Shut up He Explained

Publishers Weekly

When Lardner was two, her father, David, a New Yorker writer, was killed on assignment in wartime Germany. Her mother, Frances, then married David's brother, the screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. When he refused to define his relationship to the Communist Party before Congress, Ring was sentenced to a year in prison, leaving Kate, her two younger brothers and Frances to their own devices. Released in April 1951, Ring tried to dodge the shadow of the blacklist, but the family ultimately fled Hollywood for Mexico, then Connecticut, then New York City. By the late 1950s, adolescent Kate had discovered the bohemianism of Greenwich Village. She spent two years at college in the Midwest before returning to New York; she drifted into relationships with various men, including Tommy Lee Jones, who was then just beginning his career. Although her story vaults over the '80s and '90s, Lardner somehow lands on all fours with a few short, deft chapters that hint at the peace she made with each parent (after a few rough years during which "drugs and alcohol kept me from facing my life") and describe her father's death in 2000. Lardner descends from several generations of literary forebears and has inherited their talent by nature or nurture or both. Her book provides an unusual, child's-eye view on Hollywood in the McCarthy years and after. There's a quirky logic to the collage of excerpted letters and diary entries; Lardner interviewed many of the players for the book, but nothing's forced. This is Lardner's first book, but hopefully not her last. Photos. Agent, Liz Darhansoff. (On sale May 11) Forecast: Readers interested in this weighty period in American cultural and political history will be attracted to Lardner's memoir. Media and bookstore appearances in New York and L.A. will catch the attention of those readers. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Lardner was a child of the 1950s who survived the 1960s. Curious and independent, she experimented with alcohol, drugs, and sex and writes about it in this coming-of-age memoir. However, her story is a bit different because Lardner was the stepdaughter of screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. (Woman of the Year), one of the Hollywood Ten who refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and was therefore jailed for contempt and blacklisted. Lardner recounts these events in a matter-of-fact, conversational style that nevertheless communicates their profound impact upon her and her family. We learn, for example, that her actress mother was also blacklisted, that for many years Ring's profession and past were never to be mentioned to outsiders, and that despite a complicated and often stormy relationship, Kate deeply loved and respected Ring. Jean Rouverol's Refugees from Hollywood: A Journal of the Blacklist Years covers much of the same ground (and many of the same characters), but this addition to the literature provides the unique perspective of the second generation. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries. M.C. Duhig, Carnegie Lib. of Pittsburgh Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The story of the author's life as stepdaughter to the blacklisted screen and television writer Ring Lardner Jr., with a subcurrent of foggy but appalled unhappiness. A disembodied narrative voice gives this memoir's first third a hazy, uninflected tone. "What I remember most about Coldwater Canyon is an old wooden gate falling on my head," Lardner writes. "I don't know how this happened." As a tool for the scattershot memories of youth, this dreaminess is effective. The dreams take on more edge and gloom after Ring Jr.-referred to throughout as her father by the author, who was three when he married his brother David's widow-is convicted of contempt of Congress for replying, when asked if he is a member of the communist party, "I could answer, but I'd hate myself in the morning." The middle section, comprised largely of letters, clippings, and addenda from Ring Jr., covers his prison years. It highlights the mundanity of getting by during his year in Danbury Prison, when his sense that communism extended beyond economic equality into cultural and political spheres only sharpened, and the thrill when her mother found work on TV or radio. (Frances Chaney was also a communist and suffered from the blacklist.) Finally come the consequences for the author of those early years: her mother's distancing ("Acting was my higher power, baby. That's the only place that I knew about God"), her father's drinking (a five-page letter to him from Dalton Trumbo spells it out in spades), both parents' relentless chiding of Kate about her weight (father called her "Potato Dumpling," while mother preferred "Miss Turnip"), and the general family reticence. Little wonder Lardner turned to drugs, which perhapsinduced the haziness that returns in the memoir's third section, chronicling what should have been the good times: college, marriage(s), children. Happily, therapy worked for her, and she can tender a clean and sweet chronicle of her father's death. One melancholy baby, with every right to be so. (Photos)Agency: Darhansoff, Verrill and Feldman