Heche called her mother “eerily compliant” after she failed to acknowledge her father’s sexual abuse of her, both during her childhood and when Heche wrote about it in her memoir, “Call Me Crazy.” In the memoir, Heche revealed that she contracted genital herpes from her father when she was an infant and that her mother, believing it was a diaper rash, never took her to a doctor.
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Nancy called Heche’s allegations of sexual abuse “lies and blasphemies.”
Nancy admitted to some of her own shortcomings in her book, “The Truth Comes Out: The Story of My Heart’s Transformation,” wherein she recounted having multiple affairs after her husband wasn’t fulfilling her needs. “I had chosen lots of substitutes for God’s never-failing love. No one measured up, of course.”
After her husband’s death, Nancy became a Christian therapist and lectured on behalf of Focus on the Family, speaking about how to overcome homosexuality. It was during that time, in 1997, that Heche announced that she was in a lesbian relationship with actress, comedian, and television host Ellen DeGeneres.
Her mother described Heche’s coming out as “a betrayal of an unspoken vow: We will never have anything to do with homosexuals.”
“My mother’s had a very tragic life,” Heche said in a 2009 New York Times interview. “Three of her five children are dead, and her husband is dead. That she is attempting to change gay people into straight people is, in my opinion, a way to keep the pain of the truth out. People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life, and it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love. My mother preaches to this day the opposite of that core of my life. It is no mistake that she still stands up against love. And one wonders why I’m not rushing to have her meet my children.”
It is unknown whether Heche and her mother repaired their estranged relationship before Heche’s tragic accident.
