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This program is read by the author. A psychologically serious memoir about a unique Hollywood family by Michael Frank, who "brings Proustian acuity and razor-sharp prose to family dramas as primal, and eccentrically insular, as they come" (The Atlantic) "My sense for Mike is something from the ordi - nary," Michael Frank overhears his aunt showing his mom when he is a guy of eight. "It's stronger than I am. I cannot describe it . . . I love him beyond life itself." With this indelible little bit of eavesdropping, we fall season in to the spellbinding world of The Mighty Franks. The family is uncommonly close: Michael's childless Auntie Hankie and Uncle Irving, attractive Hollywood screenwriters, are doubly related- Hankie is his father's sister, and Irving is his mother's brother. The two family members live near each other in Laurel Canyon. Within this strangely intertwined world, even the author's grandmothers-who dislike each other-share a local apartment. Strangest of most is just how Auntie Hankie, with her luxurious personality, comes to flex the wider family to her will. Talented, mercurial, and luxurious with her love, she divides Michael from his parents and his two younger brothers as she calls for charge of his education, guiding him to the right catalogs to learn (Proust, not Zola), the right painters to admire (Matisse, not Pollock), the right architectural styles to embrace (period, not modern-or mo-derne, as she pronounces the term, with palpable disdain). She trains his head and his eye-until that eyeball begins to see alone. When this "son" Hankie longs for matures and begins to turn from her, her moods darken, and a series of shattering views compel Michael to reconstruct both himself and his family narrative as he tries to reconcile the girl he once adored with the troubled shape he discovers her to be. In its portrayal of this amazing, singularly polarizing shape, the guy in her thrall, and the man that guy becomes, The Mighty Franks will talk with any listener who has ever battled to find an unbiased tone of voice amid the turbulence of family life.

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