Jeanne Darst is the daughter of a family rich in striving, alcoholism, adultery, mania, depression and, incidentally, talent. Her father was an ambitious essayist, a blocked novelist, a busy adulterer ...

LOS ANGELESLOS ANGELES — Jeanne Darst has the perfect scenario for promoting her just-published book “Fiction Ruined My Family”: She’ll borrow every neighbor’s dirty dish, knife and fork and scatter ...

The connection between art and alcohol is legendary. In Jeanne Darst's memoir, Fiction Ruined My Family, she writes about what happens when that world collides with family life. Host Audie Cornish ...

In this memoir, freelance writer Darst has a brilliant eye for the absurd, sad, and often hilarious circumstances of her family life. Darst grew up as the youngest of four daughters. Her father, a ...

Former St. Louisan Jeanne Darst is "all about the wisecracks" in her "crazy-family" memoir, writes New York Times critic Janet Maslin in a review of Darst's "Fiction Ruined My Family." Book editor ...

Some people dream of smacking the game-winning grand slam in the bottom of the ninth, or curing cancer, or being elected president, or running into a burning building to rescue babies and/or kittens.

In 1976, Jeanne Darst’s glamorous parents uprooted her and her three sisters from their comfortable existence in St. Louis and moved to Amagansett, Long Island, so their brilliant father could write ...

This memoir about growing up in a family of eccentrics opens with the author’s father, the magazine writer Stephen Darst, cashing in his job and the family home and moving his wife and four young ...