Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

De: Allegra Huston

Narrado por: Allegra Huston

When Allegra Huston was four years old, her mother was killed in a car crash. Soon afterward, she was introduced to an intimidating man wreathed in cigar smoke - the legendary film director John Huston - with the words, “This is your father”.

At the heart of Love Child is Allegra’s search for the widely adored mother she never knew - and also a search for where she herself belongs. Allegra grew up in a fragmented, contradictory family: an only child with many siblings; not unwanted, but a perennial problem to be solved. As the daughter of a charismatic man, the much younger sister of the model and actress Anjelica Huston, and the bookish one in a family of artists, she felt like an outer planet, orbiting their much brighter lights. The discovery of her “real” father when she was 12 - the British aristocrat and historian John Julius Norwich - raised more questions than it answered.

Allegra brings us into the mind of a child tossed on the tempests of other people’s priorities - constantly assessing the unspoken currents of intention and the stability of each temporary home, always on the lookout for the next upheaval. With the forensic gaze of an outsider, she takes us from a mansion in Ireland, to the hilltop retreats of Jack Nicholson and Ryan O’Neal, to the remote Mexican beach where John Huston ended his days. With clear-eyed tenderness, Allegra tells how she reconciled the clash of loyalties, negotiated the web of secrets and awkward truths, and eventually, with the birth of her son, found her place at the center of her own life. At his christening, she forged her two families together into one and transformed her mother’s difficult legacy into a hard-won blessing.

For Allegra, having lived this story, family is defined not by the strands of DNA but simply by love and the willingness to love. She discovers in the cruel accident that ripped her mother from her an unexpected luck: a richness of family that, had her mother lived, she might never have known.

©2009 Allegra Huston (P)2019 Allegra Huston

I cried ... seriously touching memoir...

Allegra's honesty and emotional intelligence are palpable in every nuance and story she recounts about her complicated life of privilege and loneliness. Every word comes from her heart. Her metaphors, analogies, and descriptions are dense with flavor, scent, and delicacy. I was never bored, not for a moment, and I've read dozens and dozens of memoirs. People's lives are fascinating journeys of self-discovery. Their challenges, triumphs, and sufferings are universal, human, beyond class, privilege, underprivileged, nationality or levels of intelligence/beauty/good luck, bad luck.... it's all a school to the heart, to love. Allegra Huston's life, one might pre-judge as privileged and outside of everyday hardships, levels all of us. Thank you. What a pleasure and heart-opening story you tell.

FABULOUS!

Fabulous and gut wrenching.
This is the ONLY book I’ve ever recommend the author also be the narrator.
Excellent narration.

Interesting and Unique Writing Style

Good choice for a book if you are traveling. Easy listening. Interesting stories of her perceptions, attitudes, pains and emotions growing up in a family where she was a curiosity, guest, and chosen family member.