Cuckoo in the Hollywood nest
Allegra Huston gives a tender, painfully honest account of her tangled childhood, writes Elizabeth Day

Elizabeth Day IN The Observer, Sunday 19 April 2009

Glancing at the cover of Love Child, it would be easy to dismiss Allegra Huston's book as another gilded memoir of life in the shadow of celebrity. On the jacket is a family portrait that depicts each figure draped languorously over an antique daybed. The semi-bored expressions on their beautiful faces suggest a certain nonchalant fabulousness worn only by the very famous, the very wealthy or the very gorgeous. On one side, a young Anjelica Huston (the author's half-sister) gazes out of the frame. It is the sort of book one can imagine picking up in an airport departure lounge purely to pore over the shiny photographs in the centre pages; the literary equivalent of Heat magazine.

Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found
by Allegra Huston
pp291 ,
Bloomsbury,
£17.99

But although Allegra Huston was born into blue-blood Hollywood - the man she believed to be her father until the age of 12 was John Huston, director of such cinematic classics as The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen - it would be a mistake to dismiss this book as another name-dropping voyage around a thespian dynasty. Instead, Huston has written a delicate memoir of displacement, of a child coming to terms with an inexact sense of loss and not-quite-belonging.
Of course, there is a healthy dollop of name-dropping, mostly courtesy of Anjelica's boyfriends, Jack Nicholson and Ryan O'Neal. Nicholson is gregariously charming ("He seemed to know exactly what he wanted to do, at any given second"), O'Neal a distinctly creepy character who insists on resting his hand on Huston's teenage thigh as he drives her to school.

The book opens when Allegra is four and her mother, the former ballerina Ricki Soma, has died in a car crash. Soon afterwards she is taken to a suite at Claridge's and introduced to a man she has never met with the words: "This is your father." The man is John Huston. She is dispatched to his sprawling stately home in Ireland where she is raised largely by her nurse, in rooms furnished to her mother's taste and filled with her sister's pass-me-down playthings.

Huston struggles to find a place for herself: neither Irish enough to be able to take her first communion with the local girls, nor English enough to want to support the national team in a rugby match.
The best chapters are not those that relay the glitzy excess of 1970s Hollywood, but the earlier segments that deal with the discomfort of a child forced to live in an unfamiliar world populated by semi-detached adults; for much of the book, her half-siblings, Anjelica and Tony, are distant, almost mythical presences, living far-flung lives away from home.

Read the full review.