Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade is a 1955 novel by American author Patrick Dennis chronicling the madcap adventures of a boy, Patrick, growing up as the ward of his Aunt Mame Dennis, the sister of his dead father.
Kerry, a wealthy and socially prominent New York City ten-year-old, describes how his parents' marriage falls apart on Christmas morning, and recounts their divorce, his mother's romance with her ambitious lawyer and his father's with a fashionably skinny magazine editor.
Following in the tradition of Auntie Mame, bestselling author Patrick Dennis turns his wicked satirical pen on the insane world of fictional film director Leander Starr. Fleeing the IRS, creditors, and jilted lovers, Starr holes up in a Mexico City apartment—Casa Ximenez—with his faithful valet, Alistair St. Regis. Soon others descend on the villa—Starr's ex-wife, his estranged socialite daughter, a shady Mexican film producer, a tax collector who has chased Starr around the world, and a dim young widow sitting on a fortune in laxative stock. Starr concocts a plan to distract them all: an abbreviated cinematic epic covering the history of Mexico titled Valley of the Vultures, starring them. Will the scheme work?
In addition to Dennis's uproarious novel, this fresh edition includes a long-lost short story of Leander Starr, "'Twas the Night Before Christmas in the Railway Station," as well as a new afterword by the author's son.