Suzanne Vale

First Lines Fridays: April 27, 2018

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First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

  • Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
  • Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
  • Finally… reveal the book!

First Lines:

Suzanne Vale had a problem, and it was the one she least liked thinking about: She’d had a child with someone who forgot to tell her he was gay.
He forgot to tell her, and she forgot to notice.

Interested? Scroll down for the cover and summary!

The Best Awful by Carrie Fisher
(Suzanne Vale, book 2)

Suzanne Vale, the Hollywood actress whose drug addictions and rehab rigors were so brilliantly dissected by Carrie Fisher in “Postcards from the Edge,” is back. And this time she has a new problem: She’s had a child with someone who forgot to tell her he was gay. He forgot to tell her, and she forgot to notice. What’s worse, Suzanne’s not sure she has what it takes to be the best mother to her daughter, Honey. She can’t seem to shake the blues from losing Honey’s father, Leland, to Nick — the man who got the man who got away. Or maybe those aren’t the blues, just more symptoms of her sprawling multi-symptom bipolar illness: an illness Suzanne can’t bring herself to take all that seriously, no matter what her doctors say. (After all, how serious can an illness be whose symptoms are spending sprees, substance abuse, and sexual promiscuity?) And now, worst of all, under the watchful round eyes of the pills the doctors plied her with, even her friends are starting to find her a little…boring.

The obvious solution is to take a little walk on the wild side. But what starts out as a brief gambol through the scary/fun world of twenty-first-century dating becomes a vigorous jog-trot through the latest drug wonderland — and finally a wild gallop toward a psychotic break and a stay in “the bin.”

Based on a truant’s story, “The Best Awful” is Carrie Fisher’s most powerful and revealing novel: hilarious, moving, and fully informed by the wisdom of a true survivor.

First Lines Fridays: April 20, 2018

LeeLeave a comment

First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

  • Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
  • Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
  • Finally… reveal the book!

First Lines:

Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares? My life is over anyway.

Interested? Scroll down for the cover and summary!

Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher
(Suzanne Vale, book 1)

When we first meet the extraordinary young actress Suzanne Vale, she’s feeling like “something on the bottom of someone’s shoe, and not even someone interesting.” Suzanne is in the harrowing and hilarious throes of drug rehabilitation, trying to understand what happened to her life and how she managed to land in a “drug hospital.”

Just as Fisher’s first film role — the precocious teenager in Shampoo — echoed her own Beverly Hills upbringing, her first book is set within the world she knows better than anyone else: Hollywood. More of a fiction montage than a novel in the conventional sense, this stunning literary debut chronicles Suzanne’s vivid, excruciatingly funny experiences-from the clinic to her coming to terms with life in the outside world. Conversations with her psychiatrist- “What worries me is, what if this guy is really the one for me and I haven’t had enough therapy to be comfortable with having found him?”; a high-concept, eighties-style affair- “The only way to become intimate for me is repeated exposure. My route to intimacy is routine. I establish a pattern with somebody and then I notice when they’re not there?”

Sparked by Suzanne’s — and Carrie Fisher’s — deliciously wry sense of the absurd, Postcards from the Edge is more than a book about stardom and drugs. It is a revealing look at the dangers-and delights-of all our addictions, from money and success to sex and insecurity.