I Met Someone

December 15, 2015
A novel of contemporary Hollywood, featuring dozens of real celebrities and a few invented ones. Nominally the story of a lesbian movie star named Dusty Wilding and the intrigues surrounding her search for her long-lost daughter, this book is in such poor taste, so wildly overwritten, and so apparently unedited that its main use is in a party game where people pass it around and read sentences aloud at random. Perhaps you will get this one. "Embedded in the lining of the net, the Fappening's birth had been inevitable, yet fate and history had chosen him to summon the lava flow of exposed taboo bodymaps--Jennifer Lawrence's and lesser cousins'--that verily swamped Old Reality, engulfing the pristine, elitist coastal cities of the lascivious, clay-footed gods of TMZ." Or maybe this one: " 'I don't know, ' said Tessa. 'I think I'm kinda over it. He says he wants to take me to Turks and Caikos [sic]. I call it Kikes and Jerkoffs...he has this boat. Or says he has a boat. So far, all I've seen are fucking pictures. On Instagram. He takes more pictures of that boat than he does of his dick. Whatever.' " Or this: "What really galled him was when she said it was 'okay' to want to die for a moral cause and went on to invoke burning nuns as if self-immolation was something everyone should aspire to. In the same breath, he admitted there would be something immensely appealing about watching Cara Delevingne, Kendall and Gigi Hadid set themselves on fire in real time on BuzzFeed." Wagner (Dead Stars, 2012, etc.) knows enough about Hollywood and its denizens to have written a Bret Easton Ellis-style nasty satire. Maybe that book is buried in here somewhere, under the run-on sentences, the scattershot italics, the tedious and constant namedropping, and the five- and seven-page monologues by minor characters, which inevitably contain more italics, namedropping, and demented writing. All that plus the interweaving of a ludicrous melodramatic plot about mistaken parentage, a sex cult, an organ transplant, suicide, and brain trauma is just more than any reader could possibly bear. The ravings of a writer who is either on drugs or off his meds.

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January 1, 2016
Aging Academy Awardwinning actress Dusty Wilding and her wife, Allegra, have just suffered their second miscarriage. The loss is devastating for Allegra, but inspiring for Dusty, who becomes motivated to search for the daughter she unwittingly gave away decades ago. Enlisting her posse of PR handlers, ego wranglers, BFFs, and shrinks, and fueled by regret, Dusty goes into overdrive. While Dusty focuses on her mission, Allegra sinks into an emotional breakdown, convinced Dusty is, instead, cheating on her with the look-alike actress who played her body double in her most recent film. Wagner (The Empty Chair, 2013) weaves elements of Greek tragedy, Shakespearean trickery, and Freudian treachery into this tawdry but affecting Tinseltown novel of lesbian marital discord, familial disruption, and Oedipal deception. Confronting maternal rage, female identity, the stigma of childlessness, and, as always, the shallowness of L.A.'s celebrity subculture, Wagner's trademark, over-the-top, West Coast satire nonetheless addresses these essential topics with surprising sensitivity and finesse.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2015

After her wife, Allegra, has a miscarriage, Academy Award-winning actress Dusty Wilding launches a desperate search for the daughter she gave up at age 16, shaking the very foundations of her glitzy-glammy Hollywood life. Wagner wrote the PEN/Faulkner finalist The Chrysanthemum Palace and the screenplay for Maps to the Stars, directed by David Cronenberg.

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