Editor’s Note: Allegra Huston’s new book, Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found, hits bookstores on April 7. Allegra is the youngest daughter of film director John Huston and sister of Oscar-winning actress Anjelica Huston. She was born in London, raised in Ireland and Los Angeles, and now lives in Taos, NM. She was a publisher in London for nine years and has been a freelance writer and editor since 1994.

I need a clone. It’s my own fault — I never intended to get sucked into my husband’s business. Hell, I’m not even married to him. But Cisco and I have been together for ten years, we have a six-year-old son, we’ve built a house, so what’s mine is his and what’s his is mine: specifically, three storage units of old junk, the most wonderful stepson in the world (an older brother for my son) and Los Rios River Runners, New Mexico’s oldest whitewater rafting company. Cisco founded it when he was 25.

In my old days, in London, I wore tailored trousers and high heels and worked as an editor in publishing. If you’d met me then, you’d never think I would end up in a single-wide trailer with the wheels still on, in a dusty patch of sagebrush beside the highway, fielding three phones, while a bunch of long-haired, waterlogged river guides in the kitchen boast about their lines through Ski Jump and Enema and the Dead Texan Holes and the Punk Rock. Some of them — the guys, that is — are painting their toenails blue as they discuss world politics on the porch.

I started hanging out at the boathouse because it was fun, I was in love with the boss and I got to raft a world-class stretch of whitewater whenever there was room in a boat. I never wanted to be a guide; if I had people’s lives in my hands, I’d never sleep again. But I can follow instructions, especially when there are only four of them — Forward! Back paddle! Right back! Left back! — and, because you sit on one side of the boat, in fact only three will apply. It didn’t take long before I experienced a new and delicious sensation: I felt adventurous and even, on a good day, buff. Not something I’d ever felt as a publisher.

Here’s how the slippery slope begins: One more phone line is ringing than there are people to answer it, so I pick it up and take a reservation. Then there’s a morning when we — oops, it’s not "we" already, is it? — are short-staffed. Then I realize how many mistakes are being made. Then comes the fatal day: I get a good idea. "But we’ve done it that way for 30 years!" Cisco says. Here, honey. Let me help you.

So there it is, the new me: office queen of Los Rios River Runners, with loose skirts and wide hippie feet and a giant bottle of water to stave off the effects of altitude. It’s fun. I laugh a lot, I’m never bored, we stay solvent and ten thousand people a year get to experience nature in all her wild glory. But wait a minute: What happened to the old me? Wasn’t I once an editor? A writer? Someone with my own bank account, which I’d like once again to put something into? A person with my own life?

So I carved out the time to keep a hold on the self I had four decades invested in. I’d been writing screenplays, but one morning I woke up with the desire to write a memoir: the story of my nomadic childhood, my fractured family, the mother I lost when I was four. I could write it, finally, because now it has a happy ending.