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.

July 15, 2018
A notable novelist and nonfiction writer's account of the once-wealthy grandparents who raised her and their fall from financial grace.Received "as an unexpected late-life child" meant to balance out the "misdeeds" of her mother, a beautiful but irresponsible young woman with an insatiable obsession for designer shoes, Harrison (True Crimes: A Family Album, 2016, etc.) lived with her grandparents in a big house on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Though hardly wealthy, they were always impeccably turned out, quietly collecting Blue Chip trading stamps to pay for what they otherwise could not afford to do: "reshingle the roof, replaster the inside of the pool and resurface the driveway." The family's real "wealth" resided in the many stories her grandparents told the author and in the many photographs and curios they had collected during their eventful lives. Harrison's Jewish grandfather, Harry Jacobs, was born poor in London; after a stint as a soldier in World War I, he left England to seek his fortune in Alaska. There, he made a living as a fur trapper and had two sons with a Christian Scientist wife. Later, after her tragic death, he became a traveling salesman. The author's maternal grandmother, Margaret Sassoon, grew up in Shanghai. A member of the Jewish merchant class, her family once "had a 70 percent monopoly on the entire opium trade" and were labeled the "Rothschilds of the East." In her youth, Margaret jilted a wealthy businessman her father had chosen for her, turned down marriage proposals from an exiled Russian prince, and flirted with Edward VIII. When Harry and Margaret met in Los Angeles in 1941, both were middle-aged and ready to settle down. The wild-child daughter they had together was the unexpected byproduct of a marriage that began with an impulsive elopement. Blending family history and mythology, anecdotes and photographs, this book is not simply one woman's open love letter to two magnificently eccentric grandparents; it is also a testament to the enduring power of memory.A poignant and eloquent memoir.

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September 15, 2018
Readers familiar with novelist Harrison's previous transfixing memoirs, from The Kiss? (1997) to True Crimes (2016), may think that by now the well of stories about her Los Angeles childhood has run dry. Not so. It turns out that the lives of her maternal grandparents, who raised her as her young, profligate mother ran amok, are fairy-tale fascinating, profoundly revealing of cultural divisions, and brilliantly and wittily told as Harrison channels her young, inquisitive self. Her stylish, rigorous, and scandalous grandmother Margaret Sassoon, with her Ottoman eyes, descended from a Jewish clan in Baghdad of legendary wealth and global influence. Harrison's grandfather Harry Jacob was a poor Brit who became a roaming jack-of-all-trades in Alaska, ultimately settling in California, where, as a 50-year-old traveling salesman, he married the 42-year-old Sassoon heiress in 1941. Like Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes? (2010) and Lucette Lagnado's The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (2007), Harrison's entrancing look-back casts light on resonant swaths of history as she reenters the frozen bubble in time she occupied as a lonely child while the Sassoon fortune drained away and their Sunset Boulevard home crumbled.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2018

Noted for her boundary-breaking memoirs as well as her fiction, Harrison introduces us to her fur trapper-turned-Model T Ford salesman grandfather and her grandmother, born into a privileged Jewish merchant family in Shanghai, who raised her in a Tudor mansion above Sunset Boulevard until the money ran out.

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