ONE OF THE FAMILY CL - Tapa dura

This memoir begins with the emergence of a secret. At the age of 46 and five weeks after the death of her mother, the well-known Hollywood columnist and writer Sheilah Graham, Wendy Fairey learned that her true father was the philosopher A. J. Ayer. She had known Freddie Ayer since she was eleven, admiring him far more than her putative father, Trevor Westbrook, the man Sheilah Graham had married to legitimate her baby. This book set forth Fairey's quest to reclaim her father - still alive when she learned his identity - and to come terms with her mother's lie. In a portrait of her own family history and her childhood in Hollywood, Fairey weaves in her mother's history and that of her several "fathers": Sheilah Graham's lover, F. Scott Fitzgerald, her two husbands, Westbrook and a man known as Bow Wow, and Freddie Ayer.