Memoirs of abusive childhoods are a dime a dozen these days - the
unrelenting wretchedness, and sales success, of Dave Pelzer's books
has proved beyond doubt that there is a public appetite for misery.
Paula Fox's picaresque account of her unconventional childhood is
saved from descending into cliche by the sheer extraordinariness of
it all, not to mention the bohemian types and bit-part players who
wander in and out of the picture. Her parents were glamorous
strangers, Hollywood wannabes who popped in and out of her life
with disconcerting irregularity, having abandoned her shortly after
her birth in 1923 to the care of a New York orphanage. From the
halcyon days of her infancy, when she was cared for by a kindly
minister in upstate New York, to the exoticism of a Cuban hacienda
where she lived for a while with her Cuban grandmother, and finally
to Florida, Montreal and Hollywood, she paints an evocative picture
of a society in the throes of change. Meanwhile, the young girl
struggles to understand her parents' mysterious adult world of
alcoholism, casual infidelity and ambition. The legacy of her
affection-starved childhood is encapsulated in this heartbreaking
quote: 'I had a brief disastrous marriage to an actor I had met at
International House... He said we'd better get married, and I could
think of no alternative, though I didn't like him very much. I was
underage, so I was obliged to get parental consent. It took me
several days to find out where my father was living and write to
him. He sent me a telegram that included his permission and the
words "if that's what you want".' Fox wastes not a word, her spare
prose shorn of all sentimentality; and it is ultimately this
writerly eloquence that lifts the book head and shoulders above its
genre. (Kirkus UK)
Paula Fox was born in 1923 to a young bohemian couple who left her a few days after her birth in a Manhattan orphanage. Rescued by her grandmother, she was passed from hand to hand, the kindness of strangers interrupted by brief and disturbing reunions with her darkly enchanting parents. Her father was a good-looking, hard-drinking Hollywood screenwriter (among his credits is 'The Last Train to Madrid', which Graham Greene declared was 'the worst movie I ever saw') and her mother, icily glamorous, is given to almost psychotic bursts of temper that punctuate a deep, disturbing indifference.
They exercise upon Paula a drip-drip cruelty, perhaps without quite realising it, as they shuffle her from one exotic place to another, never spending more than a few scattered moments with their daughter. In New York, Paula lives with her strange Spanish grandmother. In Cuba, she wanders about freely on a sugarcane plantation owned by a wealthy relative. In California, she finds herself cast away on the dismal margins of Hollywood, where famous actors and literary celebrities – Buster Keaton, John Wayne, Orson Welles, F. Scott-Fitzgerald – glitteringly appear and then fade away.
In this extraordinarily moving and unusual memoir – this portrait of a life adrift – there are many things she can't remember, many things she can't explain, but the gaps are telling, signifying a child's quiet acceptance of the way things are. In a voice of great clarity and simplicity that has no truck with manipulation or reconstruction with hindsight, Paula Fox has given us an unforgettable appraisal of just how much – and how little – a child requires to survive.
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