“Honey, Baby Mine” is a not-really-a memoir that reads like a podcast someone passed along to a printer.

That’s kind of what you get when turn a long series of transcibed conversations into a book. And that’s what Oscar-winner Laura Dern and her Oscar-nominated mother Diane Ladd did, using conversations taken on daily walks meant to restore Ladd’s health after a (misdiagnosed) medical death sentence. It might be their last chance, Laura reminds her and us often in these chats, for her to learn things from her mother, details of her life, loves, career and relationship with dad Bruce Dern and others.

The talks were a heartfelt effort to add years to her stricken, 80something mother’s life. We read of the struggles it was to get Ladd up and moving, taking a few steps more -on oxygen, then off it — getting her lungs back to something like full capacity. Diane Ladd had a dire “six months to live” prognosis from her latest doctor, brought on, Ladd says, by some “poison” a farmer-neighbor sprayed on his property.

So Laura would make her walk and make her talk and they’d tidy up some blank spots about family history and maybe clear the air between them in the process.

That’s just lovely, especially considering how this book could have turned out to be more of an epitaph than a little love letter of chats, family photos and recipes. It’s as well-intentioned and warm as their relationship often comes off in these converations gathered under chapter headings like “The Angel’s Fault,” “Bent Spoons” “Mary & Preston” (Diane’s parents) and “What We Leave Behind.”

But if you’ve ever turned an interiew conversation into a “Q & A” in print like this, you know the shortcomings of the form. It’s the easiest, some would say laziest way to turn around an interview into a “story.” Still, you have to condense long passages into shorter ones, have to focus on the pithy quote, the nugget of insight that gets across the flavor of the person answering the question and even the one asking it. That doesn’t seem to have happened to a large enough degree here.

There’s a lot of artifice that shows, little bursts of exposition and back story that even couched in Laura’s best “Remember when” prompts, reads as stage-managed or postscripted. One can imagine a sound crew — boom mike, etc. — accompanying them on these strolls in Santa Monica and environs, places where Laura’s kids with ex-husband Ben Harper used to frolic.

Names are dropped, and with no explanation, context or the like, one must turn to IMDb to figure our who they’re talking about, although they circle back and properly ID some of them in end-of-chapter essays each writes rather than speaks.

But there are pearls scattered throughout the book. Laura’s pal, frequent collaborator and like Diane Ladd, fellow Southerner Reese Witherspoon drawls Laura’s last name as her nickname for her — “Dern.”

The most heated the chats get is when Laura laments how often her mother was gone during her childhood. Her Dad, Bruce Dern, and Ladd married and divorced, and Laura was “raised by my grandmother,” something she mentioned in interviews just often enough to hurt her mother’s feelings.

Ladd professes an eagerness to “protect” Laura from her savage, body-image-focused and predatory business. But she let Laura start auditioning at 11, and let her take a role in sex-obsessed filmmaker Adriane Lyne’s “Foxes” when she was ELEVEN.

“Laura, you were fourteen, but we told him you were seventeen!”

“No, I was eleven and I said I was fourteen for the role of a seventeen year-old!”

“Oh my God, what was I thinking?”

The reader’s allowed to wonder that as well. A lot of that stuff about what Laura dove into, what Diane “allowed” and what Laura resented about her absent-and-working mom is rationalized and normalized, but we get the feeling Dern didn’t want to raise her kids that way. Did she? Hard to say. The book doesn’t get into that.

We hear about Ladd’s brassy, assertive way of plunging into her profession in her teens, her first meeting with Bruce Dern (literally on stage), his to-the-manner-born background and the baby they conceived on their first night spent together.

I hadn’t realized their first child died at 18 months, something you have to piece together from a tidbit in the book and a deeper dive into Wikipedia.

There’s a of that in in this chatty but skips-over-a-LOT mother-daughter memoir.

Skimming Ladd’s love life, and skipping past Laura’s colorful Hollywood dating history ENTIRELY (Goldbum to Billy Bob, Kyle MacLachlan, Nic Cage, an NBA player here, Common and singer-husband of five years Harper) says more than perhaps going into detail would have.

Ladd owns up to “woo-woo” moments in her reasoning, thinking, dogma and opinions, and that jibes with her talk show appearance persona. She’s a bit “woo woo.” One of the people she’d send to “protect” Laura on teen film shoots while Diane was location was guru to the Left Coasters Marianne Williamson.

That’s about as “woo woo” as you get.

But there’s warmth in even their amusingly testy moments, even in the filler. And every so often, Laura summons up a memory they’ve shared that both regard as magical, a touchstone moment, such as when Diane “dragged” seven year-old Laura to the set of “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and Laura can “pinpoint the exact moment when I truly fell in love with acting.”

Director Martin Scorsese took an interest, and Dern noticed the specificity of his directions to her mother (who co-starred as “Flo” opposite Ellen Burstyn in the film), the way her mother processed that and made magic with his suggestions. Scorsese let Dern watch — close-up — a bathroom scene from his vantage point, through a crack in a barely open door.

Dern even got to be an extra. But that wasn’t the first time. She just didn’t make the final cut of the Burt Reynolds/Diane Ladd action comedy “White Lightning.”

“Remember when Matt Clark’s character menaced yours with a gun and I ran and grabbed your leg, wrecking the shot?”

If you’re a movie fan you probably already love these two grandes dames of the cinema. I’ve interviewed Dern a few times, never had the pleasure of talking with her mother and sometime co-star (“Rambling Rose” is their best collaboration).

Dern pal Witherspoon wrote the sweet, fun and flippant forward to the book.

Not crazy about the book, although I love the sentiment that created it. Now that Mom’s recovered, if you want to do this right, ladies, check out the way Ron and Clint Howard structured their book, “The Boys.”

Or better yet, do a podcast, maybe with a producer who eggs you on into getting to everything you kind of skirt in the book you named for your shared term of endermeant. As it’s a line from Woody Guthrie’s “Crawdad Song,” which you’d sing together on phone chats at bedtime during Laura’s childhood, “Honey, Baby Mine,” there’s your podcast theme song.

“Honey, Baby Mine, A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding),” by Laura Dern & Diane Ladd. 236 pages with scores of photos and a few recipes. Grand Central Publishing. $30.