But as challenging as it may have been, Ms. Bosworth’s life was hardly grim.

Patricia Crum was born into privilege on April 24, 1933, in San Francisco, the daughter of Bartley Cavanaugh Crum and Anna Bosworth Crum, who was known as Cutsie. Her mother was a former crime reporter who wrote several novels, among them “Strumpet Wind” (1938).

Her father, who was known as Bart, encouraged Patricia’s acting aspirations, and it was he who advised her to take her mother’s maiden name — depriving future critics of the chance, as she put it, to castigate a “crummy performance by Patricia Crum.”

During Ms. Bosworth’s childhood, her father practiced law in San Francisco and served as an adviser to the liberal-leaning internationalist Wendell Willkie in his Republican presidential campaign in 1940 and for some years after.

Image Ms. Bosworth’s second memoir, published in 2017, is both the story of a survivor who struggles with the suicides of her father and brother and an entertaining account of the author’s sexual awakening and her life among actors in New York. Credit... Patricia Wall/The New York Times

In her first memoir, Ms. Bosworth remembered her parents as glamorous figures, always leaving for parties or throwing them, their living room crowded with celebrities. But there were shadows behind the California sunlight.

Her mother, feeling abandoned by her constantly traveling husband, had affairs; her father’s heartfelt liberalism would run athwart of the postwar Red Scare. More than one reviewer of “Anything Your Little Heart Desires” compared the Crums’ story to an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

Mr. Crum’s decline followed his defense of members of the Hollywood Ten, who had refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in its attempt to root out suspected Communists in the movie industry. His corporate clients disappeared. He moved the family to New York, where he purchased the left-wing newspaper PM and tried to turn it around as The New York Star. The attempt failed, and he became despondent, worried about money and harassed by the F.B.I.