Memoir highlights life with (and without) famous father

Some fathers are in the delivery room when their children are born and some pace outside, but actress Anjelica Huston's dad learned of his daughter's birth by telegram in the Belgian Congo where he was filming The African Queen.

That circumstance fore-shadows an extraordinary childhood with an often absent father that Huston shares in her memoir, A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York.

If a storytelling gene exists, Huston, 62, inherited one from her father, the Oscar-winning director John Huston, and another from her mother, the ballet dancer Enrica Soma, who nurtured in her children a love of books and a gift for observation.