Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely?
A Novel
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- $299.00
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- $299.00
Descripción editorial
From New York Times bestselling author Sarah McCoy—a spellbinding novel based on a true story: a beautiful young movie star of Hollywood’s Golden Age gives up her bright career to become a nun.
In 1969, twenty-three-year-old starlet Lori Lovely, the apple of Hollywood’s eye, shocks the world by ditching a promising film career to take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as a Benedictine nun. Gossip columnists and scandal sheets can’t get enough of the story. Why would such a beautiful girl take the veil? Was she hiding from someone? Did it have anything to do with her costar, heartthrob singer Lucas Wesley?
In 1990, Lu Tibbott is under the gun to complete her senior thesis in modern American history. Instead of spending weeks in dusty archives, Lu decides to dig into a true twentieth-century mystery and write about her aunt Lori, now the Mother Abbess at a cloistered convent in rural New England. Biographers, journalists, and media types have long speculated about her aunt Lori’s sudden departure from Hollywood. Mother Lori, however, has refused all requests for interviews—until Lu arrives at the abbey with a tape recorder in hand. To her delight, Mother Lori announces she’s finally ready to talk...but only if Lu is truly ready to listen.
Lu is shocked to discover that the story of Lori Lovely’s rise in Hollywood was far more tumultuous than she’d ever expected, a fairy tale twisting with ambition, unforeseen alliances, forbidden love, and secrets. What began as a history thesis now threatens to upend all their lives with its unexpected truths, especially as the media gets wind of Lu’s project and begins to ask…
Whatever happened to Lori Lovely?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McCoy (The Baker's Daughter) spins an entertaining if derivative tale of a faded celebrity. In a framing device set in 1990, college student Lu Tibbott is "floundering" in her history classes, having changed majors multiple times in an effort to find out "who I wanted to be." Desperate for a senior thesis topic, she latches onto the story of her aunt Lori Lovely, a onetime budding Hollywood starlet who left show business at 23 in 1969 to become a nun. Born Lucille Hickey in Pufftown, N.C., Lori moves to New York City at 18 to live with her sister and her husband and help at their photography studio while the young couple struggles to start a family. Dazzled by the "immortality" of fame, Lori auditions for a role as an extra in a musical. She's then accepted at a school in London, where she lands the role of a lifetime in a musical film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Lori's on-screen chemistry with heartthrob Lucas, who plays Romeo, skyrockets her to fame and leads to a tumultuous affair with her costar. McCoy ably evokes the glitter and grit of mid-century moviemaking, but the melodramatic story behind Lori's retreat, which explains Lu's own life as well, is not only predictable but notably similar to that of Taylor Jenkins Reid's The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. This one doesn't quite stand on its own.
