The Paper Wasp

Having abandoned her artistic promise, Abby Graven envies former best friend Elise, a rising Hollywood star. But at their high school reunion, Elise proclaims Abby to be the true artist. A debut novel after the story collection The Wonder Garden, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick.

April 15, 2019
Acampora’s debut novel (following collection The Wonder Garden) is an unsettling and surreal excavation of the boundless depths of the human psyche. Abby Graven, once valedictorian of her high school class, is a 28-year-old college dropout, living at her parents’ home in Michigan and plagued by hyperrealistic and fantastical dreams in the vein of the dark movies she loves. When she decides to go to her 10-year high school reunion, it is with the hopes of seeing her former best friend Elise Van Dijk, now a rising actress in Hollywood, whose ascent Abby has been compulsively documenting. Elise is effervescent when she sees Abby again, making a throwaway comment that Abby should call her if Abby’s ever in L.A. Months later, Abby takes Elise up on that offer. Though clearly thrown, Elise welcomes Abby into her home and soon offers her a job as her personal assistant. But the more intimately Abby becomes intertwined with Elise’s life, the more she realizes how insecure and unstable her friend truly is. Meanwhile, Abby’s dreams grow more and more bizarre, making it difficult for her to distinguish them from reality, with eventually catastrophic results. Acampora’s writing is gorgeous and renders with precision and clarity the spiral of Abby’s increasingly disorienting world of obsession and hallucinatory imagery. The result is a piercing, disquieting novel. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency.

Starred review from April 1, 2019
In this thrilling debut novel, a young woman with big but unfocused ambitions moves to Los Angeles to become the personal assistant to her childhood best friend, a rising Hollywood starlet. Brilliant Abby never really made it out of her childhood bedroom in Michigan. Her vivid dream life and teenage obsession with the surrealist filmmaker Auguste Perren have pinned her in one place while she grows ever more detached and depressed. "The walls around my dream life leaked," Abby admits, early in the novel. "My night visions were three-dimensional, lavishly detailed scenes, feature-length films." But when Elise Van Dijk, Abby's childhood best friend and a now-famous actress, returns home for their 10-year high school reunion, her near-erotic dreams of reconnection take on the contours of reality. Weeks after the reunion, Abby hops a plane to LA and shows up out of the blue at Elise's gated front door, where she resumes her role as best friend, confidante, and support system. "I was simply there to listen, to groan in sympathy and glow with pride....I loved the sound of your voice. Whatever its petty grievances or vacuous prattle, I would have been happy to hear it forever." Acampora (The Wonder Garden, 2015) writes propulsive sentences at a fever pitch, guiding the reader through Abby's dream world as she hunts for corresponding clues in a reality of her own making. Told in the second person, the novel is by turns a confession, an accusation, and a stalker's diary, yet it is also grounded by Acampora's musings on philosophy, art, and ambition. While there are more novels than ever dedicated to obsessive female friendship, Acampora takes a relationship story that could have been reduced to petty jealousy and turns it into something bigger and weirder, as if David Lynch had astral projected into the work of Melissa Broder. This is the Los Angeles of weird cults and day-drunk stars, of struggling documentary filmmakers and mysterious but powerful directors. By turns demented, sad, and frightening, Abby is a unique heroine making all the wrong choices feel somehow right and just. Utterly bizarre and completely bewitching, this twisted, delicious tale will grab you from the first page and hurl you over the edge.

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May 15, 2019
In the lead-up to their Michigan high-school reunion, it's clear that artist and grocery clerk Abby has experienced dark times in the intervening 10 years, while her girlhood best-friend Elise adorns glossy pages as a Hollywood starlet. Despite their years apart, Elise tells Abby at the reunion that she must come visit her, which is all the encouragement Abby needs to purchase a one-way ticket on her parents' credit card. In Elise's new Malibu dream home, the old friends revisit the youthful passion neither has abandoned for Perren, an auteur whose holistic approach to filmmaking blurs boundaries between the alert and unconscious mind and whose next film Elise hopes to be in. Abby is a roiling mix of bold self-belief and traumatic self-loathing. Battling demons of her own, Elise smoothes Abby's rough edges with warmth and flattery until a relationship divides them, and Abby plans a score-settling mission. Light on plot propulsion and heavy on dream-retelling, Acampora's first novel following the acclaimed story collection, The Wonder Garden (2015), will appeal to fans of character-driven psychodramas.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)