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WORK TITLE: The Mighty Franks
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: June 2, 1959
WEBSITE: http://michaelfrank.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
He lives in New York City and Liguria, Italy. * https://us.macmillan.com/author/michaelfrank/ * http://michaelfrank.com/about/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born June 2, 1959; son of Marty and Merona Frank.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist and writer. Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, CA, book critic, worked for a decade.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short fiction to Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story and travel writing to the New York Times’s Italy: The Best Travel Writing; contributor to periodicals, including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, Slate, Yale Review, Salmagundi, and Tablet.
SIDELIGHTS
Michael Frank is a journalist and writer. He worked for a decade as a book critic for the Los Angeles Times. Frank has contributed short fiction to Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story and travel writing to the New York Times’s Italy: The Best Travel Writing. Frank has also written a number of essays for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Slate, the Yale Review, Salmagundi, and Tablet.
Frank published the memoir The Mighty Franks in 2017. This memoir covers Frank’s extended family, many of whom were active in Hollywood. However, at the center of the book is his relationship with his Aunt Harriet, otherwise known as Hankie. Frank’s family came together in an unusual manner. Hankie is his father Marty’s sister. Hankie married Irving, who is Frank’s mother’s brother. And Frank’s grandmothers lived together. Aunt Hankie worked as a screenwriter for MGM but served as his surrogate mother for much of his life. He would follow her around on her errands after school as a child. Later into adulthood, she would travel with him in Europe. While she had taught him about art, she is also highly opinionated and smothers him. Her attention toward the author created a gap between him and his siblings and also parents. After the death of Hankie’s mother, she became erratic. Annual Christmas dinners were canceled if Frank refused to help her decorate. She would also demand to talk to him on the phone, regardless of where he was in the world. Frank reflects on her domineering behavior and the anger she espoused when things did not go as she had expected.
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Peter Haldeman remarked that “some of the most potent Hollywood memoirs are the contributions not of marquee names but of bit players — Brooke Hayward’s ”Haywire,” for example, or ”West of Eden: An American Place,” Jean Stein’s recently published oral history.” Haldeman explained that “The Mighty Franks … falls into this category. The leading characters in his probing and radiantly polished account … were MGM screenwriters.” Haldeman commented that the memoir “is set in the scrubby Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles, traditional outpost of musicians and artists, rather than in the security-patrolled enclaves of Brentwood or Bel-Air. No hilltop palaces here, no People-covered weddings or medevac flights to Betty Ford. Still, this is a narrative that could unfold only in a place where fantasy and reality blur with treacherous ease.” Reviewing the memoir in the Atlantic, Ann Hulbert observed that “Frank’s eye and ear, his words and wit–the voice in these pages has such style. Better yet, the style is utterly his own.”
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews described the memoir as being “a lengthy exploration of one family’s uniquely claustrophobic dysfunctions,” reasoning that “Frank only finds mixed success in delivering a compelling narrative to bolster the provocative premise.” Booklist contributor David Pitt claimed that “this is one of those memoirs that simultaneously fascinates as it makes us uncomfortable.” A Publishers Weekly contributor found the memoir to be “complex and fascinating,” noting that “readers will be enthralled by the affecting portraits of the two central figures.” In a review in the London Guardian, Philip Hoare mentioned that “Frank is a master of self-reflection, under the bowl of blue sky and in those closeted canyons. He says nothing in an ordinary way; everything has a dreamlike smoothness, born out of his extended act of retrieval and the remembered violence of emotion and inconstancy.” Hoare recorded that the “sad and glorious” ending chapters of the memoir “capture a glitteringly dysfunctional family in a moment in time. I doubt you’ll read a better memoir this year. The Mighty Franks is full of humour and brittle irony. In Aunt Hankie, Frank has created a great new nonfictional character: an indelible wonder of dark depths and hypnotic high style.”
Reviewing the memoir in the London Observer, Rachel Cooke opined that all of the stories in the memoir are “entertainingly, and sometimes beautifully, told. Frank, as his aunt once told him, can write. But it is also too much: his account is so partial the reader comes to suspect, if not its essential truth, then at least its purpose.” Reviewing the memoir in Noted, Linda Herrick said that “towards the end, he softens his perspective as she loses her husband in an extraordinarily drawn death scene. But the damage seems permanent. This powerful, eloquent memoir may help cauterise some of his pain. But … she still lives.” Writing in the Readings Website, Jo Case concluded that “this is a loving, complex, if also critical, portrait. It will appeal to readers of dysfunctional family memoirs (like Running with Scissors) and family memoirs of perception and truth.” Reviewing the memoir in Shelf Awareness, Julia Jenkins lauded that “The Mighty Franks is an immediate, gut-wrenching account.” Jenkins concluded that Frank’s “tone is serious and his prose occasionally verbose, but the saga of this flawed family is deeply involving. Any hint of sensationalism is more than balanced by the psychological insights Frank eventually achieves.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Frank, Michael, The Mighty Franks, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Atlantic, May 1, 2017, Ann Hulbert, review of The Might Franks, p. 32.
Booklist, May 15, 2017, David Pitt, review of The Might Franks, p. 10.
Guardian (London, England), June 9, 2017, Philip Hoare, review of The Mighty Franks.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2017, review of The Might Franks.
New York Times, June 1, 2017, Peter Haldeman, review of The Might Franks, p. D6(L).
Observer (London, England), June 18, 2017, Rachel Cooke, review of The Mighty Franks.
Publishers Weekly, February 27, 2017, review of The Mighty Franks, p. 87.
ONLINE
Michael Frank Website, http://michaelfrank.com (October 22, 2017).
Noted, http://www.noted.co.nz/ (September 20, 2017), Linda Herrick, review of The Mighty Franks.
Readings Website, https://www.readings.com.au/ (June 27, 2017), Jo Case, review of The Mighty Franks.
Shelf Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (May 16, 2017), review of The Mighty Franks.*
MICHAEL FRANK
Michael Frank
Robin Siegel
Michael Frank was a Los Angeles Times book critic for nearly ten years, and his short stories and essays have been widely anthologized. His fiction has been presented at Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story, and his travel writing has been collected in Italy: The Best Travel Writing from The New York Times. He lives in New York City and Liguria, Italy.
Michael Frank’s essays, articles, and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Slate, The Yale Review, Salmagundi, and Tablet, among other publications. His fiction has been presented at Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story, and his travel writing has been collected in Italy: The Best Travel Writing from The New York Times. He served as a Contributing Writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review for nearly ten years. He lives with his family in New York City and Liguria, Italy.
A Memoir From Hollywood's Fringe
Peter Haldeman
The New York Times. (June 1, 2017): Lifestyle: pD6(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Though steeped in glory and glamour, the Hollywood memoir is also typically sprinkled with enough excess, depravity and human wreckage to afford the gorged reader a righteous aftertaste. Call it the gluten-free cupcake of literary genres.
This enduring confection is not without its limitations. ''When it comes to people who have spent their whole working lives creating images of themselves,'' wrote Michael Korda, the former editor of Simon & Schuster, ''the idea that they will suddenly put 'the truth' about their lives, whatever it may be, onto paper, is unlikely.'' (He would know, having published books by Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando.)
But some of the most potent Hollywood memoirs are the contributions not of marquee names but of bit players -- Brooke Hayward's ''Haywire,'' for example, or ''West of Eden: An American Place,'' Jean Stein's recently published oral history.
''The Mighty Franks,'' by Michael Frank, an essayist and short-story writer who has reviewed books for The Los Angeles Times, falls into this category. The leading characters in his probing and radiantly polished account, his Aunt Harriet Frank Jr. and Uncle Irving Ravetch, were MGM screenwriters (''Hud,'' ''Norma Rae''), which is to say not loftily perched on the movie-business totem pole. They would not have been courted by Mr. Korda to write their own memoirs.
''The Mighty Franks'' (the title comes from Aunt Harriet's unironic appellation for her family) is set in the scrubby Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles, traditional outpost of musicians and artists, rather than in the security-patrolled enclaves of Brentwood or Bel-Air. No hilltop palaces here, no People-covered weddings or medevac flights to Betty Ford. Still, this is a narrative that could unfold only in a place where fantasy and reality blur with treacherous ease.
At its center is Aunt ''Hankie,'' a theatrical and mercurial woman who might be described as the love child of Auntie Mame and Mommie Dearest. The author may have been raised (in the 1960s and '70s) by Marty Frank, the owner of a medical-equipment business, and his wife, Merona, a homemaker, but his surrogate parents were Hankie, who was Marty's sister, and Irving, who was Merona's brother. (In this eccentrically intertwined clan, not only did brother and sister marry sister and brother, but their mothers -- Michael's grandmothers -- also lived together.) A tall, formidable presence with a tower of auburn hair, a fake beauty mark and a slash of Salmon Ice lipstick, Aunt Hankie reels in Michael at a young age and -- unhappily for the boy but goldenly for the memoirist -- never lets him go.
After school or on Saturday mornings, she pilots her Buick Riviera into his parents' driveway, sounds the horn and, in a cloud of men's cologne from I. Magnin, whisks her nephew off on ''larky'' adventures. She takes him to his grandmothers' apartment in Hollywood, or on antiquing expeditions, or to her own home nearby, a French-style manse obsessively decorated with her cannily scavenged treasures (''period, not mo-derne''). She devotes herself to indoctrinating Michael about art (Matisse is superior to Picasso), film (Truffaut over Welles), literature (Faulkner, not Hemingway). At 9 or 10 he is unable to do much more than inhale her glamour and parrot her outre opinions and pronouncements. ''Follow the pleasure principle!'' she exhorts. ''Make beauty wherever you can!''
''I considered her quite simply to be the most magical human being I knew,'' Mr. Frank writes. ''Everything she touched, everything she did, was golden, infused with a special knowledge and a teeming vitality.''
There are early warning signs. Michael's stomach is constantly knotted. He is bullied at school, called Suzie and regularly beaten up. His parents fret that Hankie's doting on him is alienating his two brothers. After the death of Hankie's revered mother, a story editor at MGM, she grows increasingly erratic and more controlling, he writes -- of her nephew and everyone else in her orbit.
Testing the boundaries as he gets older, Michael excuses himself from one of his aunt's phone summonses; she hangs up on him and later berates him for his ''heartlessness.'' He begs off helping her with the decorations for her annual Christmas extravaganza; she cancels Christmas altogether, cutting off his family for weeks. She works a wedge between him and his parents, disparaging them in his presence. Anyone who comes between Hankie and her need to pull focus is tossed aside.
Charming but passive, Uncle Irving is the family mediator, but his loyalties are always with Hankie. (He comes off as a textbook enabler, though the author never resorts to psychobabble.) The two of them build a grander, Hollywood Regency-style showplace in Laurel Canyon with parquet floors and 14-foot ceilings, stuffed with mementos from movie sets and the antiques Hankie hoards. ''Her most sustained work of art,'' the maison, as they humbly refer to it, is a stage set for Hankie to command, a backdrop against which to dispense tea and cucumber sandwiches and increasingly hollow-sounding Hankieisms.
''It seemed perfectly logical to us that my aunt and uncle would live with tangible pieces of their movies,'' Mr. Frank writes, ''just as they spoke in dialogue-like speeches ... or staged scenes that seemed to belong more to invented than to actual life.'' The author connects the dots subtly between his relatives' capacity for self-invention and their employment in the dream factory. ''Everyone was acting'' he says of his family's denial of the cancer that killed a grandmother, ''everyone was pretending; too many books had been read, too many movies seen (or conceived, or made).''
It's not until he is out of high school that Michael can establish a healthy distance from Hankie, finding refuge in Europe. But even halfway around the world he can't escape her clutches. She interrupts his travels in Paris, insisting he change his itinerary to accompany her to London. He refuses, she explodes -- a kind of Kabuki by now.
Over time, the author's understanding of his aunt gains nuance. ''Surely it was fear that fed her anger,'' he muses, ''because isn't fear what is always lying, snakelike, at the bottom of every basketful of rage? Fear at being out of control -- of the decoration, the food, the moment, the conversation, the connections between other people, the story; always the story, which had to be as she saw (or invented or interpreted) it.''
There is a moment, years later -- Uncle Irving is in the hospital with end-stage cancer, Aunt Hankie insisting that he be kept alive at any cost -- when the adult Michael confronts his aunt over her selfishness and, in a rare flash of insight, she recognizes that he is right. But it's just a moment.
''I don't do illness'' is another Hankieism, but after fracturing her hip during an argument she refuses physical therapy and uses a wheelchair. She holes up in the maison, continuing to cram the place with new acquisitions: ceramic cherubs now, and other kitsch from thrift stores. The author traces her decline, both physical and aesthetic, in somber tones, but it also seems to have spurred his liberation.
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CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: Top, Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch in 1962 while on the set of ''Hud,'' for which they wrote the screenplay. Their nephew Michael Frank wrote ''The Mighty Franks'' about them.
The Mighty Franks: A Memoir
Ann Hulbert
The Atlantic. 319.4 (May 2017): p32.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Atlantic Media, Ltd.
http://www.theatlantic.com
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COVER TO COVER
The Mighty Franks: A Memoir
MICHAEL FRANK
FSG
"I'M SURE THAT you will be an artist one day, Mike. I'm convinced of it. Everything you do has such style" Auntie Hankie told the nephew she adored "beyond life itself." Young Michael Frank thrilled to his childless aunt's attention, her talk, her certainty that he was special, "her spark--her sparkle." He lived for their frequent outings together in and around Los Angeles, after school as well as on Saturdays.
And he lived by her fierce dictum: "Fitting in is death. Remember that. You want to stand apart from your peers. Always." How could he do otherwise, striving daily to reward her devotion, to nurture the cultural interests she prescribed? No wonder he hardly knew where to turn when, in adolescence, he struggled to escape her thrall, and she succumbed to possessive rage.
Frank brings Proustian acuity and razor-sharp prose to family dramas as primal, and eccentrically insular, as they come. His aunt, in addition to being his father's sister, was married to his mother's brother--and they were not just Mike's alternate, all-consuming parents. They were Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch, one of Hollywood's most successful screenwriting duos from the late 1950s through the 1980s. As Frank discovers the dark flaws in his aunt's script for him, he also reveals what she got right, and couldn't wreck. Frank's eye and ear, his words and wit--the voice in these pages has such style. Better yet, the style is utterly his own.
--Ann Hulbert
Frank, Michael: THE MIGHTY FRANKS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Frank, Michael THE MIGHTY FRANKS Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 5, 16 ISBN: 978-0-374-
21012-0
A writer reflects on his celebrated aunt's overbearing influence on his life.Eccentric family dynamics provide the
backdrop for this coming-of-age memoir from Frank, a travel writer and former Los Angeles Times book critic, who
recalls the unusually close ties between his immediate family and his aunt and uncle, noted screenwriters Harriet Frank
Jr. and Irving Ravetch. The two families lived just blocks apart from each other in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of
LA. The driving power source within the family is Harriet, aka Auntie Hankie, a charismatic yet manipulative and
narcissistic woman with lavish spending habits and pretentious manners. Early on in Frank's childhood, Hankie showed
great interest in his upbringing, aggressively influencing his interests and tastes and eventually becoming an allconsuming
force in his life and major disrupter within the family. As he grew through his teens and early adult life,
Hankie's influence became increasingly difficult for him to bear. Throughout much of the narrative, the author
documents her frequently erratic and cruel behavior in relentless detail. Though she was clearly a deeply troubled
individual, the portrayal feels excessively narrow; there seems to be more to her than Frank conveys here. The author
alludes to her glamorous Hollywood connections yet provides scant attention to her actual work. Though not
necessarily a household name for current moviegoing audiences, her accomplishments as a screenwriter, often in
collaboration with her husband, were significant, especially in such notable films as Hud (1963), starting Paul
Newman, and Norma Rae (1979), starring Sally Field and Beau Bridges, both of which earned Academy Award
nominations. The author occasionally displays a novelist's flare in his descriptions of family members and the LA
environment of the 1960s and '70s, but readers may feel that there is more to this story than what is presented here. A
lengthy exploration of one family's uniquely claustrophobic dysfunctions; Frank only finds mixed success in delivering
a compelling narrative to bolster the provocative premise.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Frank, Michael: THE MIGHTY FRANKS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482911690&it=r&asid=9cc0a1caaef0fc02a2759c6719610037.
Accessed 7 Oct. 2017.
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The Mighty Franks
David Pitt
Booklist.
113.18 (May 15, 2017): p10.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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The Mighty Franks. By Michael Frank. May 2017.320p. Farrar, $26 (9780374900304). 818.
From freelance writer Frank comes this satisfying memoir about his relationship to his aunt, the Hollywood
screenwriter Harriet Frank, Jr., who cowrote, with her husband, Irving Ravetch, such classic films as Hud, The Reivers,
and Norma Rae, and who received two Academy Award nominations. It was an unusual relationship in many ways. For
starters, Harriet Frank was Michael's fathers sister, while Ravetch was Michael's mother's brother. The childless couple
pretty much adopted Michael, showering him with gifts and generally treating him as though he was their own. But
there was a less doting side to Michael's aunt, who could be domineering, demanding, painfully critical, andeventually-dangerously
manipulative. A dramatic and often moving portrait of a woman who seemed to be one person
until she revealed herself to be someone else entirely, this is one of those memoirs that simultaneously fascinates as it
makes us uncomfortable. Is this too personal? Should I be averting my eyes? Maybe, but I can't because I want to know
what startling secrets will be revealed next.--David Pitt
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Pitt, David. "The Mighty Franks." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p. 10. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA496084702&it=r&asid=fae458db17e58a37044fd4034d8488f8.
Accessed 7 Oct. 2017.
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The Mighty Franks: A Memoir
Publishers Weekly.
264.9 (Feb. 27, 2017): p87.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Mighty Franks: A Memoir
Michael Frank. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26
(320p) ISBN 978-0-374-21012-0
In this complex and fascinating memoir, journalist Frank describes the spell cast over his childhood by his screenwriter
aunt and her fury at his attempts to break away from her. Even by Hollywood standards, the Franks were unusual:
Frank's mother's brother, Irving Ravetch, married his father's sister, Harriet "Hank" Frank Jr., and both families lived in
close proximity in Laurel Canyon. His childless aunt and uncle settled on Frank as a substitute son, dazzling him with
gifts and praise. Yet as Frank became conscious of the damage that Hank's imperious nature inflicted on family and
friends, he realized how necessary, and painful, separating himself from her would be. For over three decades, Ravetch
and Hank were an extremely successful screenwriting team (Norma Rae, Hud, The Long Hot Summer, etc.). In
thoughtful, fluid prose, their nephew evokes the magic and sophistication of a vanished Hollywood intelligentsia
schooled in the language of cinema. Readers will be enthralled by the affecting portraits of the two central figures: the
aunt whose drive and charming idiosyncrasies concealed an impulsive cruelty, and the child struggling to make sense of
the complex, damaged woman trying to control him. Frank doesn't fully investigate the reasons behind his aunt's
behavior, but the women he describes is as iconic and memorable as the characters she created for the screen. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Mighty Franks: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 27 Feb. 2017, p. 87+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485671217&it=r&asid=2d8cb8758ba26a6369069d2cc4bad7ed.
Accessed 7 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485671217
The Mighty Franks by Michael Frank review – a glorious tale of Hollywood dysfunction
A bitterly amusing memoir of growing up as part of an unusual family, under the influence of a despotic aunt
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Philip Hoare Philip Hoare
Friday 9 June 2017 03.30 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.33 EDT
We all long for drama in our private lives, as if to make sense of the chaos into which we are plunged at birth. But only in looking back is a pattern perceived, the narrative ordered. “Perspective does not come to us while we are living life,” Michael Frank’s mother tells her son.
Frank, now a successful writer and critic, begins his story as a somewhat precocious schoolboy growing up in 1970s Los Angeles, with an inordinate love of art and eavesdropping. He is the scion of an extraordinary coalition. The “Mighty Franks” are an overachieving, stylish clan of Jewish émigrés from Europe – their two halves united by dint of a brother and sister marrying a sister and a brother – who occupy neighbouring homes in Laurel Canyon, LA.
Their elderly matriarchs – Michael’s grandmothers – live together a block away: Huffy wrote scripts for Louis B Mayer. She now occupies a reduced universe, dominating her counterpart, the meeker Sylvia, in an apartment full of Venetian mirrors and quietly suppressed tension – shades of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Huffy’s sense of self-drama is passed on to the next generation.
Her daughter, Michael’s Aunt Hankie, bursts on to the scene. Her hair is piled up 1940s style; she decorates herself in themes, adding a flapperish beauty spot to her cheek. Tall and haughty, she too is a film writer, responsible, as “Harriet Frank Jr”, along with her husband, Irving Ravetch, for scripts for The Sound and the Fury and Hud. She lives in a “Hollywood Regency” house filled with furniture and culture from Europe or “Yurp”; her language, too, is stylised and invented.
Frank describes Hankie as a cross between Rosalind Russell and Lucille Ball. Every Saturday she arrives in her Buick and, having no children of her own, whisks Michael off to “noodle” in the antique shops off Sunset Boulevard. “Make beauty whenever possible,” she instructs him, speaking in italics. “You don’t want to be ordinary, do you, Lovey? To fit in? Fitting in is a form of living death.” She pours her taste into him, “like an unending river emptying itself into me”. This alternative education is assisted by Hankie’s diffident husband: Ravetch is a mid-century dandy who declines to polish his shoes since that would be trying too hard, and whose reaction to his wife’s aesthetic demands comes in a series of six-note sighs.
Together the pair provide Michael with a cultural shopping list. Acceptable movies (not “films”) include early Fellini and late Bergman and “Fred, not Ginger (a ditz and a Republican)”. In art, Matisse reigns over Picasso. In books, Colette and Waugh (“even though he was a pig and an anti-Semite”) over Fitzgerald or Hemingway.
Santa Monica, 1944 … clockwise from left: Peter Frank, Martin Frank, Harriet Frank Jr, Harriet Frank Sr; centre, Sam Frank
Clockwise from left: Peter Frank, Martin Frank, Harriet Frank Jr, Harriet Frank Sr, and centre, Sam Frank in Santa Monica, California, 1944
Meanwhile Michael’s two younger brothers watch from the window as their doting aunt carries him away on outings. His father, Marty, Hankie’s handsome brother, has a terrible temper and is interested only in sport; his mother, Merona, achieves a rebellion against Hankie’s taste by listening to the Mamas & the Papas and gathering her girlfriends for “consciousness raising” meetings – all overheard by her son from the stairs.
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The glory of this book is its richly evoked world, from the descriptions of the once wild California land steadily encroached on over the course of the 70s – as mountain lions are driven out and replaced by swimming pools – to the intense psychodramas of an extraordinary family. Michael is an Isherwood camera. He stops to listen before entering a room, as if to assess its potential, gathering information in advance like a dog sniffing the air. He is filled with his own vibrating awareness, his outsiderdom. He is estranged from his immediate family by his aunt’s overwhelming aesthetic and her bestowed gift of specialness; yet at the same time his eyes slowly open to her tyranny, her “unsimple love”. He sees his mother as another victim. When Merona has the chutzpah to redecorate her own house, Hankie’s disparagement is palpable: “Doesn’t she become bored with Americana? I mean, all that primitivism – it’s so repetitious. Shaker-schmaker.”
The young Frank’s precocity is both defensive and offensive. He too has been infected with the Franks’ histrionics: everything is one long performance. His dying grandmother knows her children are concealing the fact of her advanced cancer from her, but she doesn’t let on, playing her own role, for their sake: “Everyone was acting, everyone was pretending; too many books had been read, too many movies seen (or conceived, or made). A family that had quite literally written, or story-analysed, itself into a better, sunnier life.”
Frank is a master of self-reflection, under the bowl of blue sky and in those closeted canyons. He says nothing in an ordinary way; everything has a dreamlike smoothness, born out of his extended act of retrieval and the remembered violence of emotion and inconstancy. Hankie’s eyes, with their “alarming interior chasms”, reflect a subtly terrifying story. From the initial excitement of her mercurial attention, the narrative lurches into something much darker. Michael’s parents resort to banning him from seeing his aunt, who they fear is not only perverting their son but the entire family. When that doesn’t work, they take him to a psychologist. It’s another futile gesture: Michael is already aware that his aunt is more childlike than him.
The final chapters – sad and glorious – capture a glitteringly dysfunctional family in a moment in time. I doubt you’ll read a better memoir this year. The Mighty Franks is full of humour and brittle irony. In Aunt Hankie, Frank has created a great new nonfictional character: an indelible wonder of dark depths and hypnotic high style.
• Philip Hoare’s RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR will be published in July. The Mighty Franks by Michael Frank (4th Estate, £16.99). To order a copy for £14.44, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.