23. Love Child by Allegra Huston

Category: 50 Books

23. Love Child by Allegra Huston

I so wanted to love this book. I wanted to love it because:

1. It was written by one of the daughters of film director John Huston.

2. She’s Anjelica Huston’s little sister.

3. The jacket flap made it sound like she’d be the normal one, compared to the rest of her family.

4. I thought it would be dignified and dishy at the same time. It was neither. It was boring.

Look, I’m not saying it’s bad, okay? A person’s story is their story, right? And sure, parts of everyone’s story are going to be sad, inconvenient, weird, boring etc. to everyone except that person and their friends and family. My story would be like that. Perhaps your story would too. And that’s why you or I would not bother with publishing our stories.

Ms. Huston probably has a really interesting story, but you’d not really know it because she presents herself as one of the dullest, uninteresting beings I’ve ever read about. And what’s worse? Her dull and uninteresting self is constantly comparing herself to all of the more famous, artistic, people in her family as well as the maids/nannies/secretaries/houseservants/whathaveyou and she comes off as a judgemental dweeb.

And it’s like this for the whole book.

She spends most of the book talking about her childhood (and it’s the same redundant thing over and over, and while I get that that’s how it went down, that still doesn’t make it interesting to read.), breezes through the teen years, barely glances at her twenties, and then it’s all, “oh, by the way I have a family of my own now. Would you like to meet them? Too bad, the book’s over.”

It’s a sad story, her mom dies when she’s 4, she has to go live with her father, John Huston, who, when it comes to his family, is basically an asshole. She doesn’t grow up in an abusive place or anything, but there’s not a lot of emotion going on in this family. She gets moved around a lot. Her dad is always across the world shooting movies, her brother and sister are much older and have their own lives/careers. There’s a new step-mom every couple of years. Then she finds out Huston is her adopted dad and that her real dad is this guy in England and blah, blah, blah. All very dramatic, right?

Well, not the way she writes it. It’s very detached. And maybe that’s what she was going for? But it’s just this constant remoteness that begs the question, why even write it at all?

I kept thinking that eventually, towards the end, there would be this breakthrough where she would come into her own, find herself, get a hobby she enjoyed, SOMETHING. But there was nothing. It’s just one flatline after another.

And what’s sad is that I’m sure she’s a great writer. In fact, the last three or four pages, where she actually talks about her own family (husband and son), were written with a warmth and love that you could feel. She’s proud of her family. It’s great. It’s just a shame it’s only four or five pages.

Plus the ending felt rushed and vague. Like she wants you to know that she has a loving family now, she’s a mom, her husband is great etc. but she doesn’t really want to talk about them, you know? Like she wants to keep their life together private. Which, again, is fine, but still begs the question, why write/publish it in the first place?

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