"When Kate was not yet two, her father, David, was killed while on assignment for The New Yorker in war-torn Germany. Two years later her mother, the actress Frances Chaney, married David's brother, Ring Lardner Jr. - a marriage that endured for more than fifty years. Ring was already a successful screenwriter, having won an Oscar for cowriting the Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy hit Woman of the Year. (In 1971 he collected another on for M*ASH.)" "Shortly after they were married, Ring was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Asked about his membership to Hollywood's Communist Party, Lardner said: "I could answer...but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning." This much-publicized declaration of silence sent Lardner to prison. Subsequently neither he nor Frances could get work, which marked the beginning of Kate's blacklist childhood - and took the family from Mexico City to rural Connecticut to Manhattan." "Kate Lardner presents a behind-the-scenes look at the personal and family costs of weathering this ruthless and absurd period in history. She writes: "I wanted to tell my story of the events I had inherited. A therapist once told me she had the dirty job of ushering me into the real world. And now that I am more or less there, I've decided the time has come.""--BOOK JACKET.