Former Greenpoint resident Jenny Hollowell returns to the neighborhood
to launch her new book, Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe. Facebook RSVP encouraged.
“Birdie
Baker, Hollowell’s magnetically flawed heroine, is both cruelly
ambitious and deeply sympathetic, and the book’s febrile vision of
sun-scorched Los Angeles makes me think of Play It As It Lays on every
page.”—The Daily Beast
America’s obsession with Hollywood
starlets is palpable. We eat up articles on actresses: their weight,
their love lives, their next roles, their shoes. Today’s stars are
better known to the public than any others in history. But we still
don’t know the real story, the physical tolls of an actress’ life before
she hits the glossy tabloid sheets. Living like Spartans – daily
exercise, extreme dieting, and a regimen of anti-aging creams – they
cling to their youth while waiting for that next one-line role to make
them big.
In EVERYTHING LOVELY, EFFORTLESS, SAFE: a novel,
author Jenny Hollowell exposes the ambition and will of body doubles and
adult film extras. Birdie Baker, the novel’s magnetic anti-heroine,
always dreamt of becoming someone other than the young wife of a pastor.
At twenty-two she walked out on her husband and deeply evangelical
parents, got on a bus to Los Angeles, and left behind her small-town,
small-time life.
Nine years later, Birdie's life in Hollywood is
far from golden, and nothing in the intervening years—the brutal
auditions, the tawdry commercials—has brought her any closer to the
transformation she craves. Caught between success and failure, haunted
by guilt about a tragedy in her long-forsaken family, Birdie is at the
brink of collapse when she meets Lewis, a beautiful but naive young
actor with his own troubled history, whose self-destructive impulses run
dangerously parallel to her own.
When her big chance finally
comes, Birdie must reconcile the wide-eyed girl she once was with the
jaded starlet she has become—and try to find herself and her future
somewhere in between. Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe is the story
of a young woman's struggle to make her own way in the Technicolor land
of make-believe.
About the Author:
Jenny Hollowell's short
fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Scheherezade, and the anthology
New Sudden Fiction. Her piece “A History of Everything, Including You”
was named a distinguished story by Best American Short Stories. She
received an MFA from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry
Hoyns Fellow in Fiction and recipient of the Balch Short Story Award.
She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. This is her
first novel.
