Famous Baby

March 31, 2014
This deft first novel from Rizzo, author of the memoir Things to Bring, S#!t to Do... and Other Inventories of Anxiety, uses a driven professional blogger and her resentful daughter as a springboard for a satirical exploration of the modern American family. After publishing one celebrated novel, L.A. writer Ruth Steinberg fails to deliver a follow-up, instead turning to nonfiction and the popular “Full Nest Blog,” mining her own life, and that of her husband, Justin, and daughter, Abbie, for material. Now 18, Abbie is estranged from her mother, whom she has dubbed “the First Lady of Cyber Exploitation” for chronicling Abbie’s entire life online. Ruth’s newest scheme is to broadcast her dying mother Esther’s final days over webcam, but Abbie catches on and spirits her grandmother away to Tucson, Ariz. Ruth, along with Harold Klein, her agent and onetime lover, launches an attempt to find them before word of their escape gets out. Meanwhile, Eric Smith, an earnest young filmmaker, is trying to persuade a skeptical Abbie to cooperate with a documentary about her life as a “famous baby” of the Internet age. Rizzo’s wicked takedown of “mom bloggers” concludes on an unexpectedly but convincingly sweet note, making this a very pleasing debut. Agent: Joy Tutela, David Black Agency.