As for her mother, Brooke to this day doesn't understand Teri's thought process regarding her suggestive early modeling/acting career.

“I mean, I could say, ‘Oh, it was the time back then,’ or, ‘Oh, it was art,’” Brooke told The Sunday Times. “But I don’t know why she thought it was all right. I don’t know.” Brooke's own children view her early work as "child pornography."

And while the masses scolded Teri for her lenient parenting, Brooke feels no anger toward her mother, who died in 2012 following "a long illness related to dementia."

“Everyone always wanted me to be angry with her, but anger was just too sad for me to take when I looked at how insecure she was,” she shared. That being said, Brooke fired her mother in 1999.

Brooke's 2014 book, There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me, details her complicated, intense bond with Teri. Growing up, their relationship was so impassioned that Brooke "thought she was God."

"I thought she could change the weather. It was us against the world," she told USA Today.

Back in 2014, the Sahara star clarified that her New York Times bestselling memoir is not "a Mommie Dearest book."

“It’s so innate when you’re an only child of a single mother,” she told The Sunday Times. “All you want to do is love your parent and keep them alive forever, and so I wanted to protect her. And by virtue of protecting her, I was justifying everything, and that solidified that bond between us.”

During a telling interview at the Variety Studio, Brooke opened up about the gut-wrenching feelings that came with losing her "controlling" mother. “You don’t ever recover from losing a parent,” she began. “It’s a primal thing. You learn to put it in a different place in your heart."

"I also said goodbye to her every time she drank," Brooke continued. "She wasn’t present. I knew who she was capable of being because it was in there."

The two-part documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, premieres on Monday, April 3, 2023, on Hulu.