ROTTENKID

Binns offers a memoir about reckoning with the legacy of difficult parents.

The author grew up in Los Angeles in the 1960s, the daughter of actor Edward Binns and his second wife, Marcia Legere Binns, described as the “ultimate sophisticate.” Childhood summers were spent on the ranches and beaches of the local Hollister family, descendants of early white California settlers; her schoolmates and playmates were children of Hollywood stars. After her parents’ marriage disintegrated when she was 13, her father returned to the East Coast, leaving her with her mother, who, according to the author, “always had to have someone to hate, and it was my turn.” Binns includes letters and transcripts of clandestinely recorded phone calls that show her mother as being full of vitriol and self-importance. The author rebelled: “At home I will be feral; elsewhere, I’ll be jocular and engaging.” In 1972, she was sent to the progressive Verde Valley boarding school in Sedona, Arizona. The school’s emphasis on cultural understanding and immersion in the natural world taught her important lessons about how persistence can help to overcome limitations. This wisdom paid off in her college years, in her world travels, and the 1980s world of Wall Street, where she worked for Morgan Stanley. Her wealthy way of life as the wife of a British Morgan Stanley trader collapsed when he lost his job; she returned to Los Angeles to build an independent existence based on her love of food and prose, resulting in a satisfying career as a culinary writer. Binns’ self-aware and wry writing will interest readers who grew up with angry, self-involved parents, but she also keenly explores the difficult childhoods of both Edward and Marcia in order to better understand them. Through therapy, she managed to find a sense of peace, which she expresses engagingly: “It was this hard work, over months, that finally allowed me to cast aside my mother’s scathing opinions of me and emerge with a growing smidgeon of self-esteem. The elephant that had been squatting on my shoulders for decades had disappeared.”

A grounded remembrance of an outwardly glittering Hollywood upbringing.