The Mighty Franks

A Memoir

By: Michael Frank

Narrated by: Michael Frank

Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's Summary

This program is read by the author.

A psychologically acute memoir about an unusual Hollywood family by Michael Frank, who "brings Proustian acuity and razor-sharp prose to family dramas as primal, and eccentrically insular, as they come" (The Atlantic)

"My feeling for Mike is something out of the ordi - nary," Michael Frank overhears his aunt telling his mother when he is a boy of eight. "It's stronger than I am. I cannot explain it . . . I love him beyond life itself." With this indelible bit of eavesdropping, we fall into the spellbinding world of The Mighty Franks.

The family is uncommonly close: Michael's childless Auntie Hankie and Uncle Irving, glamorous Hollywood screenwriters, are doubly related— Hankie is his father's sister, and Irving is his mother's brother. The two families live near each other in Laurel Canyon. In this strangely intertwined world, even the author's grandmothers—who dislike each other—share a nearby apartment.

Strangest of all is the way Auntie Hankie, with her extravagant personality, comes to bend the wider family to her will. Talented, mercurial, and lavish with her love, she divides Michael from his parents and his two younger brothers as she takes charge of his education, guiding him to the right books to read (Proust, not Zola), the right painters to admire (Matisse, not Pollock), the right architectural styles to embrace (period, not modern—or mo-derne, as she pronounces the word, with palpable disdain). She trains his mind and his eye—until that eye begins to see on its own. When this "son" Hankie longs for grows up and begins to turn away from her, her moods darken, and a series of shattering scenes compel Michael to reconstruct both himself and his family narrative as he tries to reconcile the woman he once adored with the troubled figure he discovers her to be.

In its portrayal of this fascinating, singularly polarizing figure, the boy in her thrall, and the man that boy becomes, The Mighty Franks will speak to any listener who has ever struggled to find an independent voice amid the turbulence of family life.

©2017 Michael Frank (P)2017 Macmillan Audio

If Proust Wrote a Mystery...

As my friend Elaine, herself a Collector Extraordinaire who, well into her 90s - like Harriet Frank Jr. - threatened immortality, might have said:

"The whole woman was impossible."

Which Harriet Frank Jr. was, certainly: and talented and charismatic and a mighty mixed blessing, leaving me at least, wanting so much more. As in: why in the world, & how in the hell, did she get away with being herself?

I'm glad she was an original. Two of 'em? It woulda been too much for any of us. Michael Frank has survived to tell the tale, pretty lovingly, of the one and only - many thanks to him, for that.

This is a wonderful story of a family - and too, of a boy who made it, a tad against the odds, to manhood.

A Memorable Delight

A compelling tale and incisive character study. Beautifully​ read by the author. Rich with time and place. I always looked forward to the next unfolding of the story.