Coast to Coast: A Family Romance [Hardcover]

Nora Johnson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 3, 2004

No Description Available

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Daughter of Hollywood producer/ screenwriter Nunnally Johnson and actress Dorris Bowdon, the author spent her childhood, after her parents' divorce, shuttling between parents and coasts. She eloquently evokes the 1940s and '50s: the war years and postwar Communist paranoia, bombed-out London and the enormous pressure on women to marry. Johnson also vividly contrasts New York, with its cocktail parties and cabs, and Los Angeles, with its swimming pools and chauffeurs. Intelligent, curious and troubled, the adolescent Johnson is absolutely privileged, except she doesn't feel at home in either family. This is a book full of superstars, and the confusion and loneliness of a child of divorce are amplified by the proximity of celebrities. When the teenaged Johnson and a pal attend a grown-up party, mean, drunk Johnny Mercer insults Johnson's bulimic girlfriend, and Humphrey Bogart comes to the rescue. At Smith, Johnson and Sylvia Plath attend a class together. Her descriptions of the poet are convincingly disturbing, as are those of talented classmates who abandoned bright futures for marriage. Eventually, Johnson herself succumbs, and in surprising contrast to the rest of the book's dreamy impressionism, she ends in high suspense, walking down the aisle in her bridal gown toward a man she doesn't love, unable to figure out how to say no.
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From Booklist

When your father is celebrated Hollywood screenwriter/producer Nunnally Johnson, and movie royalty such as Bogie and Bacall attend your birthday parties, life may seem impossibly exciting. But when your parents divorce and your mother tears you away from L.A.'s glamour for a more vagabond Manhattan milieu, your new life pales by comparison. Though she may have come from an enviable background, Johnson's pedigree couldn't protect her from the emotional turmoil faced by any child of a broken home. She was frequently lonely, certainly confused, and her peripatetic lifestyle is most definitely unenviable. With a foot in both camps and a stake in neither, Johnson finds herself routinely passed between two homes on two coasts. As she embarks on solitary cross-country train trips to visit one parent, then the other, Johnson seizes these opportunities to reflect on a remarkable, and fleeting, chapter in American culture while struggling to discover her own identity. An acclaimed author in her own right, Johnson, in this captivating coming-of-age memoir, reveals an ethereal time teeming with extraordinary people. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (August 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743234472
• ISBN-13: 978-0743234474
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #735,883 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Engaging and personal, September 13, 2004

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Occasional Reader (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coast to Coast: A Family Romance (Hardcover)

If this is a genre, I don't have any experience with it. Part confession, an insightful portrait of her times and engaging picture of very human personalities, whatever it is I found this memoir to be charming as it was frank, and poignant.
The brushes with late fifties Hollywood royalty bring the era alive. The author brings us into her encounters with friends of her beloved father Nunnally (famed screenwriter of the day) with an immediacy that I could touch. Her wry rending of the struggles of an adolescent and young woman of her life including (tactfully) frank discussion of coming to grips with sex bring the story alive and make me look forward to the sequel. I want to know how she and the characters she introduces us fair in the many worlds she travels.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Surprise Find For Another Fan Of Henry Orient, August 25, 2005

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S. Peterkin "martlet" (Lilburn, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Coast to Coast: A Family Romance (Hardcover)

My eleven year old daughter and I read The World Of Henry Orient, another work of this author, as part of our tradition of reading books together over summer vacation. We so enjoyed that book that I quickly ordered another of Ms. Johnson's books - this one just for my own reading. Coast To Coast is just as much fun for adults as Henry O was for myself and my daughter. I now have a third book of Nora's on order and it will not be the last. Highly Recommended!

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Impressionistic Memoir, July 2, 2005

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Coast to Coast: A Family Romance (Hardcover)

It seems as though Nora Johnson already wrote this book before, though now she's telling the story in a new way with a new focus on experimentation, as though Virginia Woolf were writing THE LAST TYCOON. The accent is on her younger years, and what is what like growing up in Hollywood and New York, the child of a broken home and the daughter of an accomplished, even famous screenwriter. Quick, impressionistic sketches of a time long gone by intermingle with the author's private reflections on the events she lived through, and some of them she helped create.

Fans of the lyricist Johnny Mercer are not going to like the way he comes across in this book, as a poisonous Buddha who apparently hates women and is drunkenly, insanely cruel to a young girl at a "sophisticated" party. Talk about a mean drunk! At the same party the girl is rescued by none other than Humphrey Bogart, who betrays the sensitivity and the thoughtfulness we always "knew" lurked behind his touch guy image.

To me, the greatest disappointment was Johnson's chapter on poet Sylvia Plath, with whom she attended Smith College back in the day. It's not that Johnson doesn't give a new angle on Plath, for she does (she, Nora, must have been one of those privileged, spoiled rich co-eds whom Sylvia envied, feared and adored), it's only that Plath still manages to elude description properly. Of all the great Hollywood and Broadway legends whom young Nora knew, isn't it odd that the most provocative and charismatic turns out to be none other than our Sylvia?