Actress Sally Field has written a memoir in which she writes in detail about being sexually abused repeatedly by her stepfather, stuntman and actor Jock Mahoney, until she was 14 years old.

"It would have been so much easier if I’d only felt one thing, if Jocko had been nothing but cruel and frightening. But he wasn’t. He could be magical, the Pied Piper with our family as his entranced followers," she writes.

In the new book entitled In Pieces, which is out on 18 September, Sally Fields also admits to having an abortion at 17 in Mexico, a couple of years before finding worldwide fame with roles in Gidget and The Flying Nun.

Sally Field, who says she turned to acting as therapy and went on to star in hits such as Forrest Gump and Smokey and the Bandit, also candidly discusses waking up to find singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb on top of her!

After smoking marijuana with Jimmy Webb, Sally Field fell asleep and then woke up to find Jimmy "on top of me, grinding away to another melody". Field said she does not believe Webb set out to intentional hurt her and that he was just “stoned out of his mind”.

Asked by the New Yorks Times for a comment, Jimmy Webb told them in an email: "I am being asked to respond to a passage in a book that the publishers refuse to let me read, even at my lawyer's request, so all I can do is recount my memories of dating Sally in the swingin' 1960s. Sally and I were young, successful stars in Hollywood. We dated and did what 22-year-olds did in the late 60s — we hung out, we smoked pot, we had sex."

In an interview with the New York Times to promote the book, Sally Field says she now believes her relationship with actor Burt Reynolds, who died earlier this month, was because she was trying to re-create her relationship with her stepfather.

“I was somehow exorcising something that needed to be exorcised,” she said. “I was trying to make it work this time.”

Sally Field says she's glad Burt Reynolds will not be able to read the memoir because she knows parts of it would've hurt him.

“This would hurt him,” Sally Field said. “I felt glad that he wasn’t going to read it, he wasn’t going to be asked about it, and he wasn’t going to have to defend himself or lash out, which he probably would have. I did not want to hurt him any further.”