Excerpt from Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Now I knew why Hitler shoved all the Jews into ovens," my grandmother said, clutching my hand tight, "and it's a shame he missed you, too!"

"Grandma!" I said outside the store. "I don't think you should have said that."

"Oh, I was just making her day interesting," my grandmother said. "Stop taking everything I say so goddamn seriously." No apologies later, in a month or two we were back there shopping like nothing had happened.

When the "politicians downtown" refused to put up a stoplight on Sunset after a child died crossing the boulevard, June rounded up my mother and a friend in a three-woman protest and began randomly stepping out into traffic disruptively until a light was installed.

This was how the mayor did business.

• • •

My grandmother loved the movies. She'd switch on cable in the morning like she was checking with a good friend on the day's gossip. If nothing good was playing, she'd take the bus downtown to dilapidated one-dollar-a-ticket movie palaces that'd become makeshift homeless hotels, staving off bums with her house keys in the bathrooms. Her favorite memories were of watching movies in those same theaters with her mother, Lucille. She died in 1941, but my grandmother spoke of her daily, as if she'd just gotten off the phone with her. Lucille often needed "time away" from being a mother, and she'd send June, whom she nicknamed Eek for her inability to speak in a clear voice, to a series of convents and reform schools, including the Ventura School for Girls. They'd celebrate June's releases by going to the movies. When she was eleven, Lucille took June to the premiere of City Lights, standing outside the Los Angeles theater downtown as part of a teeming mass of twenty-five thousand fans lining Broadway, tiptoeing and flamingo-necking for a glimpse of Charlie Chaplin. When the churning crowd almost crushed June, her mother beat her with a belt for being clumsy. Once, June was released to the custody of a family friend who accompanied her to Long Beach, where her mother was living. She arrived on the day of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake that killed over one hundred people. Lucille said, "You brought the damn earthquake with you, Eek!"

Gone With the Wind was the last film she and her mother saw together. When Clark Gable said, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!" there was a collective audience gasp.

Lucille stood up and shouted, "You tell her, Rhett!"

My grandmother valued the dead. On her always-on TV, June catalogued the opening credits of black-and-whites with a Hollywood Babylon encyclopedic knowledge of every deceased actor's sordid backstory: "Gable, he's dead. Womanizer. Monroe, she OD'd; beautiful but no talent. Montgomery Clift, he died a drunk. My God, they're all dead! Clift was such a gorgeous man but liked to swing both ways." (Confused look from a six-year-old me.) "You know, he liked women and men!"

Like many of the women in my family, my grandmother rooted for the bad girls in movies. Every month, cable played the same twelve movies multiple times a week; an endless loop of my grandmother's favorite roles. Shirley MacLaine tearing up her "ungrateful" daughter Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment. Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, my grandmother shouting in unison with Joan from her oversized recliner, "Don't fuck with me, fellas!" Susan Hayward played Barbara Graham in one of my grandmother's favorites, the "based on a true story" potboiler I Want to Live! My grandmother told me again and again that Graham lived behind our property for a few months before she was arrested in 1953 for pistol whipping an elderly woman to death in a botched robbery and sent to die in San Quentin State Prison's gas chamber.

"What a woman!" my grandmother said.

I'd walk up to the thicket of trees and bushes that separated our backyard from Graham's former house to see what ghosts this pretty murderess had left behind. What I found were swarms of cats the house's current owner hosted, fed, and watered. When he died, the cats mewed for days as they succumbed to malnutrition. By the time the stragglers crawled through the chain-link fence to our yard looking for food and water, most of the cats had died. Solemn, I rattled kibble in pie tins for the survivors but my grandmother said it was hopeless.

Excerpted from Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse. Copyright © 2014 by Brando Skyhorse. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.