A short while back, I was watching Tell Me All Your Secrets on Amazon Prime, which is a really good show that I recommend. Here’s the premise: a youngish woman (played by Lily Rabe) gets out of jail on the witness protection program. Her ex-boyfriend is a convicted serial killer and there are still several missing girls the authorities believe he might have been murdered, so Lily Rabe’s job is to help with that and tell them whatever she can. Meanwhile, the mother (played by Amy Brenneman) of a …
Book Review: White Ivy
I have taken many fiction writing courses, and I’ve also had my writing reviewed by readers, critics, and my agent. One thing I've found to be consistent is, no one seems to like it when a main character does something unlikeable. Just this weekend, I took a fiction writing workshop where the presenter said the main character needs to be sympathetic or compelling, and he or she needs to change over the course of the novel. For most readers, a compelling main character doesn’t seem …
Little Disasters
I still remember those days leading up to having my first baby, the anxiety I felt that I might lose my identity once I became a mother. All I heard was, “nobody tells you hard it is,” it being motherhood. Yet I felt the opposite was true. Not that motherhood isn’t hard, but that the hardship was all I seemed to hear about. What took me by surprise was the overwhelming love and joy that this little baby brought to my life. This “little baby” is now a teenager, which reminds …
The Escape Room
Nearly two years ago, before Covid 19 was a thing, my son Eli and I went to an escape room together. I had bought a Groupon, thinking it would be a fun mother/son activity, especially since Eli’s good at solving puzzles and I’m good at being a sidekick. I remember that he’d just had his braces put on that morning and that I’d injured my knee, so neither of us were in top form, and it was our first escape room ever and we were the only two people there. We tried to solve the clues, while he …
The Comeback
Ella Berman’s The Comeback is a post #metoo saga about Grace Turner, a Hollywood star who achieves fame at a very young age, develops the requisite addiction and emotional issues that childhood stars seem often to battle, and then drops suddenly and inexplicably into obscurity. When the story begins Grace is living with her parents in a suburb of LA, but after tensions with her mother bubble over, Grace returns to Hollywood and confronts her estranged …