The Mighty Franks

by Michael Frank

Overview

**One of the Telegraph's 50 best books of the year!**Longlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize**

The boundaries of family life are upended in this memoir, which turns on the author’s lifelong relationship with his enthralling yet deeply possessive aunt, a powerhouse Hollywood screenwriter whose turbulent nature slowly reveals itself.

All his life Michael Frank has been fawned over by his aunt, who was a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1970s. She loves him more than life itself. At first, when he is a young boy, this is a very good thing. He takes refuge in her adoration and attention. But soon things turn bad and her hold on the entire family begins to spiral out of control in increasingly unpredictable and volatile ways.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374210120
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Michael Frank's short fiction and essays have appeared in the Yale Review, Salmagundi, Glimmer Train, the New York Times Magazine, and Tablet, among other publications, and they have been anthologized in Mother Knows: 24 Tales of Motherhood and Not For Bread Alone: Writers on Food, Wine, and the Art of Eating. 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. As a Los Angeles Times book critic for nearly 10 years, Frank covered literary fiction and biography, Jewish and Italian history, gastronomy and art history. He has written frequently for the New York Times on architecture and culture.

Table of Contents

Overheard 3

Part I

1 The Apartment 7

2 Ogden, Continued 45

3 On Greenvalley Road 61

4 Safe House 81

Part II

5 My Um-le's Closet (in My Aunt's House) 103

6 Off the Hill 143

7 Five Places, Six Scenes 187

8 Last Room 247

9 Goodbye to the Closet 271

10 Fall and Decline 283

Acknowledgments 305

Editorial Reviews

Michael Frank's childhood was more complicated than many. Although relatively privileged, it was also somewhat fraught, colored by two very different forms of bullying — one in school, the other at the hands of a doting but overbearing aunt who played an outsized role in his upbringing. In this vividly written coming- of-age memoir, he makes it clear that it's taken most of his life to get over it.

When he was eight, he overheard his aunt tell his mother how much she adored him — "beyond life itself" — before adding, "I wish he were mine." Nearly half a century later, Frank recalls that he could "feel the weather in the room change." After a pause, his mother replied diplomatically, "I wish you had a child of your own."

The aunt was Harriet Frank, Jr., who with her husband, Irving Ravetch, was part of the successful screenwriting couple whose many movies include Hud, Hombre, The Long, Hot Summer, and Norma Rae. Harriet — called Hank or Auntie Hankie — was the older sister of Michael Frank's father, Marty. In addition — here's where it gets complicated — her husband, Irving, was the older brother of Mike's mother, Merona. On top of this, the author's maternal and paternal grandmothers — the mothers of both his parents and his aunt and uncle — shared an apartment in their last years, although not altogether happily. When it came to family ties, the Franks were lashed together as tightly as sailors bound to the mast.

Michael was the oldest and most artistically inclined of Marty and Merona's three sons. Harriet and Irving had no children but a seemingly endless supply of disposable income, time, and energy. The two Laurel Canyon households were within walking distance of each other, facilitating the further blurring of boundaries.

But Hankie — according to her nephew's unforgettable portrait — ignored most boundaries, particularly those that impeded her wishes. She was an "impossibly glamorous woman" who was also often just plain impossible. She had strong opinions about everything. She loathed mediocrity, laziness, and "mo-derne" design, and she considered Brahms the last top-rate composer. Her style was formal and brisk. A shopaholic who bought more antiques than she had room for, her "decorative fervor" extended to hotel rooms, summer rentals, and her relatives' homes, whether they wanted her bounty or not. She was generous to a fault — always bestowing largesse-with-strings.

Frank, singled out and pulled into her orbit when he was a small boy, at first reveled in "the force of her attention …My aunt was the sun and I was her planet," he writes. He was wooed by her lavish presents and intoxicated by "her talk, which was like an unending river emptying itself into me." He absorbed her many edicts, including "Less is not more; more is more" and "Make beauty whenever possible." He read and read from her approved list of great books — excellent training for his eventual job as a book critic for The Los Angeles Times — and memorized "yards of Shakespeare." His aunt and uncle's eccentric Hollywood Regency house was "a little bit fake and a lot fantastical, like a movie set," but with four walls. It was, he writes, "the central school of my youth, the school of culture, aesthetics, literature, music, movies, architecture and design."

But all that glittered was not gold. His parents decried his aunt and uncle's unequal treatment of their three sons but had little success in getting them to mitigate their favoritism. It took Frank years to realize that his family's situation was "not remotely normal."

The Mighty Franks chronicles this fascinating family's indirect route from poverty and pogroms to the land of movie stars and backyard swimming pools, along with Frank's difficult path to self-definition and the painful repercussions of pushing back against his aunt — who turned 100 in 2017 — as she became more difficult. The shadow at the heart of this memoir is the emotional cost of suffocating love: ties that bind but also choke.

Revisiting the scene of his childhood, Frank reflects: "My parents and my surrogate parents, my parents and their siblings: each pair represented two different worldviews, two different paths through experience that had intermittently been aligned but more often were set against each other, toggling, or torqueing, between the reasonable and the dramatic, the ordinary and the magical . . . " Standing midway atop the hill between the two houses and worlds between which he had been pulled off-balance in his youth, he comments, "it was as if I were standing on my own personal equator."

Heller McAlpin is a New York–based critic who reviews books for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications.

The Barnes & Noble Review

One of The Telegraph's 50 Best Books of 2017

"[A] probing and radiantly polished account . . . Move over, Royal Tenenbaums: Meet the Mighty Franks." —Peter Haldeman, The New York Times

"Frank brings Proustian acuity and razor-sharp prose to family dramas as primal, and eccentrically insular, as they come . . . 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, The Atlantic

"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 . . . 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, The Guardian

"Beautifully written . . . A marvelous, clear-eyed memoir about [Frank's] eccentric family but especially about his glamorous but dangerously possessive Aunt Hank." —Moira Hodgson, The Wall Street Journal

"The Mighty Franks is a witty, moving account of Frank's dawning apprehension of his entranced state and his subsequent efforts to reclaim himself . . . In this narrative, however, [Aunt Hankie] emerges as a fully realized and unforgettable persona, simultaneously attractive and horrifying . . . [a] beautifully written and timely work." —Michael Saler, Times Literary Supplement

"There is a lastingly sane quality to [Frank's] riveting memoir that's reminiscent of To Kill A Mockingbird. . . Frank has conjured 'a plausible story out of implausible facts,' an extraordinary tale that unfolds on the border between abuse and enlightenment." —Gaby Wood, The Daily Telegraph (U.K.)

"Michael Frank, the acutely perceptive scribe behind The Mighty Franks,doesn’t just place his dysfunctional extended family on the couch. He performs such an incisively intimate autopsy on his clan’s psyche that the result comes close to being an exorcism, a perfectly balanced near-gothic blend of the fascinating and the horrifying." —Susan Wloszczyna, The Buffalo News

"A fascinating look at the inner-workings of a textbook example of a dysfunctional family." —John Paul, Spectrum Culture

"Truth is not just stranger than fiction, it's more interesting, too . . . More than a memoir, this is really a study of human pathology, a book that should be widely read for its insights into families and the process of growing up." —Library Journal (starred review)

"[A] satisfying memoir . . . [An] 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." —Booklist

"[A] complex and fascinating memoir . . . In thoughtful, fluid prose, [Frank] evokes the magic and sophistication of a vanished Hollywood intelligentsia schooled in the language of cinema . . . the woman he describes is as iconic and memorable as the characters she created for the screen." —Publishers Weekly

“The Mighty Franks is a tremendously smart and beautiful portrait of one of the most interesting and memorable families I've encountered. Crackling with sorrow and wit, Michael Frank has written a gorgeous, moving and intensely compassionate memoir that will stay with me for a long, long time. An astonishing book.” —Molly Antopol

“The Mighty Franks is very easy to love and very hard to put down. It is a terrific portrait of Los Angeles at a particular time for all of us who ever fantasized about growing up with pools, palm trees, and, yes, even the occasional star. Moving, wonderfully written, and marvelously written, it is filled with characters who love you, hug you, drive you crazy, and sometimes make you cry.” —George Hodgman

“This is one complicated family. How do any of us survive our families? The how of The Mighty Franks is beautiful, tender, forgiving, funny, and fiercely honest. Michael Frank’s book will certainly join the canon of classic memoirs. I adored it.” —Maira Kalman

“Be careful when you start reading The Mighty Franks since you won’t be able to stop. As finely drawn as it is acutely observed—painful, honest, evocative, spare—this portrait of an extraordinary family is a work of art.” —Jean Strouse

“To paraphrase Tolstoy, interesting families are unhappy in mysterious ways, and in this subtle memoir full of hard-won wisdom, Michael Frank gives us an indelible portrait of his own. His imperious, beautiful, infuriating Aunt Hankie, in particular, is one of the great Difficult Women of contemporary literature.” —Judith Thurman

From the Publisher

2017-02-19
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 all-consuming 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.

Kirkus Reviews

Frank brings Proustian acuity and razor-sharp prose to family dramas as primal, and eccentrically insular, as they come.

The Atlantic

Easy to love and very hard to put down. . . . A terrific portrait of Los Angeles. . . . Moving, wonderfully written, and marvelously drawn, it is filled with characters who love you, hug you, drive you crazy, and sometimes make you cry.

George Hodgman

To paraphrase Tolstoy, interesting families are unhappy in mysterious ways, and in this subtle memoir full of hard-won wisdom, Michael Frank gives us an indelible portrait of his own. His imperious, beautiful, infuriating Aunt Hankie, in particular, is one of the great Difficult Women of contemporary literature.

Judith Thurman

The Mighty Franks is a tremendously smart and beautiful portrait of one of the most interesting and memorable families I’ve encountered. Crackling with sorrow and wit, Michael Frank has written a gorgeous, moving and intensely compassionate memoir that will stay with me for a long, long time. An astonishing book.

Molly Antopol

Probing and radiantly polished.

New York Times

This is one complicated family. How do any of us survive our families? The how of The Mighty Franks is beautiful, tender, forgiving, funny, and fiercely honest. Michael Frank’s book will certainly join the canon of classic memoirs. I adored it.

Maira Kalman

A marvelous, clear-eyed memoir. . . . Almost thriller-like. . . . Beautifully written.

Wall Street Journal

Acutely perceptive . . . [Frank] performs such an incisively intimate autopsy on his clan’s psyche that the result comes close to being an exorcism,  a perfectly balanced near-gothic blend of the fascinating and the horrifying.

Buffalo News

Be careful when you start reading The Mighty Franks since you won’t be able to stop. As finely drawn as it is acutely observed-painful, honest, evocative, spare-this portrait of an extraordinary family is a work of art.

Jean Strouse