Kelly Blewett

Actress Anjelica Huston offers a retrospective on her childhood in Ireland, her adolescence in London and her burgeoning model days in New York City in a vivid new memoir, A Story Lately Told. This first installment of a planned two-book set offers a personal look at Anjelica’s early life, in which her parents—the famous director John Huston and ballet dancer and model Ricki Soma—feature prominently. From a young age, Huston watched these wealthy, glamorous people navigate the worlds of art and culture. She paid attention to the eclectic way her mother decorated their family manor in Ireland, to the way her father directed conversation at the dinner table, to the people who drew her parents’ attention.

Though often criticized as a young girl for being directionless and not terribly focused on her studies, Huston proves an excellent student of the people she admires most. She lingers on alluring details, like the story behind the Monet water lily painting that hung in her childhood home and the clothes her mother wore for a night out. “Anjel is pure artist,” her mother wrote to her father when Huston was only a toddler. As Huston grows older and her parents separate and then divorce, she remains keen to the worlds of fashion and film and eager to make her own way. Huston proves a natural in front of a camera. And with seeming effortlessness, she breaks onto the pages of Vogue as a model.

Because of who she was, Huston met brilliant and quirky people. She was given roles in film (first by her father) and plumy modeling gigs. Yet, all these gifts did not necessarily make discovering her true self any easier, nor did they shield her from making damaging mistakes along the way. This book will be of interest to fans of the Huston family and people who love the places where Huston lived. But, perhaps most intriguing of all, is to see the impacts of nature and nurture, how a splendid and varied upbringing replete with stimulating people and bright opportunities enhanced the world of a sensitive young girl who was born, as her mother said, a “pure artist.”

“We’re just looking for the ghost town,” a stranger tells Justin St. Germain on the back roads of Arizona. St. Germain understands—maybe more than the stranger could appreciate. He is a haunted man. After his mother’s death, he moved from Arizona to San Francisco and rarely told new friends that she had been murdered when he was 19. He didn’t want to be defined by the tragedy. But now he can’t forget it, and Son of a Gun is his journey to make sense of it all.

The journey is also literal, as St. Germain returns to the scene of the crime. He interviews the detective, pages through old case files and reconnects with his mother’s former boyfriends. There’s something about the memoir that’s reminiscent of a dog sniffing around a backyard, determined and focused, following pure animal instinct to dig things up. Ultimately St. Germain’s journey is as much about himself as it is about his mother. It is about understanding how he arrived at his “new and clean” life in California after leaving behind such wreckage—not just the murder, but also emotional wreckage, domestic violence and poverty.

The book’s construction is pure elegance. By weaving the history of Wyatt Earp with his own story, St. Germain suggests meaningful parallels between the town of Tombstone and himself. Tombstone is defined by 30 seconds of violence that happened more than 100 years ago. St. Germain, too, is struggling against the inevitability of the past defining his present. As all of this unfolds, St. Germain manages to make the book feel like an old Western, a burlesque of violence strangely appropriate for his tale. By page 15 I knew I was in the hands of a master storyteller. Emotionally raw and beautifully written, Son of a Gun is a book you won’t soon forget.

Imagine a man who can bend a horseshoe with his hands, whose outsized literary interests include everything from Jonathan Franzen to Stephen King and who towers above most of us at six feet seven inches. He sounds like a comic book hero, but the most heroic thing about him is this: He chooses to spend his days working in a public library, even though he suffers from a syndrome that compels him to act out, often audibly. Tourette’s, which Josh Hanagarne has referred to for years as Misty (for Miss T), is a formidable foe and constant companion. And the way he deals with her—graciously, courageously, humorously—gives this book its strength and staying power.

Most readers might not know a lot about Tourette’s, but that doesn’t matter. Hanagarne explains it to us in vivid detail and without self-pity. The Tourette’s-driven desire to act out—physically, verbally—is as impossible to avoid as an oncoming sneeze, and the precise manner of acting out is ever evolving. “In the coming chapters, when I experience new, significant tics, I’ll say so,” he writes. “Once I’ve had a new type of tic, you can assume it stays in the rotation. Each new tic is stacked on top of what came before it.” When friend and future mentor Adam grasps the full reality of Hanagarne’s world, he asks, “How have you not gone insane?”

Tourette’s and the myriad of impacts it has had on Hanagarne’s life—he took 10 years to finish his undergraduate degree, for example, and had trouble holding down a job in his 20s—sounds like it would make for a depressing tale. But that’s not the case. I frequently found myself laughing aloud, such as when he described his first major literary crush: the gentle and maternal Fern from Charlotte’s Web. His story spills over with affection for his parents, especially his mom. He’s curious about the big questions of faith and life. And he is passionate about his chosen field.

Librarians, Hanagarne says, are rarely suited for anything else. They are the ultimate generalists. They are a quirky, caring, funny, readerly bunch whose daily business is different than readers might imagine (ever dealt with snarky teenagers in the stacks?) and whose field is on the edge of significant change. The World’s Strongest Librarian speaks to that change, joyfully celebrates books and reading, and illuminates an unlikely hero who will be remembered long after the final page is turned. I couldn’t put this book down.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE
Read our Q&A with Josh Hanagarne for The World's Strongest Librarian.