A Story Lately Told - by Anjelica Huston (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Anjelica Huston's "gorgeously written" (O, The Oprah Magazine) memoir is "an elegant, funny, and frequently haunting reminiscence of the first two decades of her life...A classic" (Vanity Fair).

In her first, dazzling memoir, Anjelica Huston shares the story of her deeply unconventional early life--her enchanted childhood in Ireland, living with her glamorous and artistic mother, educated by tutors and nuns, intrepid on a horse. Huston was raised on an Irish estate to which--between movies--her father, director John Huston, brought his array of extraordinary friends, from Carson McCullers and John Steinbeck to Peter O'Toole and Marlon Brando.

In London, where she lived with her mother and brother in the early sixties when her parents separated, Huston encountered the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac. She understudied Marianne Faithfull in Hamlet. Seventeen, striking, precocious, but still young and vulnerable, she was devastated when her mother died in a car crash. Months later she moved to New York, fell in love with the much older, brilliant but disturbed photographer, Bob Richardson, and became a model. Living in the Chelsea Hotel, working with Richard Avedon and other photographers, she navigated a volatile relationship and the dynamic cultural epicenter of New York in the seventies.

A Story Lately Told is an "evocative" (The New York Times), "magically beautiful" (The Boston Globe) memoir. Huston's second memoir, Watch Me, will be published in November 2014.

Review Quotes

"Huston comes by her vivid life stories honestly. They are her birthright. And how fortunate for readers that she's an easy and graceful storyteller. Read this memoir for the thrilling, improbable sentences that stop you cold. Most of all, read it for the sheer pleasure of listening to someone render a memory so tactile you can astrally project yourself there." --Joumana Khatib, New York Times

"Anjelica Huston grew up in what sounds a fairy tale--magically beautiful, yet tinged with loss, sadness, and monsters." --Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe

"An elegy for a vanished world, A Story Lately Told becomes a seductive social history of the 1960s--and the story of Huston's fractious separation from an indomitable father and grief for the loss of the mother who was the ballast of her life." --Sheila Weller, The New York Times Book Review

"Impressively written in a style that is as graceful and natural as breathing and as observant as that by a 'born writer.'... Huston comes of age surrounded by talent, pot, fame and photographers, and tells her tale with unexpected distinction." --Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News (Editor's Choice)

"Anjelica Huston has lived a big, colorful life--big and colorful enough to fill two volumes of an autobiography... Huston has a way with a descriptive phrase, and it's on display in A Story Lately Told." --Jocelyn McClurg, USA Today

"Huston's lovely, novelistic writing carries the book... As a storyteller, she's having more fun than a monkey in a lingerie drawer." --Melissa Maerz, Entertainment Weekly

"Evocative." --Mary Pols, People

"An elegant, funny, and frequently haunting reminiscence of the first two decades of her life...A classic." --Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair

"A Story Lately Told contains a plethora of compelling tales." --Maggie Lange, New York Magazine

"Huston's privileged childhood is described with great texture. The enormous estate in Ireland where her family lived is a rambling, magical place. The names that are dropped in this book don't constitute name-dropping, but are simply the names that populated her childhood... Huston is a smart and subtle enough writer not to aim for a pop diagnosis, but instead, once again, goes for something truer, deeper and richer... A stirring memoir." --Meg Wolitzer, NPR

"A Story Lately Told is peopled by names like Carson McCullers, John Steinbeck, Peter O'Toole, Marlon Brando, Monty Clift and the succession of gorgeous, interesting women who made up her father's peripatetic life. Anjelica can really write. The prologue alone to her memoir is worthy." --Liz Smith, Huffington Post

"Structured in short, colorful vignettes, A Story Lately Told shows off Ms. Huston's fabulous memory, keen observations and lovely use of language." --Carol O'Sullivan, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Compelling, thoughtful, starry reading...What's particularly enjoyable about her story is the rhapsodic way that she beautifully describes that bygone world." --Alexander Larman, The Guardian

"Elegant and economical." --Helen Brown, The Telegraph