The narrative risks that Quinn takes in the book do not always work convincingly, but the decision to write psychoanalytic autobiography was a courageous one. Set in a psychiatrist's office where he is beginning therapy, the autobiography begins with the psychiatrist reading from news clippings that in characteristic Hollywood style embroider Quinn's cultural origins. The clippings brag that his father was an "Irish adventurer" and his mother an "Aztec princess," and romanticize their participation in the Mexican revolution of 1910. Quinn's response to this "Indian princess crap" is largely what directs the narrative tone. Quinn feels deep antipathy for those forces in American society that, first, limited his creative aspirations and then, when he did succeed, invented a story that, in erasing his Mexican, lower-class origins, conformed to Hollywood's--and America's--fantasy of itself.
Since the glittering Hollywood image is what he wishes to exorcise, he retrieves his real Mexican-Irish past. Quinn's narrative of his birth in Chihuahua on 21 April 1915 and his early life in Mexico takes place during a visit Quinn has with his mother after his first session with the psychiatrist. Rather than relate the story himself, Quinn dramatizes his mother's telling of the events of his early years: he was the son of Manuela Pallares ("Nellie") Quinn, a self-sufficient woman but an obedient wife of Francisco Quinn, whom she followed while he was a soldier in Pancho Villa's army.
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