NEW YORK — No posters or photographs of Orson Welles hang in the living room of his eldest daughter, Chris Welles Feder. His memory is preserved, imperfectly, through a shelf of books that Feder says have yet to capture her father's many-sided life.

"There are some excellent studies about him, but I feel that the Orson Welles I knew doesn't really exist in these books because many of the people who wrote them never got closer than a long distance phone call," she says.

Feder, author of the popular "Brain Quest" series for young people, may be one of the reasons Welles' story remains incomplete. She has talked to few of his biographers and acknowledges that she has had a hard time reconciling the genius of "Citizen Kane" with her dynamic, but distant father, who died in 1985.

But in recent years, she has reached her "great goal" of peace with Welles and found the words. In 2002, she privately published "The Movie Director," a collection of poems. She now has written a memoir, "In My Father's Shadow," just released by Algonquin Books, the darkened cover showing a gray, bearded Welles, hand holding a cigar before his mouth like an old king pointing a sword.

"I wanted to write a book that would give Orson Welles a human face," says the 71-year-old Feder, interviewed on a rainy afternoon at her apartment in downtown Manhattan. "I wanted to show him with all his warts and holes, but also with the qualities that don't come through in the other books."

Her father's spirit flickers in Feder's eyes, but she more resembles her mother and Welles' first wife, actress Virginia Nicolson. Feder's features are refined, her voice light, her diction even and untheatrical. Her true inheritance from her father, she says, is a love of the arts and an appreciation for people of different backgrounds and cultures.

Feder's book is new to followers of Welles — who married three times and had three daughters — if only because she is the first blood relative to write about him. In Feder's memoir, Welles is a performer even in real life, a maker of bold entrances and sudden exits, a composite of his most famous characters — as imperious as Charles Foster Kane, as unknowable as Harry Lime of "The Third Man," as wounded as Falstaff in "Chimes of Midnight."

"I learned quite a bit of intimate stuff about Orson and what he was like as a father," says director Peter Bogdanovich, a friend of Welles' who wrote often about him. "None of it surprised me; it all reminded me of the man I knew. He could be the doting father and he could disappear. He could be a doting friend and he could disappear. But he'd eventually turn up."