Any Resemblance to Actual Persons
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In the spirit of Motherless Brooklyn or Remains of the Day, Allardice offers up a searing and memorable debut.
When Paul McWeeney's older sister writes a book accusing their late father of committing the gruesome Black Dahlia murder, based on memories her new therapist has helped her recover, or imagine, he sits down to write a cease and desist letter to the publishers. Paul hopes to refute his sister's claims about their father's role in the infamous 1947 murder, arguing for his own divergent memory of their Hollywood childhood by way of defending their father's name and legacy. But the letter begins to take on a life of its own, and Paul, a failed novelist and community college writing instructor, soon finds himself on an obsessive, elliptical exploration of both his family's history and his own conflicted memory, which begins to absorb his daily life and threaten his relationships with those, closest to him. The letter becomes not the intended refutation but rather a disturbing and wildly comical psychological self–portrait of man caught between increasingly unstable versions of the past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Allardice's debut novel has an unusual conceit: in 1996, a New York publisher is preparing to release Edith McWeeney's The Dahlia Dossier: Hollywood's Most Notorious Killer Revealed, in which the author attempts to prove that her father, George McWeeney, was the murderer in the notorious unsolved 1947 Black Dahlia case. Paul McWeeney, Edith's brother, writes a long letter to the publisher (which forms the novel's text) refuting that claim. A teacher at a junior college in L.A. and aspiring writer, he identifies with and even idealizes his late father. As his protest letter takes on its own life, we witness Paul's own delusional world and self-destructive obsessions. Alas, he can be a pedantic bore. Allardice does a great job, however, of satirizing some key players of today's Black Dahlia mythos John Gilmore, Steve Hodel, and especially James Ellroy. This is not, finally, about the case so much as it is about the fragility of memory and one man's reckoning with failure and dissolution.
