TOW#20: A Story Lately Told (Ireland)

Nearly half of A Story Lately Told, by Anjelica Huston is used to describe her childhood during her time in Ireland. Her family moved to Ireland when she was only one year old, so that is the setting of all of her early childhood memories. Huston incorporates relevant photographs and detailed character development to illustrate the complexity of her childhood caused by her father’s absence.

            At the beginning of every chapter she uses a back-and-white photograph from around approximately the same time period as the events in the chapter to visually illustrate her life as she recalls it in her writing. The pictures often include Huston, her brother Tony, and her mother in a variety of places suggesting that while her family moved often she still had a strong relationship with her mother as well as many playful memories with her brother. The absence of her father in majority of these images demonstrates that he was not that great of a figure in her life and while her brought many incredible people around and provided immense opportunities for her, their relationship was lacking and unable to flourish under his busy schedule and intense approach to directing. These unbalanced family ties influenced her childhood into being complex and seemingly incomplete.

            It is through her character development and descriptions that she alluded to the poor relationship with her father by emphasizing people who would generally be less influential has her father had a more active role in her childhood. Throughout the first section of the book she described smaller character, guests and household workers, in great detail through imagery, similes, and other rhetorical devices. In describing short-term maids at one of her many estates she said, “Josie, with fair hair and cheeks like roses, and Mary Margaret, timid as a field mouse” (59).  By using such poetic detail for these two characters who are virtually insignificant in the overall plot of her life Huston makes it evident that that due to her father’s absence she developed a need to make smaller characters in her life has a greater meaning to her in order to fill the void that was caused by the incomplete father figure she had.

            It is through her inclusion of images and development of characters that she illustrated the lasting affects of her complex childhood. Although seeming perfect, beneath the surface even the privileged, talented Anjelica Huston worked avidly in fulfilling the voids in her life that developed at an early age.

URL:http://www.amazon.com/Story-Lately-Told-Coming-Ireland/dp/1451656297