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[10], 339, [7], pages. Signed and Inscribed by Author. The dust jacket is in a plastic sleeve. When Frank Chesney first saw the letter, his only reaction was one of mild annoyance. At forty-two, he was happily married, fond of his three sons and devoted to his job as a business manager for movie people. Neither his wife Sue's concern for her old college friend nor the news that Duane's troublesome daughter was coming to Hollywood to study acting gave him any sense of foreboding. Pat Godden would be another starlet and he had seen plenty of them. But from the moment he saw her, he knew that she was no ordinary girl. Her wild and inchoate beauty; the child's body beneath the woman's shadowed face; her intense, almost rapacious appetite for life set her apart from the other young girls who wore their ragged haircuts and their black stockings like a badge. From that first encounter, he felt himself increasingly drawn to her: to her world of unreality, suffering and, eventually, desire and guilt. Robert R. Kirsch (October 18, 1922 August 16, 1980) was an American literary critic and author. Kirsch joined The Los Angeles Times, where he was the literary editor for 23 years. He wrote "thousands of columns, book reviews, and essays." He was one of the first critics to praise the works of Joseph Wambaugh and Tom Sanchez. Kirsch authored several books about California and Las Vegas. He used the pen names of Robert Dundee and Robert Bancroft. He is the namesake of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize's Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement. Derived from a Kirkus review: Frank Chesney, at forty-two, is very much in love with his wife, Sue, and their life with three young sons is compatible, as is his work as a business manager for certain people in the film industry. None of this seems to steady him down, however, when he meets Pat Godden whose appeal (she is sick, she is confused, she has run away from the mother who never wanted her, she has never been loved) finds him very vulnerable. All his better- as well as his baser- instincts are aroused, and he is determined to give her a chance at the film career she wants, to see her through the pregnancy (father unknown) she claims, and to offer her the security of his love, impossible as it seems. Guiltily on edge at home, lying to Sue, lashing out at the boys, he gets more and more involved with Pat- finally takes her away for a few days to discover that he has been not only seduced by her "nightmare" world but hooked by an old guilt he has tried to write off. A messy situation, smoothed over by a certain sympathy toward those involved, so that these distraught people provide- if not much else- a measure of distraction.
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