Mimi Sommer and Donna Summer.Photo: Courtesy of HBO
Mimi Sommer has taken control of her past and is ready to share her story with the world.
In light ofLove to Love You, Donna Summer’s premiere on Friday, Mimi — the eldest daughter of the late Disco QueenDonna Summer— opens up to PEOPLE about why she decided to tell her story of being sexually abused as a child in the film, how she’s found healing since and her relationship with her mother.
“I feel like I’m pretty open, but I’ve had to work through a lot of stuff in my life,” Mimi tells PEOPLE exclusively. “I have four kids of my own, and I want to make sure that I’m not passing on things from my own trauma or things from my own story.”
“We never really got closure from it,” she says.
“I don’t know that she was ever super comfortable talking about. That was probably one of her biggest nightmares, was something like that happening to one of her kids,” she adds. “So I think that might have been a very difficult thing for her to have to really hash out with me in some ways.”
Donna Summer.Courtesy of HBO
“I didn’t hold it against her in any way. Because I understood. I was older when she found out, and so I understood at that point that the healing process for her took a lot longer,” she says. “And for me, I was very aware of it from a much earlier age so I was able to gauge it, realize what it was, and start working on it. There’s a shame element that comes with that, so learning how to realize that this wasn’t me, it wasn’t my fault.”
She adds, “So even though we didn’t really get into the nitty-gritty of it and really kind of work through all of that, I still understood where she came from. I understood because I lived it in a sense. So I think I have a lot of grace for her in that way.”
“I’m sure like any child, a child who has military parents or has a celebrity parent or a politician as a parent, somebody who’s gone a lot; you’re a child, you want your parent. So I was blessed because I had amazing grandparents who raised me, and so they really did stand in the gap for her.”
“I understood, and I felt really sad for her in a lot of ways,” she adds. “I think that was a struggle sometimes, to share her with everyone.”
Something that helped her during that time, was listening to “Mimi’s Song,” a song Summer released in 1978 for her daughter to listen to before bed when she was on the road.
“Every time I heard it, it made me feel seen and made me feel remembered and made me felt like, ‘Oh, this is how she feels about me.’ Even though she might be miles away, thousands of miles away, and I can’t be with her, this is how she feels about me when she’s away.”
In her later years, however, Mimi says that the singer was actively involved: “When she was home, when she would come back to Nashville, the first thing that she did was call us. ‘All right, who’s picking up cozy meals? Who’s picking up dinner? Let’s get dinner. Go to the grocery store. We’re going to make food.'”
She adds, “My last memories with her was — we talked all the time. She would call me up every week and check-in. We had a mom-daughter relationship. We didn’t really fight or argue too much. I was blessed to have the time that I had with her.”
Her last day, she says, was “vulnerable”: “I think she just realized I got no face to show other than the one I’ve got,” Mimi reflects. “She just let all the walls down, and so we really got to just be with her in all of her vulnerabilities and weaknesses and her funniness.”
Love to Love You, Donna Summeris out now on HBO and HBO Max.
source: people.com
