Kookooland

In this grim memoir, screenwriter Norris (The Moment) writes of growing up in the housing projects of Manchester, N.H., in the 1960s, and escaping to California to find success as a filmmaker. Norris’s father, Jimmy, overwhelms her with awe and fear when she’s a little girl, and disgust when she’s an adult. But Jimmy is the story’s star, and its arc is his evolution from a drunken, abusive criminal to a more egregiously drunken, abusive criminal. It’s an awful tale, told dispassionately, of a man who claws his way through life dealing stolen TVs, drinking and drugging, berating those who cross him, and taking his daughter to shoot rats at the dump. Things get worse at particular points—when a family friend butchers his estranged wife with a kitchen knife, when the daughter of that family murders her dad, and finally, when Jimmy almost kills the author’s mother. He’s never redeemed. The only way forward for the women in Jimmy’s world is to flee. They head to Kookooland, Jimmy’s name for California: the author moves there to retreat from her dad and write this story from a distance, both literal and metaphorical; Norris’s mother visits in the last years of her life, after Jimmy dies; and the murdering daughter of the family friend has her ashes scattered in California. Unfortunately, because Norris takes herself out of the action, the memoir feels like little more than a rap sheet of her father’s misbehavior. (Jan.)