Travel writer and Los Angeles Times book critic Michael Franks’ aunt, Harriet Frank, Jr. was best known as a screenwriter who, with her husband Irving Ravetch, wrote the screenplays for Hud, Norma Rae and many other classics. The Mighty Franks: a Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Michael Franks’ memoir of his growing up as her surrogate son, is both a tale of life in Hollywood and that of his relationship with a complicated woman both nurturing and cruel.  

"[A] complex and fascinating memoir . . . In thoughtful, fluid prose, [Frank] evokes the magic and sophistication of a vanished Hollywood intelligentsia schooled in the language of cinema . . . the woman he describes is as iconic and memorable as the characters she created for the screen." --Publishers Weekly.