Blind Sight - Vintage Contemporaries

Zusatztext 77497953 Informationen zum Autor Meg Howrey was a professional dancer and actress. She lives in Los Angeles. Klappentext Seventeen-year-old Luke Prescott has been brought up in a bohemian matriarchy, surrounded by his divorced New Age mother, his religious grandmother, and two precocious half-sisters. He is writing his college applications when his father-a famous television star- invites him to Los Angeles for the summer. Luke accepts and is plunged into a world of location shooting, celebrity interviews, glamorous parties, and premieres. But as he begins to know the difference between his father's public persona and his private one, Luke finds himself questioning the new history he has created for himself. CHAPTER ONE   Names are just what we all agree to call things. They have noth­ing to do with the intrinsic reality of the objects they name.   I have been thinking about names, actually my name in particu­lar, for about ?fteen minutes now. What I should be doing is work­ing on my college application essay. That’s one of three things I have to do this summer. The other two are running between seventy and seventy-?ve miles per week, and getting to know my father, whom I just met. I’ve made a training schedule for running, and the essay only needs to be between three and ?ve hundred words, so those two shouldn’t be that hard.   My father ?ew me out here to Los Angeles ?ve days ago. I wouldn’t say that I know him yet.   Anyway, before I get to the essay, I’ve got to ?ll out the personal information section on these forms: name, gender, ethnic af?liation. “Who are you? What are you?”   It’s a very American kind of question, “What are you?” People are always telling you how they are Sicilian, or Polish, one-sixteenth Cherokee. People might hear my last name, and say, “Oh, is that English? Your family is from England?” And I will say, “No, my fam­ily is from America.” Because when it was your great-to-the-eighth­ power grandparents who emigrated here from England I feel like, “Yeah, I’m not really English, okay?”   I guess this doesn’t happen so much in other countries, where they don’t have an Ellis Island to chop off two syllables and six letters from your last name. Imagine this kind of conversation going on in Tokyo:   Japanese Speaker One: Hello, my name is Fumio Watanabe.   Japanese Speaker Two: Water . . . NOB . . . hay? Am I saying that right? What is that? Russian?   Yesterday I visited my dad for the ?rst time on the set of his TV show and there was a little confusion at the security booth. I gave my last name, “Prescott,” but the ID tag they had for me said “Franco.” I guess they assumed that I would have my father’s last name. It seems weird that he would have told them I do. Anyway, Mark Franco isn’t even my father’s real name.   My father’s real name is Anthony Boyle. He had to change it when he became an actor because when you do a movie or a televi­sion show you have to join the Screen Actors Guild and there was already an Anthony Boyle registered in the union. Two actors can’t have the same name, so my father had to change his. He didn’t make “Franco” up: it’s his mother’s maiden name. She is second-generation Mexican. (His father was “maybe Irish and something else.”) I forgot to ask where he got the “Mark” part.   My father told me that if people ask him what he is, he says he is Italian. His manager told him to do that because being Italian sounds sexy and being half Mexican and half maybe-partly Irish sounds “kind of random.”   If my father had kept his real name, then we—my family—would have made the connection that the guy on television and in movies was my dad. But since he and Sara—that’s my mom—didn’t really know each other that long, well, not  really at all really, and Sara didn’t have any pictures of him, and she never watches action movies anyway...

Product details

• Authors: Meg Howrey
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 04.09.2012
• EAN: 9780307739292
• ISBN: 978-0-307-73929-2
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 205 mm x 15 mm
• Series: Vintage Contemporaries; Vintage Contemporaries
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature