"Sheilah Graham was my mother and I grew up listening to her memories and anecdotes that she both told and wrote in books. Stories of a world I found fascinating: Bogart, Harpo Marx, Marc Connelly, John O’Hara, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley — the whole Algonquin Table crowd who had made their way to the Garden of Allah to drink effusively by the swimming pool, and make great sums of money in the movies. After my mother died in 1988 I spent a number of years researching her life as a young woman, before my birth. It was my way to lay her ghost to rest, and for me this was a complicated ghost. She was my mother, after all. But not someone I entirely knew."