A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York - Hardcover

Huston, Anjelica

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1451656297 ISBN 13: 9781451656299

Publisher: Scribner, 2013

Synopsis

Writing with an exuberant love of language and detail, Anjelica Huston shares her enchanted childhood in Ireland, her teen years in London, and her coming of age as a model and nascent actress in New York.

Writing with an exuberant love of language and detail, Anjelica Huston shares her enchanted childhood in Ireland, her teen years in London, and her coming-of-age as a model and nascent actress in New York.

Living with her glamorous and artistic mother, educated by tutors and nuns, intrepid on a horse, Huston was raised on an Irish estate to which—between movies—her father brought his array of extraordinary friends, from Carson McCullers and John Steinbeck to Peter O’Toole and Marlon Brando. Every morning, Anjelica and her brother visited their father while he took his breakfast in bed. “What news?” he’d ask. “I’d seen him the night before,” Anjelica recalls. “There wasn’t much to report.” So she became a storyteller.

In London, where she lives with her mother and brother in the early sixties when her par­ents separate, Huston encounters the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac. She understudies Marianne Faithfull in Hamlet. Seventeen, striking, precocious, but still young and vulnerable, she is devastated when her mother dies in a car crash.

Months later she moves to New York, falls in love with the much older, brilliant but disturbed photographer Bob Richardson, and becomes a model. Living in the Chelsea Hotel, working with Richard Avedon and other photographers, she navigates a volatile relationship and the dynamic cultural epicenter of New York in the seventies.

A Story Lately Told ends as Huston launches her Hollywood life. The second part of her story—Watch Me—opens in Los Angeles in 1973 and will be published in Fall 2014. Beguiling and beautifully written, Huston’s memoir is a treasure.

About this title

About the Author:

Academy Award-winning actress and director Anjelica Huston has received honors from the National Society of Film Critics; the Independent Spirit Awards; and the Golden Globe Awards; as well as multiple Oscar, BAFTA, and Emmy awards or nominations. Huston most recently starred on the hit TV show Smash. She is the author of the memoirs A Story Lately Told and Watch Me.

Academy Award-winning actress and director Anjelica Huston has received honors from the National Society of Film Critics; the Independent Spirit Awards; and the Golden Globe Awards; as well as multiple Oscar, BAFTA, and Emmy awards or nominations. Huston most recently starred on the hit TV show Smash. She is the author of the memoirs A Story Lately Told and Watch Me.

Review:

“[An] elegy for a vanished world, [A Story Lately Told] becomes a seductive social history of the 1960s—and the story of [Huston’s] fractious separation from an indomitable father and grief for the loss of the mother who was the ballast of her life.” Author: Sheila Weller Source: The New York Times Book Review

“Impressively written in a style that is as graceful and natural as breathing and as observant as that by a ‘born writer.’...[Huston] comes of age surrounded by talent, pot, fame and photographers, and tells her tale with unexpected distinction.” Author: Jeff Simon Source: The Buffalo News (Editor’s Choice)

“Huston’s privileged childhood is described with great texture. The enormous estate in Ireland where her family lived is a rambling, magical place. The names that are dropped in this book don’t constitute name-dropping, but are simply the names that populated her childhood...[Huston] is a smart and subtle enough writer not to aim for a pop diagnosis, but instead, once again, [goes] for something truer, deeper and richer...[A] stirring memoir.” Author: Meg Wolitzer Source: NPR

“Anjelica Huston grew up in what sounds a fairy tale—magically beautiful, yet tinged with loss, sadness, and monsters.” Author: Kate Tuttle Source: Boston Globe

“A Story Lately Told proves that Huston is a third-generation storyteller. As she chronicles her earliest memories through age 22, she echoes the rhythms and structures of novels like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and What Maisie Knew, focusing on surface sensations of youth while implying profound internal changes.” Author: Carrie Rickey Source: Philadelphia Inquirer

“Anjelica Huston has lived a big, colorful life—big and colorful enough to fill two volumes of an autobiography...Huston has a way with a descriptive phrase, and it’s on display in A Story Lately Told.” Author: Jocelyn McClurg Source: USA Today

“[Huston’s] lovely, novelistic writing carries the book....As a storyteller, she’s having more fun than a monkey in a lingerie drawer.” Author: Melissa Maerz Source: Entertainment Weekly

“Evocative.” Author: Mary Pols Source: People

“An elegant, funny, and frequently haunting reminiscence of the first two decades of her life...A classic.” Author: Graydon Carter Source: Vanity Fair

“[A Story Lately Told] contains a plethora of compelling tales.” Author: Maggie Lange Source: New York magazine

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1451656297
• ISBN 13: 9781451656299
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272