Tous les livres de James Franco
Palo Alto, Californie. Cette petite ville huppée, berceau de l'informatique, a tout d'un paradis. Et pourtant... Des adolescents désorientés, accablés d'ennuie, se révoltent contre leur famille et leurs professeurs, s’entre déchirent, flirtent avec la violence et l'autodestruction.
Une jeune fille dont la vie vole en éclats lors d'une soirée trop arrosée; un étudiant qui fait l'apologie de l'esclavage au cours d'un exposé pour impressionner une camarade de classe; un adolescent solitaire qui collectionne des armes en rêvant de se venger de ses persécuteurs...
Apres et dérangeantes, ces histoires se croisent et se heurtent, dressant le portrait oppressant d'une jeunesse assoiffée de provocation
The Book Description: In A California Childhood Franco plays with the concept of memoir through personal snapshots, sketches, paintings, poems, and stories. "I was born in 1978 at Stanford Hospital and spent my first eighteen years in a single house at the end of a cul-de-sac in Palo Alto," Franco writes in his introduction. Steve Jobs's daughter and the grandson of one of the Hewlett-Packard founders may have both been in his graduating class, but just across the freeway from his home turf lay East Palo Alto, which in 1992 had the highest murder rate per capita in the country. For Franco, the terrain of his upbringing is fraught with the complication of a city divided. But within that diversity, universal aspects of adolescence rise to the surface, and those are the subjects at the heart of Franco's work.
The actors in James Franco’s brilliant debut novel include a McDonald’s drive-thru operator who spends his shift trying on accents; an ex-child star recalling a massive beachside bacchanal; hospital volunteers and Midwestern transplants; a vampire flick starlet who discovers a cryptic book written by a famous actor gone AWOL; and the ghost of River Phoenix. Then there’s Franco himself, who prowls backstage, peering out between the lines—before taking the stage with fascinating meditations on his art, along with nightmarish tales of excess. “Hollywood has always been a private club,” he writes. “I open the gates. I say welcome. I say, Look inside.”
Told in a dizzying array of styles—from lyric essays and disarming testimonials to hilariously rambling text messages and ghostly footnotes—and loosely modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous’s Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Actors Anonymous is an intense, wild ride into the dark heart of celebrity.
