On Sunset

July 9, 2018
Harrison (True Crimes: A Family Album) mines the lives of her grandparents in this touching family history. Harrison’s young mother was largely uninvolved in her early life, as was her father, whom she did not meet until adulthood (she explored their incestuous relationship in The Kiss). Born in 1961 and raised in a house on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles by her mother’s aging parents, Harrison had an insatiable desire to hear family stories. As the author retells her grandparents’ reminiscences, she also shares glimpses of her “Victorian” upbringing (seven p.m. bedtime, no Barbie dolls). Her 79-year-old grandfather constructed a reading chair for her atop a “fey and fairy-dusted’ avocado tree and shared stories of his youth in London, his apprenticeship to a Berlin cabinet maker, his becoming a member of the Hussars calvary, and his move to Canada, where he became an engineer. Her grandmother, meanwhile, told her of being born to Jewish merchants, living in Shanghai as a privileged girl and taking the Trans-Siberian Express through post-revolution Russia to boarding school in London; she also told of jilting a groom at the altar. Evocative and tender, this delightful memoir pairs the distant past with a safe and sacred time in the author’s young life.