Love Affair: A Memoir of a Forbidden Father-Daughter Union

by Leslie Kenton

Overview

A searing literary memoir of a disconnected childhood, a multigenerational upbringing and incest— from the daughter of legendary jazz pianist Stan Kenton

Leslie Kenton was the only child of Violet, a stunning Hitchcock blonde, and the legendary jazz giant Stan Kenton. The story takes place on the road in 1950s America and in the mania of Hollywood—a world of jazz clubs, dance halls and onenighters, where lives were lived on a razor's edge.

Love Affair takes us beyond the bright lights and glamour into an intense, claustrophobic world of a father and the only child of his troubled marriage. As Stanley grapples with alcohol and his personal demons, gradually his actions threaten to destroy the only real, untainted thing in his life: Leslie.

A true story of obsession, tragedy and grace, Love Affair is Leslie Kenton's powerful memoir. At its heart is the complex, ultimately incestuous, relationship with her father–a union so powerful it defines all that came after. As their lives become increasingly entangled, so do the forces of darkness and light that exist within us all, leading to destruction for him and heartbreaking redemption for her.

There have been memoirs about incest before, but Love Affair is a surprisingly moving and elegant treatment of a young life, shared passion, and boundaries crossed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250002754
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/17/2012
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Leslie Kenton is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and filmmaker who has written more than thirty books on health, beauty and spirituality, many of them bestsellers in the UK. She conceived the Origins product line for Estee Lauder, and was the first chairperson of The Natural Medicine Society in Great Britain. She is the author of Love Affair. She lives in London and New Zealand.

Editorial Reviews

The author chronicles a bizarre, tortuous journey from incest with her jazz-musician father to late-life healing.

Born in Los Angeles to a glamorous couple—Stanley Kenton was a jazz pianist and composer who was forging his own band, and Violet was the beautiful woman who believed in his dreams of success—filmmaker and health-book author Kenton (Raw Juicing, 2009, etc.) wasan only child and a somewhat awkward appendage to their show on the road. The anxious, fearful author grew up isolated from other children, her youth spent driving from city to city with her mother and father, staying in hotel rooms most nights. Stanley was a heavy pill-popper and alcohol abuser who was prone to wild mood swings, and his daughter "escaped into a world of my own making, away from the adult craziness around me." Eventually, her parents broke up, and Violet remarried and moved to another town. Kenton spent summers with her father. When she was 10, a series of shocking events robbed the child of her innocence, beginning with an afternoon in New York spent playing dress-up and stripping with a bunch of theater people—an outing apparently engineered by her paternal grandmother, Stella, a highly shadowy figure in this narrative. Kenton's closeness with her father—they often slept in the same bed—transformed into a sexual relationship over the next three years. She adored him but learned to dissociate herself, unable to deal with the emotional conflicts required to keep their secret. The book is full of these gaps, in memory and detail, yet the undertow of feeling is powerful. The girl's increasingly erratic behavior (mysterious illnesses, an attempted suicide) began to alarm her flipped-out dad and evil grandmother Stella, who took advantage of Stanley's absence to rehabilitate the 13-year-old, drugging her and sending her secretly to a sanatorium for electro-convulsive therapy.

Kenton tells a truly harrowing story of the violence inflicted on her younger self, and she writes eloquently of the time and therapy that allowed her to heal.

Kirkus Reviews