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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 4.75/5
Started: 7 December 2021
Finished: 7 December 2021
Summary:
Grace was fifteen when she auditioned for her first movie. She got the job. Her family moved from England to a town an hour from LA, and she was placed under the watchful eye of a team prepared to create a perfect image for her, and Able, a rising genius director. Able made her a star. He payed attention to her, helped her feel special, invincible. But then a pattern started. He would be cold and cruel for months, then warm and kind in a heartbeat. He told her that she couldn't trust her own mind. Then he made her touch him. She was sixteen. She stopped trusting him, started being afraid of him, but her success was so tied to his. She had no choices. She had no escape.
Years later, Grace isn't any more okay. Her marriage has crumbled, her career has gone sideways, and she's become dependent on substances in the hopes that they will shut off her mind enough to forget about how Able made her feel. But after a year of hiding at her parents house, she decides to return to LA. There, she must come to terms with the selfishness and her trauma, and find people to support her, and figure out whether she wants to try to restart her career, or expose Able as her abuser.
Thoughts:
This book was so good. I wasn't even really expecting to read it at all, but I was kind of obsessed, and read it in one day. It was super interesting because the main character was not a good person, and many of her flaws were not caused by or excused by her trauma. Of course, her relationship issues and substance issues were mainly caused by her trauma, but she was selfish and a horrible friend, and those things had been with her since before she even got famous. I'm pretty sure that she was a narcissist, and I don't think I've ever read a book from the perspective of a not-self-aware narcissist. I loved the complexity of relationships in the book, especially those between the female characters. One thing that I was not expecting was the ending. I thought the end of the book was going to involve Grace doing something fully irredeemable at the end of a series of partially irredeemable actions that would get her either arrested, committed, or killed. I wasn't expecting her partially happy ending. I understand how the author wanted to end with compassion, so that people who struggle with similar things to what Grace struggles with can see the possibility of redemption, but frankly, I think that happy endings are boring when put on the end of a book that incites a mix of fascination, compassion, and horror. After all, it's easiest to be sympathetic toward the dead.
Words:
Anodyne (adj) not likely to provoke dissent or offense; inoffensive, often deliberately so
Insipid (adj) lacking flavor; lacking vigor or interest
Insouciant (adj) showing a casual lack of concern; indifferent
Malaise (n) a general feeling of discomfort, illness, or uneasiness whose exact cause is difficult to identify
Inane (adj) silly, stupid
Auteur (n) a filmmaker whose personal influence and artistic control over a movie are so great that the filmmaker is regarded as the author of the movie