Leavings: Memoir of a 1920s Hollywood Love Child—hardcover

Description

Leavings: Memoir of a 1920s Hollywood Love Child by Megan McCLard

From California to Colorado, from childhood to adulthood, Megan is passed among a real-life Dickensian cast of characters. Despite the relentless confusion of her journey she triumphs in discovering where she comes from and who she is.

Leavings: Memoir of a 1920s Hollywood Love Child begins with Megan’s birth in 1927. She is the love child of a Hollywood screenwriter and director, and a narcissistic married woman twenty-four years his senior. Abandoned in the hospital as a newborn and made a ward of the city of Los Angeles, twenty-one-month-old Megan lands in a stable home with strict Pentecostal foster parents who are dutiful in her care, but not loving.

As a young child Megan has a strong sense of not belonging—at home, at school, or even at church. She sleeps on a cot at the foot of her foster sister’s bed. Her teacher asks her to leave first grade after she cries for two weeks. She never gets saved at church. Even her name comes and goes, depending on under whose care she falls.

Hers is a life of continual searching, and repeated leavings—both left by others and forced to leave. We follow this odd but lovable child, adolescent, and young adult through a solitary life of acute observation and search for identity, from finding her birth father to meeting her half siblings, an early marriage, children, meeting the woman who will be the love of her life and, finally, divorce and freedom.

Megan’s extraordinary story transports us across many decades and to locations throughout the western United States. Through beautiful prose, she imparts astute commentary on political events with vivid descriptions of the social and moral views of the times. Each encounter shapes her experience of the world, as we witness her journey to a life of belonging and acceptance, a woman who in the end becomes closer to being the person she wants to be.

Leavings: Memoir of a 1920s Hollywood Love Child: About  the Author

MEGAN BROWN MCCLARD was born in 1927 in Hollywood and died in 2023 at the age of 96 in Portland, OR. She attended schools in California, Montana, and Colorado. As a single mother of five children, she began college at age thirty-five.  She went on to earn a PhD in English at University of Denver, specializing in creative writing. And later, Megan taught literature, writing, and women’s studies for many years at Metropolitan State University in Denver before retiring as a professor emeritus. She published two books for young people, Hiawatha and the Iroquois League; Harriet Tubman: Slavery and the Underground Railroad.