Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

William Friedkin, who is making the rounds publicizing his memoir "The Friedkin Connection," gave his picks for the five best books on directors to The Wall Street Journal.

Among his picks was "This Is Orson Welles" by Peter Bogdanovich and Welles. Friedkin says of the book, "Peter Bogdanovich is a respected film historian and critic as well as a fine director ... His lively conversations with Welles in various parts of the world took place over a nine-year period in the late 1970s and early '80s."

Also on Friedkin's list was "Searching for John Ford" by Joseph McBride. "McBride has written the definitive work on Ford's inner life – a respectful but critical study of a complex man, the most "American" of filmmakers."

As Welles fans know, McBride has written three books about Welles, most recently "What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career." He also had a role in the still unfinished "The Other Side of the Wind." (more...)

Orson Welles, Henry Jaglom

Filmmaker Henry Jaglom, whose recorded conversations with Orson Welles form the basis of an upcoming book, graciously agreed to field a few questions about his late, great friend.

Jaglom's relationship with Welles dates back to his freshman 1971 film "A Safe Place." In the interview, he discussed those legendary lunches with Welles and the ill-fated "The Big Brass Ring," as well as footage from the unfinished "The Other Side of the Wind," which has made the rounds on the web.

The tape recordings have been edited by Peter Biskind into "My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles," due out July 9 from Macmillan/ Metropolitan Books.

"It is altogether Mr. Biskind's book and has turned out to be quite terrific, I feel (in) actually capturing the real Orson, my most wonderful friend and mentor, who so few knew and who so many misunderstood and thought they knew..." (more...)

By RAY KELLY

The book "My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles," which Wellesnet reported on back in October, will also be released as an unabridged audio book on July 9.

Presumably the audio book will utilize the recordings made by Jaglom during Welles' final years. While the hardcover book will carry a $27 list price, Macmillan/ Metropolitan Books has listed the audio book at $39.99. It will be issued on compact disc. A running time has not been announced.

Peter Biskind (”Easy Riders, Raging Bulls”) is editing the book using transcripts of conversations taped by Jaglom.

Jaglom has stated he recorded their frequent lunchtime chats at Ma Maison with Welles’ knowledge. However, some Welles associates have maintained he was unaware he was being taped until shortly before his death. (more...)

John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich

It was a little more than a year ago we learned of Josh Karp’s planned book about The Other Side of the Wind.

Due in late 2013 for St. Martin’s Press, An Adventure Shared By Desperate Men (That Finally Came to Nothing) will chronicle the making and status of Orson Welles’ unfinished film, which stars John Huston as aging movie director Jake Hannaford and Peter Bogdanovich as Brooks Otterlake, a young successful director. (more...)

Orson Welles, Henry Jaglom

Orson Welles' candid lunchtime conversations with director Henry Jaglom will be the basis of the upcoming book "My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles."

Peter Biskind ("Easy Riders, Raging Bulls") is editing the book using transcripts of conversations taped by Jaglom. "I'm excited about it. I'm reliving these wonderful, amazing lunches," Jaglom recently told Slant.

The 240-page hardcover, to be published by Macmillan/ Metropolitan Books on July 9, is described by the publisher as "Welles as he has never been seen before: talking intimately, (more...)

By RAY KELLY

While the future of The Other Side of the Wind is always cloudy, one thing appears clear: A book chronicling the making of this unfinished Orson Welles film is in the works.

Josh Karp, who teaches journalism at Northwestern, is writing about The Other Side of the Wind for St. Martin's Press. Due in 2013, An Adventure Shared By Desperate Men (That Finally Came to Nothing) looks at the filming of the 1970's Welles movie starring John Huston as an aging director attempting to revive his career with a hip, artsy film.

Karp has written for Salon, TV Guide, Premiere, The Atlantic Monthly Online, The LA Times Sunday Magazine and other publications.  He is the author of  A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever and Straight Down the Middle: Shivas Irons, Bagger Vance and How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Golf Swing.

Karp, who is conducting some of his final interviews for the book, agreed to field a few questions from Wellesnet.

RAY KELLY: Your previous two books have dealt with golf and National Lampoon. What attracted you to an unfinished Orson Welles film?

JOSH KARP: The simple answer is that it’s a great story and something I could gladly work on for a year or two.

What first got me interested were the stories from the set. I’d read about Rich Little and the midgets; John Huston driving the wrong way on the highway; a movie funded by the Shah’s brother-in-law; Welles seeing the amazing sunset outside the open studio door and saying, “It looks fake.”  I just loved all of that.

Then you had Welles and Huston who are almost literally characters out of novels (Huston was once described as “A Hemingway character lost in a Dostoevsky novel”). Complicated, charismatic, larger than life men and remarkable artists.
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Richard Frances's play Obediently Yours, Orson Welles was published by Oberon Books earlier this year in a volume entitled Hollywood Legends: 'Live' on stage.

Besides the Welles show, it features two additional plays, one on Marlene Dietrich, the other about James Dean, along with an introduction by Simon Callow.  Dr. France has graciously given his permission for Wellesnet to post his preface to the play here.  In addition, Glenn Anders has alerted us to an audio interview with Richard France you can listen to Here.  It includes comments about Richard France's two books on Welles, The Theatre of  Orson Welles (sadly, still out of print) and Orson Welles on Shakespeare.

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INTRODUCTION TO OBEDIENTLY YOURS, ORSON WELLES

By Richard France

Orson Welles was rightfully contemptuous of academics, refusing all the honorary degrees that he was offered and heaping scorn on those of his “learned “bee-ographers” who dared to base our writings about his life and  accomplishments on anything other than the charming fairy-tales that he had so skillfully crafted over the years.

Frankly, it’s hard to fault him on either count. These, after all, were the same fairy-tales that sustained him long after the “pigeons” (as he called potential investors) stopped returning his phone calls. And had he lived long enough to witness the birth of nano-technology, there can be no doubt that he, too, would have recognized it as the only known substance on the face of this earth smaller than the mind of an academic.

I was living on a small farm in southern Maine at the time, annotating the third and final play-script – the enormous crazy-quilt known as “Five Kings”  -- for “Orson Welles on Shakespeare,” when I received an offer from the University of  Southern California to spend a year as visiting associate professor with their (so-called) Theatre Division, now even more pretentiously known as its School of Theatre.  “Stay put,” I was told, especially by the very few academics whom I respected. “That place is known on campus as USC’s own little gulag..”

I’d been eking out a living by doing voice-overs in Boston, a two-hour drive from my home. And while debt-free, there were no wind-falls awaiting me in Maine. So, the opportunity to triple my average income for a year, plus a $2500 stipend to pay for the visuals and to index the “Welles on Shakespeare” book, plus a subsidized apartment above the smog line in Laurel Canyon proved irresistible. I was also able to convince myself that since we’d be  parting company in such short order, even the vilest and most insecure of my colleagues would realize  that I was no threat to them.  Silly me !

Some years earlier, the Asian-American company, East West Players, had produced “Station J,” my epic about the evacuation and internment of our Japanese population during World War Two. So, when I alerted my good friend, Mako that I’d be in Los Angeles, he invited me to return to East West as his dramaturg. In addition, a number of my voice-over clients in Boston apprised me of a recording studio in L.A. where, through a process known as phone-patching, we could continue working together.

Did I say triple my income? Mako introduced me to an L. A. agent, and I was soon recording promos and commercials for clients out there, as well. From the outset, it was agreed to that none of these outside activities were to interfere with my primary responsibility, which was to my students. Even so, I soon found myself in the cross-hairs of a particularly venomous assistant professor.

“I don’t see how Dr. France can continue doing everything he’s doing,” she hissed at one of our faculty meetings, prompting two of the deadest of the department’s dead-wood to bob their hollowed-out heads in agreement.

“Eventually, something has to suffer.”

“Such as?” I asked.

“We hope it won’t be your classes, Richard,” the older, and even dumber, of the two dead-woods chimed in.

My assurances that I would never allow that to happen, and it never did, seemed to put the matter at rest. Or so I imagined. In fact, the poison has only just begun to spread.  When the time came, and my student evaluations far surpassed my “bitch noir,” she merely dismissed these results as “gender distinction,” and intensified her campaign to discredit me.

Early in the second semester, I was in my office, with the door open, when one of my graduate students, an acting major from South Africa, appeared, crying hysterically. “My mother!” she blurted out. “She’s dead!”  All I could think of was trying to comfort her as I guided her to a chair. We sat across from each other, holding hands, as she revealed what happened. Not only was her mother’s death completely unexpected, by the time word of it reached my student it was too late for her to return to South Africa for the funeral.

The following week, I found myself in the provost’s office, charged with sexually harassing the student whom I had simply tried to comfort. Also present was my dean, the very person who had persuaded me to spend that year at USC, looking even more sanctimonious than usual. “What would you have done” I asked him, making no attempt to disguise my anger, “let her fall on the floor?” (He didn’t know it at the time but his days at USC were also numbered.)

Confronting one’s accuser is (supposedly) a corner-stone of American justice. It wasn’t my student, that I was sure of. But when I asked who then (as if I couldn’t guess), I was denied that information on the grounds that I might also get it into my head to harass my accuser. And given my angry reaction to the disgusting charges I was facing, both my dean and the provost considered this a real possibility.

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You can read an interview with David Thomson by John Carvill  Here.  It' s an interesting but at the same time quite an idiotic interview. Why? Not because of the questions asked, which is usually the case, but because of the answers given, by Mr. Thomson.

I think the interview makes a very nice piece to discredit David Thomson as any kind of authority on Orson Welles, or for any one else in the cinema, for that matter.

Mr. Thomson’s answers to Mr. Carvill's questions on Orson Welles, which come at the very end of the long interview, seem to me to be very condescending.  That Mr. Thomson prefers  the 93-minute original cut of TOUCH OF EVIL,  which Welles himself detested, is obviously very revealing. It shows us where to place Mr. Thomson on the level of Orson Welles scholars.  Namely, way below Pauline Kael.  Obviously anyone who loves Welles work and the cinema would wish these people had never existed!

As Webmaster of Wellesnet, I don’t know anyone who would give David Thomson’s book ROSEBUD, anything less than an “F” except my good friend,  "Glenn Anders."  I'm sure Glenn and I will be talking about our differences when next we meet, and obviously if Mr. Thomson views Wellesnet, he is invited to reply, but as far as I know, he is the only writer associated with Orson Welles and his work who does not visit this site.  Unlike  most other Welles scholars and friends, such as Joe McBride, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Simon Callow, Christopher Welles Feder and Beatrice Welles, to name only a few.  But of course, Mr. Thomson feels he knows more about Welles than all of these people, as a reading of his discredited book, ROSEBUD will show.

Actually, I find it ironic that Mr. Thomson could bring Welles two daughters, who agree about little else, together in agreeing that Thomson's ROSEBUD is a complete abortion. But beyond the fax pas Mr. Thomson committed with ROSEBUD, I must also note the superior, John Simon-like attitude Mr. Thomson projects throughout his interview with John Carvill.  The tone is that Mr. Thomson is right, and everybody else is wrong. For example, Mr. Thomson’s view of Martin Scorcese and Leonard Di Caprio’s work. Obviously, it’s fine to say their films are bad, or you don’t like them, but to suggest they have both not been recognized widely elsewhere, because you don't like them, is simply idiotic in the extreme.

I don't know how old John Carvill is, but when I first met Mr. Thomson in San Francisco, in 1981, shortly after seeing THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS for the first time, I would have told Thomson to (excuse my French) go fuck himself if he had said what he did to Mr. Carvill.  So would two directors who were friends of mine, that Thomson professes to admire, Nicholas Ray and George Cukor.

Mr. Thomson's  suggestion that Mr. Carvill is too young to "appreciate "THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS is, in my humble opinion, simply beyond the pale.  Orson Welles is obviously a far greater artist than Mr. Thomson, which I assume even Mr. Thomson would agree with (well, maybe not).  And how old was Orson Welles when he made  THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS?  26... So how does Mr. Thomson explain that?  "You are too young, Mr. Carvill."  My God, that has got to be the stupidest answer I have ever heard!  How old were Picasso and Van Gogh when they painted their earliest masterpieces on canvas?

Just imagine if in 1937,  GUERNICA had been "re-touched" by another artist who felt it needed a bit of color to dramatize the black and white and "CinemaScope" canvas Picasso had painted.  Picasso, as a true artist  would have burned the painting rather than seen it displayed in any version other than what he had intended.

Welles, as a film artist,  was in the same position five years later, except in 1942, he couldn't burn the negative of his original film.  It took the idiots at RKO to do that for him.  Ironically, they wanted to burn the negative of CITIZEN KANE,  but to destroy the artistry of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, they dumped it into the Pacific Ocean.

The bottom line is this:  David Thomson is no fan of Orson Welles or his legacy.

To anyone interested in Orson Welles or his works, please avoid Mr. Thomson and his trashy books like the PLAGUE!

Here is what Jonathan Rosenbaum had to say about Mr. Thomson's book  A Biographical Dictionary of Film:

"Rather than focus on its omissions and denials, which I've already done elsewhere, I'd like to raise my eyebrows at the notion that the book, whatever its merits as criticism, is any kind of reference book at all. Apart from skeletal and often incomplete filmographies, its facts are few and far between."

Read more by Jonathan Rosenbaum on David Thomson HERE.

CHRIS WELLES FEDER: My father thought Chimes at Midnight was his masterpiece, and I think that, as well. Falstaff was a role that was really made for him and I think his playing of that part is probably his greatest moment on the screen as an actor. When Prince Hal says, “I know thee not old man,” it’s an extraordinary moment. I wish the film could be seen more in this country, but it’s almost never shown here. I believe it is still tied up in all kinds of legal red tape.

_________

So, wouldn't it be fitting if Cambridge could show CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, as Welles first brought it to Boston on the stage way back in 1938?

In any event, Boston and Cambridge, Mass. are obviously very important to the cinematic legacy of Orson Welles, as not only did FIVE KINGS open there, but so did AROUND THE WORLD, eight years later.

In fact, it is really due to the Welles fans at Universities across the county and in Europe that Orson Welles legacy is so vibrant. The Lilly Library at the Univ. of Indiana, The Univ. of Michigan, Yale, UCLA, USC, NYU, and of course the famous Univ. of Bridgeport. CT were Warren Bass and Michael Kerbel taught. These are just a few of the many colleges and universities, without whose work the legacy of Orson Welles would not be anywhere as rich as it is today.

Sadly the ORSON WELLES CINEMA in Cambridge, no longer exists. It was made especially famous in FILMING OTHELLO, thanks to Larry Jackson, who invited Welles to Cambridge on January 7, 1977, for the Boston premiere of F FOR FAKE. Welles came, and along with his cameraman, Gary Graver, they shot a long Q & A session with the audience that was used in FILMING OTHELLO. If Welles did the same thing today, we could see the video on YouTube within minutes after he had spoke.

So, on June 6, 2010 I imagine there will be a lot more documentation of Chris Welles visit to Cambridge than was ever possible than when Orson Welles visited in 1977!

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Chris Welles Feder will be in Cambridge, Mass. at the Brattle Theatre on June 6 to introduce a 1:15 pm screening of THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI and will answer questions and sign copies of her marvelous book about ORSON WELLES, In My Father's Shadow.

Following the screening, Chris will answer questions from the audience and autograph copies of her book, before the screening of TOUCH OF EVIL.

The Brattle Theatre is located at 40 Brattle Street, near Harvard Square. For full details, check out their web site: www.brattlefilm.org

Harper Collins has come out with a trade paperback edition of the novelization of Orson Welles's movie Mr. Arkadin, which contains a new Foreword by John Baxter. Jonathan Rosenbaum has written an essay about the book for the Barnes and Noble website, noting that "Baxter's Foreword, which starts off quite reasonably, winds up with the usual boilerplate vilifications, claiming without much basis that Welles habitually walked away from films when the budgets ran out, ended his life on charity, and, 'For diversion, he dined out -- always assuming someone else picked up the check.' "

Given Baxter's penchant for getting his facts incorrect, it would seem there would be little reason to buy the book, since the marvelous Criterion DVD set includes the novel along with a much better preface by Robert Polito. Interestingly enough, I first discovered that writers like John Baxter often don't check their facts when I interviewed director Stanley Kramer and asked him about his "three-hour cut" of On The Beach, which Baxter cited in his book Science-Fiction in the Cinema. To my great embarrassment Stanley Kramer asked me where I had heard such a ridiculous canard, telling me that On The Beach had never been cut by anyone! Sadly, as Rosenbaum points out, Mr. Baxter is still getting his information wrong.

It's fairly well known that Welles's friend Maurice Bessy wrote the novelization of Mr. Arkadin, and Robert Polito's introduction to the Criterion edition of the book goes into many of the details about the contradicting stories regarding his authorship. Robert Arden claims in the audio interview with Simon Callow on the DVD that he saw Welles typing manuscript pages for the novel, but most probably he was misremembering. It seems clear that Bessy wrote the novel just by the many changes that have been made from the film in several details. For instance, Mr. Arkadin's castle is identified in the book as being in Santo Tirso, a city located in the north of the Porto metropolitan area of the Oporto district in Portugal! In fact, on the Criterion DVD commentary, nobody bothers to mention that Mr. Arkadin's castle is actually located in Segovia, Spain. James Naremore says Welles based a long shot of the castle on a famous El Greco painting, "View of Toledo," but that is most unlikely, since Welles used the famous Alcázar castle outside of Madrid for his location. Alcázar castle was also a source of inspiration for several of Walt Disney's fairy tales and in the novel, Mr. Arkadin buys the castle on a whim after his daughter Raina sees it as a child and says "it's just like Sleeping Beauty's castle." For the movie, Welles also makes dramatic use of the local medieval streets in Segovia, including the fabulous 2000-year old Roman aqueduct known as "The Devil's Bridge."

What would have been far more exciting than re-issuing Maurice Bessy's novelization, is if HarperCollins had asked Francois Thomas or some other Welles scholar to write a introduction to Welles's actual shooting script and his 90 pages of cutting notes for Mr. Arkadin.

Both exist and have been sold at auction. Here is the Christies description for:

Orson Welles' cutting instructions for his film Mr. Arkadin
(signed Orson or O.W. in several places) - 90pp.

Majority entirely in Welles' hand, plus 17 typescript pages with underlinings or annotations by Welles, erratically paginated, incorporating several autograph pages of instructions addressed by Welles to "Renzo" Lucidi, his film editor. Some pages with notes or markings in other hands, possibly Lucidi's; and ten pages of carbon typescript continuity with annotations and revisions by Welles and others employed on the film, most pages with markings relating to the filming process. Accompanied by seven pages of carbon typescript detailing a list of music cues to be inserted throughout the film, numbered one to seven in Welles' hand.

These manuscripts provide revealing documentation of Welles' working methods, and show the remarkable degree to which he controlled all aspects of the film's creation. The editing was overseen by Welles in a film laboratory at Saint-Cloud. However, when financial problems surfaced, the backers of the film took control away from Welles and it was extensively re-edited for commercial release by Warner Bros. Welles refused to take credit for the released version, which he maintained was not faithful to his conception. Peter Cowie comments in his book The Cinema Of Orson Welles: "It is a great pity that Confidential Report should be of all Welles' films at once the one truly original work and -- in the end -- the furthest removed from his intentions as a director.”

Sold in London on December 19, 2007 for $6,764.

Robin Wood died on December 18, 2009 and although I never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Wood, his passing hit me especially hard because I regard his writings as among the most influential ever to be published about the cinema. His groundbreaking book Hitchcock Films still remains to my mind, the best book ever written about that celebrated director.

In the early seventies when I first became enamored with movies, it was Mr. Wood's writings that opened my eyes to the then radical notion that popular movies from directors like Hitchcock and Howard Hawks could actually be considered works of art. That Wood would call Vertigo and Rio Bravo "masterpieces" in the sixties was certainly not an idea that was widely accepted at the time, but today both films are seen as great works of cinematic art (and both were ignored by the Academy at the time of their initial release.)

From Wood's books on Hitchcock and Hawks it was a simple step to graduate to more difficult to comprehend films by directors like Bergman, Antonioni and Orson Welles (Rather unfortunately Wood never wrote a book about Welles). However Wood's long piece on Welles Touch of Evil is a brilliant and incisive analysis of the movie that remains one of my favorite pieces about the picture.

Besides Mr. Wood's many books, he wrote a series of astute articles for Film Comment throughout the seventies. Even on the rare occasion when I didn't agree with him, his ideas were always insightful and very hard to refute. He explained why a supposedly badly received film like Marnie was actually a great masterpiece (not that I needed convincing on that one.) But I do recall seeing Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life for the first time around 1975 and thinking it was nothing special. After reading Wood's article about the movie in Film Comment I saw the picture again and it suddenly became a cinematic treasure that I had simply misunderstood.

Wood's book on Arthur Penn was another eye-opener for me. He brought up the idea that a film artist should have the right to experiment and make a movie that may be seen as both a commercial and critical failure, such as Mickey One.

That idea holds a special meaning for a director like Orson Welles, whose Mr. Arkadin Robin Wood recently placed as number three on his list of favorite Criterion titles. Wood explained, "The critics of Cahiers du cinéma once chose Mr. Arkadin over Citizen Kane for their “Ten Best Ever” list. I am inclined to agree. The three versions suggest an endless, fascinating 'work in progress'.”

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Chris Welles Feder's wonderful new book about her life and times with Orson Welles, In My Father's Shadow has just been released by Agonquin Books. Chris Welles began her book tour in San Francisco with a showing of The Lady From Shanghai at the Rafael Theatre on November 2, and earlier that day Alex Fraser and I met with Chris in the lobby of the Orchard Garden Hotel in San Francisco, at the corner of Grant and Bush Streets, only a few blocks from where her father had shot key scenes from The Lady From Shanghai (at Grant and Pine street) in 1946. Part one of our talk appears below and will soon be followed by part two.

You can see pictures of Chris with her father and Rita Hayworth taken by Life Magazine photographer Peter Stackpole HERE.

You can also read Alex Fraser's review of In My Father's Shadow at Epinions Here.

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LAWRENCE FRENCH: What prompted you to start writing In My Father’s Shadow?

CHRIS WELLES FEDER: There are many books that have been written on my father, biographies and critical studies and so on, but none of them have captured the Orson Welles that I knew. Also many of the people who wrote about my father either never met him, or they didn’t meet him until the last 15 years of his life. So I felt I had a story to tell from the unique perspective of being his daughter. I think I’m probably one of the few people still alive who knew him when he was in his vigorous youth and he was at the top of his game. So I really wanted to recapture the young Orson Welles before he was beaten down by disappointments, betrayals and not getting the money he needed to make his movies. I wanted that vision to be out there as part of the record. In addition, besides showing a much fuller picture of my father, as I knew him, there were other people in his life who were important but have been given scant attention in the vast Wellesian bibliography, beginning with my mother, Virginia Nicolson Welles. She is always described as a Chicago socialite, which in fact, she wasn’t. But almost nothing is known about my mother, who after all was the first Mrs. Orson Welles.

Then there were other people who were very important in his life that I knew personally. Roger and Hortense Hill, who were like his parents, because he was orphaned when he was quite young. They were probably the closest thing that he had to a family and I wanted the world to know who they were. Also, Oja Kodar who spent the last 20 years of his life with him and was probably the woman that he loved more than any other. I didn’t feel she had been given her due in the other books, so those were just some of the reasons why I wanted to write the book.

LAWRENCE FRENCH: What kind of work process did you follow in writing the book?

CHRIS WELLES FEDER: It took me about six years to write the book. I had two or three false starts where I wrote an enormous amount of material, but I realized I was going in the wrong direction and I had to throw it all out. So it took me awhile to find the right direction for the book. The most difficult thing was deciding what I should leave out. Finally, what became my organizing principle was to use only those parts of my life that were directly involved with my father. I could have gone on for pages and pages about living in South Korea or in other places, but what helped me to hone the book, was to keep it just focused on my father, our times together and our relationship. That became my organizing principle.

LAWRENCE FRENCH: How much direction did you get from your editor at Algonquin Books, Chuck Adams?

CHRIS WELLES FEDER: Chuck was a very sensitive editor. He respected everything that I had written and hardly made any changes to the manuscript, but he did make some very good cuts. Although what I really liked was he would write questions in the margins that would really get me thinking, such as “what did your mother think about that?” That alerted me to the fact that maybe I needed to cover something a little bit more in-depth. I was truly blessed to have him as an editor. He told me he feels very proud of this book. My whole experience with Algonquin has been just wonderful.

LAWRENCE FRENCH: You told me early on when you were looking for a publisher several editors wanted you to write more of a Mommie Dearest kind of a memoir.

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