RaveAlta\"I don’t know of anything else like it. Perhaps in empathy for a powerful female figure, it recalls Jim Harrison’s Dalva. My guess is that McDonell’s book became a voyage of discovery of his mother, but also a chance to unravel his own origins and impulses, a rethinking of his own life events, from the changed viewpoint, the inevitable greater perspective, that comes with age ... Irma is a beautifully crafted book. Its rich language and sharp, poignant descriptions are suggestive of James Salter at his best ... Myth is sometimes stronger than fact. One wonders, at the end of Irma, whether McDonell was a kind of warrior himself, willing to do battle for his writers, his clarity of vision, his team, possessing special skills—and tracing his character back to the courage and adventurous spirit of his mother ... Irma is a sparkling book. It has the economy and power of language found in California Bloodstock. It has the literary sophistication of The Accidental Life. But it has the vulnerability, tenderness, and gratitude of a son who made good.\
Lara Gabrielle
RaveAlta OnlineA deeply researched and fair-minded biography of Davies’s life and movie work ... Gabrielle’s work offers a look at my own family’s mythology through the opposite end of the telescope: from the viewpoint of a woman who was part of my grandfather’s life—but who saw the world in different terms ... The author deserves special credit since this was a difficult subject that she took on with intense scholarly devotion. This biography is not merely a summer beach read but a careful examination, a precisely drawn work, so it’s an enormous adjunct to our understanding of Hearst and Davies’s era and the movie business back then ... Davies’s life story has been in the shadow of so much mythology ... I admired Gabrielle’s effort to excavate the real Davies. It was a project facing a stiff headwind ... Gabrielle has done a wonderful job of presenting the raw facts. It’s a story told from Davies’s point of view ... As well as being a detailed biography of Davies’s film career, this is a profile that does not lend itself to easy, moral, or psychoanalytic answers ... Readers who expect juicy tidbits about the fabled 32-year romance of Marion and W.R. may be disappointed. Captain of Her Soul is a university-press publication, with pages of footnotes and an extensive bibliography ... Gabrielle’s book is two stories interwoven seamlessly. One thread is a detailed narrative, told chronologically, of a genuine romance ... The other thread is an equally detailed narrative of the motion picture industry, in the same time frame ... In the final analysis, Gabrielle, like a detective or an archaeologist, has reconstructed a life history and made a convincing case, contrary to the prevailing cliché, that Marion was a complex, happy, and talented actress—and that whatever sorrow darkened her days, her love affair with W.R. Hearst was genuine, long-lasting, and intensely satisfying.
