August 2009

So the Post tries to say my book’s going to piss off the real celebrities who act in fictitious ways in the book. In it you get a mean quote from Alec Baldwin and some other snark. You also get real-celeb portions of the novel.
Wish the reporter, Mandy Stadtmiller, had talked about one of my favorite writers, Bruce Wagner, who mingles reality and fiction beautifully in his own Hollywood novels. Or my hero and friend Bruce Jay Friedman, who in his hilarious 1974 short story “Let’s Hear It For a Beautiful Guy,” has his narrator fantasizing about how he would help Sammy Davis Jr. get some rest. (New Yorker subscribers can read the entire article for free online) here. Can anyone think of other books that mingle real characters with fictitious ones?

I wrote a blog for the Huffington Post on the benefits of breastfeeding – to the mother. I argue that even if the infant benefits are negligible, mothers should still nurse for the emotional and physical benefits to themselves. It’s Breastfeeding Awareness Week.

I am very sad about John Hughes’ death. He was influential to me as a writer and his movies were influential to me as an American teenager who was frequently unhappy during high school. When I got to interview Ally Sheedy in the ’90s I felt I was meeting an icon and we spent a long time talking about the shooting of The Breakfast Club. She talked about the makeover scene at the end of the film, when Molly Ringwald’s character gives her a makeover: “It was originally written as a makeover, but I asked John Hughes to change it because I didn’t want them to put makeup on me so I suddenly appear like this pretty girl.” She tried to make it that Molly was taking off Ally’s goth mask, instead of turning her into a pretty girl, though it didn’t come off that way in the movie.
Anyway, you can read the whole interview.
One of the things I didn’t like about John Hughes was the way the guys always came around, or the girls came to see the Duckies for the gods they really were. This doesn’t happen so often in real life, especially not during the teenage years.
I’m posting a piece I wrote about John Hughes when I was at NYPress about this romantic misleading.

PROSPECT PARK WEST got a nice, if somewhat inaccurate, writeup in Booklist, and was recently featured in the cover story in Publishers Weekly by Doree Shafrir about “the new chick lit.” Doree looks at my novel, Paula Froelich’s MERCURY IN RETROGRADE, and Gigi Levangie Grazer’s QUEEN TAKES KING, to see how these books are different from some of the single-girl literature published in the late ’90s. It’s a very smart piece.
More PROSPECT PARK WEST tour dates have been added – I will be in St. Louis, Decatur (GA), San Francisco and Los Angeles. If you live in any of these cities or know people who do, please visit the Tour page and tell your friends to come.