A furiously funny, clear-eyed novel about a non-bimbo's dating adventures in a town that celebrates bimbosity.   Elizabeth West is twenty-eight, which means she's just entered The Zone--that seven-year span in a woman's life when the pressure to find Mr. Right is at its most intense. For Elizabeth, however, the quest is not about Mr. Right so much as it is about Mr. Maybe. And on some nights, all she's looking for is a little distraction . . .   What complicates Elizabeth's quest are the particulars of her situation. She is a writer of testosterone-heavy screenplays--the blow-'em-up vehicles for eight-figure stars and their bad-boy directors--and therefore deals on a daily basis with men who traffic nearly exclusively in bimbos, which, like smog and palm trees, are a fixture of the L.A. landscape. Though her job requires her to sound like one of the boys (sample dialogue: "I don't deal with dickbrains"), she's very much a girl, from her cell-phone codependency to her chronic attraction to dangerous men. With her female friends succumbing to marriage or morphing into Spermtrappers (women who hunger to be impregnated--husband optional), Elizabeth finds herself questioning the long-term benefits of remaining an SCU (self-contained unit) and looking with new eyes at the mating options around her.

The Cigarette Girl

Literature & Fiction

Carol, Wolper

Contemporary

Pan.

Can a girl in Hollywood ever trust her girlfriends not to sleep with her famous boyfriend? What's the fastest route out of the life slump that particularly afflicts thirty-five-year-olds who've already done a decade in the "the business"? Should PDPs (Public Displays of Privacy) be outlawed? And what is a "secret celebrity" anyway? Carol Wolper answers these and other burning questions in this sharp-eyed and sly novel, the perfect follow-up to her bestselling The Cigarette Girl.   Secret Celebrity tells the story of Christine Chase, a thirty-five-year-old filmmaker who is seeking deliverance from ambivalence about everything in her personal and professional life via her latest documentary subject: Richard Gault, a famously elusive, mythically cool cultish actor/musician who went underground in the seventies rather than sell out.   In the process of searching out her secret celebrity and discovering how the legend was born, Christine learns a lot about the kind of people willing to pay the steep price of fame, those who'll pay anything just to trail in its wake, and the kind of people you couldn't pay enough. . . .  Achingly inside, hilariously acute, and right on the money, Secret Celebrity is a novel that sends up our celeb-obsessed culture.

Secret Celebrity

Pan Books

<p>When a couple of box-office bombs lead to a dramatic downturn in his career, an aging action star embarks on a journey of self-discovery and self-invention in the hope of getting in touch with his sensitive side and re-creating himself as a serious actor, in a hilarious look at the wild and wacky world of Hollywood. By the author of The Cigarette Girl. 12,500 first printing.</p>

Mr. Famous

Humor & Satire

Riverhead Books

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Books by Carol, Wolper