Lorna Luft’s memoir Me and My Shadows (1998) provides the most detailed account from a child’s perspective of what it was like to grow up in Garland’s household. She describes the love and the difficulty with equal specificity — the warmth of her mother’s performing ability and the chaos that the pharmaceutical dependency and financial difficulty created in the domestic space. The memoir is valuable precisely because it doesn’t reduce Garland to either a monster or a martyr; it describes a parent who was genuinely loving and genuinely limited, whose limitations had consequences for her children that were real and lasting.
Joey Luft has been less publicly prominent than his sisters. He has given interviews over the years that describe his mother with warmth and that speak to the particular difficulty of losing a parent at twelve years old — which is how old he was when Garland died in 1969.
All three children carry the inheritance of their mother’s life in different ways. Liza Minnelli’s own career — her Oscar for Cabaret, her stage work, her concert performances — has been shaped by and compared to her mother’s career in ways that are sometimes illuminating and sometimes reductive. The comparison is real; the influence is documented. But Liza Minnelli is also a performer with her own distinctive identity and a body of work that stands independent of the parental context.
The relationship between Judy Garland’s life and the lives of her children is a reminder that the effects of what was done to her at MGM, and of the conditions of her adult life, extended beyond her own experience. They shaped the family in which her children grew up, and they have shaped the way those children have understood their own lives and their own relationships to the performing world their mother inhabited.