Based on a True Story
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A delectable satirical novel about celebrity culture, journalism, truth, lies, consequences — about the fictions we tell ourselves and the fictions we tell others.
Augusta Price (not her real name) is famous in England for playing a slatternly barmaid on a nighttime soap opera and for falling down drunk in public. Now, she has no job, no relationship with her long-lost son, and a sad shortage of tranquilizers — but she has had an improbable hit with her memoir (which is based on a true story, but only very loosely).
But when Frances Bleeker — an insecure and not very successful American tabloid journalist — tells Augusta that a man she once loved has written a book, Augusta becomes terrified that her life story will be revealed as the web of lies it really is. She sets out on a trans-Atlantic journey from London to California to seek revenge on her former lover — a journey that will require the reluctant help of Frances.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Augusta Price is a pill-popping middle-aged has-been with a boozy diva's primal thirst for drama. With her life and TV career in shambles, she's more prone than usual to go off the rails. Elsewhere in London is Frances Bleeker, a shy Californian whose journalism career in the British capital has recently tanked. Fortunately, her newspaper interview with Augusta leads to a gig ghost writing the actress's tell-all memoir and a bumpy trip to L.A. where figures from both women's pasts lurk. From the opening sentence of her debut ("It was not the first time she'd been asked to leave a clinic"), newspaper columnist Renzetti strives to signal a lightweight but outrageous comedy, somewhere between the Stoli-fuelled antics of the BBC's Absolutely Fabulous and the caustic black wit of Edward St. Aubyn. It's hit and miss; shopworn ridicule of Californians, a series of slurred drunken scenes, and pratfalls ensue. The story has an out-of-place redemption arc, and the sentimentality tends to domesticate and declaw what would have been a scandalous premise. Peppered liberally with zingers courtesy of Augusta, the result is a comedy that's sporadically funny, but no more edgy than a television sitcom on a major network.
