have you been doing cartwheels? Mom will look stricken. Being perfect is the glue that holds her together, which holds us all together.

For the anniversary party, I’m taking a rare stand. I’ve put on my favorite, most protective blue skirt, with big front pockets to hide my restless hands and the hair elastics I’ll snap against my fingers if I need to. The skirt has an attached wrap belt that I’m winding twice around my waist, so tight that I immediately have a stomachache. That’s how I know it’s tight enough.

Mom says you’re not wearing that, Dad informs me, appearing in my doorway. She says we’re doing a family portrait. To put on the other one. His Long Island accent is thicker and rougher than Mom’s—weah, not wear, and doin’, not doing.

It itches, I say, tightening the buckles on my Mary Janes. And the shiny red sash makes him look, I don’t add.

You think I like wearing this thing your mother puts me into? Kim, look at me.

Dad’s hair, blond as mine in summer, is wet from the shower, but he’s already sweating through his faded wedding-baptism-funeral suit, and his big neck is splotching red under his collar. He looks as uncomfortable as I always feel.

I briefly consider cooperating to make his life easier, but then I remember: once we get to the party, Dad will go to the bar and forget all about his suit, and me.

I’m not changing, I say, reknotting my belt.

Dad sighs, twists his Marine Corps ring. His hands, big as baseball mitts, are scarred and calloused from being a mason his whole life. It’s just a dress, Kim, he says, patting his pocket where his Marlboro Reds should be. It doesn’t matter.

Sometimes I wonder if Dad even lives in the same world as us. Nothing is just anything at a Tyler party. Nothing is what it looks like. A dress can be your armor, or make you invisible, or make you pretty. Pretty girls can’t disappear.

Mom is upset that the clothing argument made us late. She carries my little sister, Collette, on her hip and tugs me across the Rockville Links lawn with her free hand. Dad strides ahead in a stream of smoke, our store-wrapped gift tucked under his arm. I’m worried he’ll drop it, and break Mom, too. I helped choose the crystal candy bowl at Macy’s, watched her pick it up and look at the price tag and put it down and walk away and turn back and pick it up and put it down and finally rush it to the cash register before she could change her mind again.

On the clubhouse stairs, under a HAPPY 40TH ANNIVERSARY banner, stands Grandpapa in his pin-striped suit, drinking with the men from his architecture firm. He sees us and does his tap-dancer trot down the stairs. Grandpapa personally greets every guest, even the late ones.

Dad shakes Grandpapa’s hand, and Mom leans in with Collette so Grandpapa can kiss them. Happy anniversary, Dad. She straightens the red rosebud on his lapel. Where’s Mom?

Oh, putting her lips on, I’m sure, replies Grandpapa. I smell the Old Spice he keeps on his dresser. A white tin bottle with a red ship. A blue towel around his hips. Shaking my head, I rub the toes of my Mary Janes together, soothing myself.

Mom lets go of my hand, gives the back of my neck a little squeeze.

Hi, Grandpapa, I say.

His eyes cut to me—my sheer lace sleeves; my red sash; the short, ruffled hem of the white lace dress I wore, in the end, deciding it wasn’t worth the battle. Deciding wrong.

How’s my prettiest granddaughter? Grandpapa says. And the world just stops.

At the kids’ table, my cousin Amanda and I play tic-tac-toe on the place mats. She takes bites between her Xs, but I push my plate away. Under the tablecloth, I bend my knee and jam the heel of my shoe into my crotch to tell my bladder STOP, don’t GO. Bathrooms aren’t safe at parties. Does everyone else know that, too, and go anyway? Is everyone braver than me? I’ve never asked Mom because I know what she’ll say: You’re big enough to go alone; it’s just family here!

But Aunt Pat—my favorite aunt—will take me. I scan the crowded room for her, as the grown-ups break into another round of applause. They’re toasting my grandparents, telling all the stories. About how Grandpapa always knows the right thing to do, and Grandma Gen always wears lipstick, even in a snowstorm. Most stories revolve around parties. And every single one has the same hero: Grandpapa.

Uncle Chris tells the one about the wedding where a drunk guest was causing a scene and Grandpapa went up behind him, whispered in his ear: You don’t want to ruin such a lovely day, do you? He escorted the man outside, saving the day.

Dad stands up, raising his beer. To Gen and Ed.

To Gen and Ed! shout the grown-ups.

When I married Kath, Dad continues, I felt so, so lucky. Not only was I marrying a wonderful woman, but I was marrying into the perfect family. For a kid from the other side of the tracks, it was something—the beautiful house, the beautiful cars. It was intimidating, alright. But you took me in as one of yours, and there’s just no . . . no better family.

I press and wriggle in my chair, peeking over at Pop-pop and Grandma. Dad’s parents are sitting right there at his table. Both are smiling, but I wonder if it hurts their feelings when Dad talks like he does. No one worships Grandpapa more than Dad. Mom says they have a special bond as war veterans. Grandpapa was a fighter pilot in World War II, and Dad was a minesweeper in Vietnam, but Mom says what they went through is the same underneath.

For the first anniversary portrait, it’s just the Tylers—Grandpapa and Grandma Gen with their six kids: Mom, Aunt Pat, Daphne, Kristy, Chris, and Jon.

Next, the rest of us are called over. I prance and hop in place while Mom fluffs my bangs.

Kim! she whispers. Run to the bathroom!

But I don’t have to go! I lie.

Pick a lap, any lap, grandkids! says the photographer.

I don’t mind when Collette jumps on Mom. I have Aunt Pat. Hey, pen pal. She pulls me onto her lap. Wrapped in her long, strong arms, her feather earrings tickling my cheek, I feel safe for the first time all day.

Say rubies, everyone!

Rubieeees!

My picture smile stays glued to my face as a wet snake slithers down my thigh. I’m peeing on Aunt Pat! Tears bristling, I bury my face in her neck. "I’m sorry," I whisper.

She squeezes me, dries my cheek with her hand. Nothing to be sorry for, she says softly, into my hair. And I believe her. I know Aunt Pat cares more about me than her best silk pants. Being perfect is not what holds us together, love is.

* * *

Christmas Party, mid-eighties

Christmas steals Mom’s energy, too. She doesn’t even have enough to wrap our presents, just leaves them on the couch for us to open Christmas morning. Right cushion, Kimberly; left, Collette. Dad goes downstairs first, so he can howl, Girls, we’ve been robbed! Then we race each other down and have the good part of Christmas. I always get a new doll, and Collette gets books. There’s no church because we do it on Christmas Eve. We have bacon and eggs and stay in our pajamas until it’s time to get ready for the party. And that’s the end of the good part.

Grandma Gen and Grandpapa have hosted the Christmas party since Mom was a kid. Every year, Earle Avenue turns into a Disney holiday–special house—its pointy eaves lined with colored lights, logs crackling in the fireplace, and tinsel dripping from everything in sight. To complete the picture, each time the doorbell rings, the guests in their red-and-green finery rush to the entryway to belt out a new round of We Wish You a Merry Christmas. Grandpapa sings barbershop, my great-aunts play show tunes, and couples dance the Lindy. Grandpapa taught all his kids to ballroom dance, and they taught their husbands and wives, so everyone can fit the part. Meanwhile, the grown-ups drink and drink until the party splits into two parties, theirs and ours. Only ours isn’t really a party, it’s more like killing time.

My cousin Mike and I take turns sliding down the banister while we wait for them to wake up from their dreamworld and take us home. We whoosh down on our stomachs, tiptoe back up, and go again. We don’t let my cousin Amanda go because she’s the littlest and we’re in charge.

Keep a lookout for Grandma Gen, Mike orders his little sister. Just sit on the bottom stair, and if she comes, say, ‘Hi, Grandma Gen!’—loud, so we hear.

"But I don’t want to sit at the bottom!" Amanda stomps, dangling her Christmas Barbie by the hair.

Secretly, I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t want to sit down there, either. The cuckoo clock hangs at the bottom of the stairs. It’s the worst of all Grandpapa’s clocks. They’re everywhere: a grandfather on the middle landing and little ones in wood-and-metal frames ticking and chiming all over the house. Also, the blue bathroom is down there. The light is off, and the door is cracked open.

Mike caves and stations Amanda by the grandfather clock, where she’ll never see Grandma Gen coming in time. We continue the game anyway, until her red talons reach up from below and snatch Mike off the railing. We’re sent to the basement, like I knew we would be.

At least Grandma Gen won’t come down here. The basement is Grandpapa’s space, always freezing cold. It