Iconoclastic auteur film director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause; In a Lonely Place; Johnny Guitar) led a troubled life, plagued with schizophrenia and decades-long addictions to alcohol and drugs. By the early 1960s, his addictions and public breakdowns made him uninsurable within the film industry. His daughter Nicca writes he was "a man riddled with torment who lashed out at those he loved with crushing results." Nicca's blisteringly candid memoir, Ray by Ray, chronicles her search for the father who abandoned her at the age of three when he divorced her mother (third of his four wives) and who died when she was 17. Her memoir also details her sexual molestation by a stepbrother that led to numbing herself with alcohol and drugs, selling herself sexually to strangers and her eventual recovery.
"I come from a long line of alcoholics and drug addicts," writes Nicca. She also notes that her family life "should have been something out of Greek mythology, not everyday life." Ray's second marriage to actress Gloria Grahame broke up after he discovered she was having sex with his then-13-year-old son, Tony (from his first marriage). A decade later, Grahame married Tony--making him Nicca's half-brother and stepfather. Muddying the waters even further, Nicca's mother later had an affair with Tony that led to a pregnancy and abortion. "That child would have been my brother and my nephew," writes Nicca.
Nicca Ray's original search to understand her troubled father expands into a shocking, intimate and gripping tale of family secrets and addictions. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant