Exiles

Back in print a wry and moving . . . rare and minute accounting of growing up. (Time)Exiles is the story of two glamorous people―one a beautiful aristocrat; the other a self-made man one of the most famous authors of the 1920s. In this slender volume which was nominated for the 1970 National Book Award and helped reestablish the memoir as a genre Michael J. Arlen evokes―with humor and honesty―his parents'' seemingly charmed life in Hollywood and New York his own childhood spent between homes and boarding schools and the decline of a family full of love joy and pride in one another: in other words a family as ordinary as it is unusual.