Five years before he won the National Book Award for Passage to Ararat, Michael J. Arlen earned a nomination for this 1970 memoir. The son of bestselling Jazz Age author, Michael Arlen, and an aristocratic mother, 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 around the world, and the decline of a family full of love, joy, and pride in one another.