Not really about Nicolas Ray as he didn't stick around long enough to be in his namesake daughter's life. The book is more of a catharsis for Nicca as she struggles with an absentee father, sexual abuse from the son of the man her mother married after Nicolas Ray, drug addiction, prostitution, etc. I would have liked to have had more on her mother's career as a dancer in films like Pal Joey and Silk Stockings and at one time dated men like Bing Crosby (who supposedly proposed marriage) and Vince Edwards. Director Nicolas Ray is remembered for a few films like Rebel Without a Cause and In a Lonely Place among others. However, he had his own demons and also struggled with addiction. He certainly was not an ideal father. While I am glad that Nicca has her life in order now, the book just was not what I expected. The passages on the things she did during the years and years of addiction were brutal. ( )

Another memoir about a troubled childhood at the hands of Hollywood people. Every story is unique and I'm there for it. I take something from all of them and find them interesting reads. Thanks for the book, Early Reviewers ( )

I wanted to read this book because I love everything about the Golden Age of Hollywood and classic movies. I own thousands of them. I don't watch the films of today, but if you ask me about anything doing with the classics, I'll know. Saying that, I was really hoping this wasn't just another book about a Hollywood child who was telling everyone that their life was ruined by their absent parent, and even though they were brought up in luxury, they felt sorry for themselves and trashed their parent.

This book is less about Nicholas Ray and more about Nicca Ray. I don't know how that affects anyone who reads it; it's more of a cathartic lesson by Nicca to bare herself evenly and cleanse her own ghosts to the world. That's not a bad thing; but to be honest, does anyone really care about Nicca Ray? Has anyone even heard of her before now?

I am glad she was able to get clean and sober; I am glad she's not another person lost to the drugs that would have killed her. But unfortunately, this book was less about Nicca's relationship with Nick than about Nicca herself. It started out fine, but then went all over the place until we finally come to the ending. It's like it's trying to be told from different directions and then come together at last.

I wish I could have enjoyed this book more, but I found much of it to be boring, and it just couldn't hold my attention all at once -- I had to read this in several settings. ( )

This book is Nicca Ray's own story about her self-absorbed substance abusing parents. She had very little contact with her father and seems confused in remembering him. I found it to be a difficult tedious read with many inconsistencies. Was this book edited at all?? Nicca Ray has a story to tell but trying to find it in this book is just about impossible. ( )

The last scheduled meeting of our book group was scuttled by the plague among us; too bad, as we had chosen a classic to read and discuss, "The Wind in the Willows" by Kenneth Grahame. Well, there may rarely have been a better shelter-in-place read. It seemed like the central theme of the book was to hasten back into the burrow, build a good fire, eat, and sit in comfy chairs while chatting with friends.

A slightly different notion of home is at work in "Ray By Ray: A Daughter's Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray" (Three Rooms Press, $20). It’s not comfy.

Nicca Ray is the fourth and youngest child of Nicholas Ray, best known as the director of “Rebel Without a Cause.” The Internet Movie Data Base credits him with 31 films, including “They Live By Night,” “In a Lonely Place,” “Johnny Guitar” and others, particularly from the 1950’s, that made him into a darling of the French New Wave, such as Jean-Luc Godard, who considered him the ultimate American auteur: "The cinema is Nicholas Ray."

Ray was championed early on by Thornton Wilder, Frank Lloyd Wright, Elia Kazan, John Houseman, Alan Lomax, and he ultimately influenced subsequent generations of directors like Godard, Truffant, Scorcese, Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch.

A cottage industry of books about Ray confirm his talents, realized and wasted. He clearly exuded a charismatic personal charm, and he needed it to have friends willing to put up with his excesses of alcoholism, drug use, bisexual promiscuity. He was married four times and the relationships were complicated, to put it mildly. Suffice it to say that his second wife, actress Gloria Grahame, wound up marrying Tony Ray, Nicholas Ray’s son from his first marriage.

And there’s a good chance that Tony Ray, Nicca's half brother, also became sexually involved with Ray’s third wife, Betty Utley, Nicca’s mother. Complicated.

Nicca certainly touches on the high and low points of her father’s career in this memoir, but it’s from an oblique angle. She didn’t see “Rebel Without a Cause” until 1995, when she was 34. (Nick Ray died in 1979 at 67.)

As far as Nicca was concerned, her father was mostly just missing, having left Betty when Nicca was two. She saw him rarely in subsequent years and his absence gnawed at her.

Her mother wasn’t exactly a stabilizing influence, either. Betty Utley was an accomplished dancer who had a decent show business career going before she married Ray and had two daughters with him. She, too, married four times, had some drug issues of her own, and in later life embraced nudism and free love.

But at least she was there. If her portrait here comes across as a little daffy, she was clearly a loving mother. (The book is dedicated to her.)

It gives nothing away to say that Nicca is now long-sober and in a stable relationship for 30 years. Between the covers here we see the less salubrious early years, when Nicca was sexually abused by a step brother, plunged into the grunge rock scene which evolved into her own early alcoholism and drug abuse, to the point of turning tricks for cocaine.

It’s frank, and not pretty, but it’s not a narrative onslaught as Nicca tells the tale in kaleidoscopic fashion, largely unmoored from any linear chronology, ricocheting between her story, Nick’s or Betty’s.

Mostly it’s a search for the father she barely knew: Nicca did scores of interviews with the onlookers—one is tempted to say the survivors—and it tends to give a, well, wide-screen look at the entire cast of characters.

Of her father she writes: “I’m not defending his tormented and sometimes cruel character. God, I used to hate it when people would describe him as tormented. It was a way his admirers absolved him from having to take responsibility for his actions. He was, though, a man riddled with torment who lashed out at those he loved with crushing results.”

If she doesn’t defend her father, she doesn’t condemn him, either. She lays out the facts and opinions she’s uncovered, tells her own tale, and lets readers pick through the crushing results as they will.

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An illustrated version of this review (titled "Sometimes I Feel Like a Fatherless Child") and more (the vast majority about golf) can be found at The Bookshelf portion of my website: http://theaposition.com/tombedell/rummaging-around-in-the-bag/the-bookshelf ( )