The things that have survived from Nicca Ray’s past are somewhat remarkable — the doll she got at the Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles when she was five; the piles of diaries that moved with her from place to place; the pictures that document a misspent youth.
Most remarkable, though, is that Ray herself has survived.
The daughter of legendary film director Nicholas Ray — who abandoned her and her mother when she was three — Ray found herself in a spiral of drug use, alcohol addiction and random sex before she was legally able to drink.
Now sober since she was 20, the 62-year-old Nicca Ray, a Gramercy resident, is an accomplished author who has fearlessly examined her past while searching for the truth of her missing dad, who reappeared 10 years after he left — still failing to take up the mantle of fatherhood.
Ray’s memoir “Ray By Ray: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray,” is a fascinating tale that combines the harrowing saga of her upbringing with a bio of sorts of the director’s journey, with some major doses of mental and physical abuse thrown in.
“I spent close to 20 years on it,” Nicca Ray says. “Five solid years of interviewing people, and then 10 years of figuring out how to write it — and then five years actually writing. I had help with the interviews. … i was sometimes hard to process.”
Although she didn’t set out to use the process as therapy, she says the result turned out to be “life-changing.” The hardest part, she admits, was “listening to his former students say that he was like a father to them. In the end, it was therapeutic, but it was hard to realize that my father was more interested in drugs and alcohol than he was in me.”
She made sure that her interview subjects knew that they were not to hold back with their accounts, but that wasn’t always easy for her to deal with.
“It was hard,” Ray admits. “I ate a lot of chocolate! But I was grateful for their honesty.”
After “Ray By Ray,” Nicca concentrated on publishing her poetry. “Back Seat Baby” is her “ode to LA and the childhood druggie years.” “Curve,” as she describes, “deals with sexual abuse and trauma and then coming out of that.”
The just released “Go Go Go Girl” is “a memoir in poems.” A collaboration with her partner of 34 years, artist Jesse McCloskey, Ray describes it as “having a little more breath in the poems — a little more hope, a little more space.” While it may be less dark, she notes that while she is “writing about love, there’s no roses or meadows or any of that bulls#!t.”
McCloskey has previously contributed to her books, but this is the first time they have collaborated fully. For “Go Go Go Girl,” he created imagery based on her poems most of the time, but some of the text was created in response to his artwork.
“The thing I love about her poetry is that she paints pictures — a really three-dimensional world,” offers McCloskey. “They are very visual poems. I find it very easy to find the characters and make drawings for them. There’s a desperation in a lot of them that I respond very strongly to.”
“He gets the essence of the poems,” concurs Ray. “He sees what I’m saying.”
Coming up for Ray is a memoir about her mother, who embraced the sexual revolution and made some very questionable life choices. Titled “Love And Cigarettes,” it’s finished and in the final planning stages. Beginning when Ray was 20, it examines that fraught relationship, filling in the blanks left in “Ray By Ray.”
“She was a hard mother to have,” Ray explains. “Our relationship was difficult, we fought a lot. But it got easier over time and we started to understand and appreciate each other.”
Another nonfiction book about the girls who populated the LA scene in her teen years is also in development, and a play is scheduled to run at the Theatre for the New City in the winter of 2025.
Although she has a day job as a restaurant manager, she writes every day — frequently getting out of bed at two in the morning to sit in her blue chair and type ideas into her laptop. She knows that she is heading into the future because she has come to grips with her past.
“I had to write the first book in order to be where I am now,” she says. “I couldn’t have gotten to the place where I am and really embraced myself as a writer unless I had done ‘Ray By Ray.’ I had to come out of his shadow.”
Follow Nicca Ray for information about upcoming readings and book info on Instagram at @niccaray and @niccaraywrites.
