Tag: fictional authors

Categories
what's lit

‘And Just Like That…’ Shows How Recording an Audiobook Is Part of Grieving Process

Sarah Jessica Parker in "And Just Like That..."
Sarah Jessica Parker in "And Just Like That..." Photo: Craig Blakenhorn/Max

⚠️ Spoilers ahead! Watch the series on Max.

The Sex and the City reboot centers its second season’s third episode on Carrie Bradshaw narrating her story of grief for her audiobook. As she bumbles with emotion over the chapter detailing her husband’s untimely death, Carrie does everything in her power to avoid having to complete the narration. 

And Just Like That… returned for its second season June 22 on Max, formerly HBO Max, and picked up where the first season left off: Carrie moving forward after the sudden death of her husband, John, better known as “Big.” The grief connects to her writing in the episode “Chapter Three.”

Traipsing around Manhattan in her iconic heels, Carrie, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is heading to the studio to record her latest book, Loved and Lost. This book fits into a different genre compared to her other books. This one is about her journey of grief after the death of Big, played by Chris Noth (Sexual assault allegations against the actor emerged immediately after his character’s demise. He denies the allegations and hasn’t been criminally charged).

Carrie’s foray into the grief memoir genre has given her an opportunity to narrate her audiobook. Most memoirists tell their stories for the audiobook, and it’s become more of a standard for memoirs about grief. But when Carrie speaks into the microphone, she keeps choking on her words, reliving the moments from the premiere episode of the series where Big dies from a heart attack after riding on his Peloton (The fitness company’s stock fell due to the negative storyline). Carrie’s male audio producers try to coach her through the annunciation issues, like she’s swallowing her t’s and popping her p’s, but they can’t pick up her frustration in reliving that distinct memory by reading it aloud. 

“A memoir this personal needs to be read by the author,” her editor says after Carrie urges for an actress to be hired to record the audiobook, like Julianne Moore or Julianna Margulies. Then Carrie learns that the studio has been booked for five days. She thought it would be only for two. But the publisher already factored in extra days to accommodate the emotional hardship of reading the story. Back in the recording studio, Carrie starts to hear the water from the shower on that tragic day and sees water blurring the words on the e-book she’s reading from. The audio producers decide it’s better to skip the chapter for the time being. 

After a tearful moment in the recording studio, Carrie receives advice from Bitsy Von Muffling, played by Julie Halston. Complaining about the upkeep after a facelift, fellow widow Bitsy recommends Carrie should do whatever she loves to do to make her feel better. So, Carrie goes shoe shopping. She bursts through her apartment door with Bergdorf Goodman bags filled with shoes, such as a pair of pink Gucci ankle-cuff leather pumps and copper-studded Giuseppe Zanotti Intriigo mules.

While trying on her new shoes, she calls up the main audio producer and tells him she has contracted COVID-19. Therefore, the producers need to hire that actress Carrie had suggested earlier. The viral disease that caused a yearslong global pandemic is now treatable enough that it can be a lie to get out of work. She stays in her apartment, even enjoying a hamburger and fries when her friends Seema and Anthony, played by Sarita Choudhury and Mario Cantone respectively, call her for lunch. She lies to them about her fake COVID. Seema comes to visit where Carrie admits her lie and tells her how she needs to attend her neighbor Lisette’s jewelry showcase. 

At the showcase, Carrie and Seema are chatting when they see a man in a black suit pocket the jewelry on display. While they’re questioning the theft, Carrie yells that she has COVID, which clears the outside tents. Seema brandishes a handgun, which turns out to be a lighter. The jewelry is gone, and Lisette, played by Katerina Tannenbaum, is devastated. Carrie visits Lisette the next day with pastries as they mourn the loss. Mourning, even for material objects, helps Carrie prepare to narrate the chapter detailing her husband’s death in the recording studio. She celebrates with Seema, who has recovered her Birkin handbag stolen in the beginning of the episode, at a communal table with young men visiting from Australia. At the end of the episode, Carrie’s lie manifests into real COVID. 

Though the writing in the reboot fails to be as crisp as the writing in the original Sex and the City series based on Candace Bushnell’s 1996 book, emphasizing the hardship of narrating an audiobook about grief seems to be a realistic issue memoirists deal with.

Marketing maven Bozoma St. John, for example, went on tour earlier this year to discuss her grief memoir The Urgent Life: My Story of Love, Loss, and Survival. In the very first minutes on her audiobook, she narrates the day her husband died from a rare cancer thought to be treatable. Tembi Locke’s 2019 memoir From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home came to life onscreen with a Netflix miniseries. She narrates the story of losing her husband to cancer elegantly for the audiobook edition. You can find the book review here.

On the other hand, Sheryl Sandberg didn’t narrate the audiobook for Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, her 2017 memoir about losing her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg. She may have been worried about being overtaken with emotion, or the publisher decided her voice wasn’t the right fit, even when more memoirists are reading their life stories. Elisa Donovan of Clueless and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch fame stepped in to narrate the Option B audiobook. In fact, the actress narrated the 2021 audiobook for her own grief memoir about losing her father in Wake Me When You Leave: Love and Encouragement via Dreams from the Other Side. 

This a rare episode for Carrie where we see the process of her promoting her book. This is a newer process for some authors, especially for memoirists, with coming to terms to reading an audiobook, even when it draws up tough feelings. Audiobooks are more popular than ever, so publishers are banking on authors to vocalize their own stories of loss and healing.

Categories
book reviews

Book Review: ‘Linden Hills’ by Gloria Naylor

She Lit Book Club Pick: Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor

Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor explores the rise of a Black suburb and how the residents sacrifice so much to live at the lowest elevation to flaunt their wealth.

The community of Linden Hills was created by Luther Nedeed’s “double great-grandfather” who has the same name. The rumor around town is the original Luther Nedeed sold his wife and six children into slavery to get the money to buy the hilly land that nearby White residents found unlivable. But the original Luther Nedeed set out to build a community that lasted generations with the current Luther Nedeed approving all the residents with a contract. If the residents fail to live up to the terms in the contract, then they’re asked to leave the elusive Linden Hills. But residents keep coming to the master-planned community the moment they amass enough money. They also try to get closer to Nedeed’s grand cabin and the funeral parlor he owns. If their home is closer to the man who pulls the strings in town, then they’re considered the most important residents in town as well.

The story follows two twentysomething handymen, Lester and Willie. Lester lives in Linden Hills proper, but on the edge of town in a small home that doesn’t meet the standards of most of the homes in the area. Willie lives outside of Linden Hills with his family in low-income housing. They team up to fulfill jobs around Linden Hills to multiply their money for holiday gifts, with Willie opting to stay with Lester the week leading up to Christmas. But something doesn’t sit well with Willie. He’s noticing the quirks of the average Linden Hills resident.

Willie and Lester work the wedding of the year of Winston Alcott, a rising businessman who feels he must get married to succeed in Linden Hills. Or that’s what Luther Nedeed is telling him. When Willie and Lester listen to Luther Nedeed talk on stage at the wedding, Willie gets a bad feeling about the man who serves as the face of Linden Hills.

The more jobs the handymen do in the span of five days, the more they come across Luther Nedeed. As Luther’s eerie presence marks the scenes where they work, the situations with the residents Willie and Lester are helping seem to worsen. Willie tries to make sense of it as he and his friend witness the ultimate sacrifice residents take to live up to Linden Hills’ expectations.

With chapters split into full days from Dec. 19 to Christmas Eve on Dec. 24, the book becomes unputdownable with easing into the narratives of neighbors weaved together through the eyes of Willie and Lester. We meet characters desperate to keep their economic stature in order to move on up in Linden Hills. The higher on the hill, the higher the respect, but in this case, residents want to move down to the center of the hill where the Nedeed cabin and mortuary sits. They don’t realize they’re physically being dragged downward instead of upward.

The downward pull is supposed to represent hell for these residents. They’ve signed their names to contracts to keep homes until infinity, but if they break any rules, then the contracts are nullified by Luther Nedeed himself. The book adapts the 14th century epic Inferno by poet Dante Alighieri, which depicts nine circles of hell: limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery. The Linden Hills residents are socially climbing so high that they don’t realize downfall is the only place left to go when the obsession for riches and power overcomes them.

A theme in the book is the absence of women. There are several references to funerals happening in Linden Hills of women and husbands who had lost their wives years prior. We meet Laurel Dumont, a successful woman separated from her husband. She summers in Linden Hills as a child who loves to swim with her grandmother. But the moment Luther Nedeed finds out Laurel’s husband has filed for divorce, he threatens to take away her home because it wasn’t in the contract for her to live in the home without her husband. Also an interwoven perspective is that of Luther Nedeed’s wife, who nobody ever sees because she’s trapped in the basement. Luther Nedeed carries on business in town and lies about his wife’s whereabouts, knowing that nobody will investigate further because of the power he possesses over the town and its residents. He creates a patriarchal society without anyone realizing it because they’re so consumed by their financial worth.

Overall, the novel gives us a chilling look into a fictional Black suburb built on wealth and how residents only care about accumulating more wealth to move closer to the most powerful resident. The characters are blind to their obsession with money and to their worship of Luther Nedeed. Author Gloria Naylor started writing this book for her master’s thesis examining the Black middle class at Yale University under the guidance of Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. Linden Hills is a stark difference from her award-winning debut novel The Women of Brewster Place but maintains the narrative of a community making sense of the socioeconomic elements that went into its creation. The way she describes Linden Hills as a haven for Black residents is in reality a different kind of hell shows the duality of how we see our communities. It could be safe, but your life could be in danger because of other circumstances that you may have overlooked in search of calling a place home.



View all my reviews

Categories
what's lit

How ‘Younger’ Painted an Insanely Glamorous, Somewhat Diverse Publishing World

TV Land

Spoiler alert: The post below reveals storylines from the seventh season of Younger.

Literary industry cable series Younger wrapped up a successful seven seasons this summer. Though racial and ethnic diversity took a backseat to the storylines, the show still put diversity and inclusion in the forefront of an industry struggling to fulfill its promises.

Created by Sex and the City and Beverly Hills 90210 visionary Darren Star, Younger follows a 40-something White woman named Liza Miller, played by Broadway veteran Sutton Foster, who knocks her age down to 26 to get her foot back into the door of the publishing industry after raising her daughter and divorcing her husband. Based on Pamela Redmond Satran’s 2005 novel of the same name, the show started on TV Land in 2015 and moved to Paramount+ this year.

The show featured diversity markers, mainly with age and gender, in a fictional publishing scene made to look obscenely glamorous. Recent data from Lee & Low Books finds that the literary industry as a whole is 74% cisgender female, but when it comes to executive leadership positions, the number is down to 60%. On Younger, the main female characters are striving to retain and maintain leadership throughout the series to elevate works by women.

Amplifying younger voices

“Younger” Ep. 603 (Airs 6/26/19)

After lying about her age, Liza earns the coveted job of an editorial assistant at traditional publishing powerhouse Empirical. To make matters more complicated, Liza is paired up with actual 26-year-old Kelsey Peters, played by Hilary Duff, whose ambition oozes to make books more appealing to millennials.

This eventually leads to the two creating an imprint called Millennial, not only multiplying books by Gen Y authors but also taking a focus on female authors in the age group. As they are underestimated by Empirical and the industry at large, Liza and Kelsey build a behemoth of an imprint that in its final season begins suffering from hits by Empirical’s old White male investors.

This motivated the pair to create Inkubator, a spoken word event series featuring promising millennial authors ready to have their work published.

Women supporting women

“Younger” Ep. 501 (Airs 6/5/18)

Helping Liza and Kelsey on their literary adventures and misadventures are editor Diana Trout, known for her brusqueness and over-the-top statement necklaces, who is played by Miriam Shor who did not return for the final season; Lauren Heller, the carefree bisexual social media enthusiast played by Molly Bernard who replaces Diana’s presence in the Empirical office as an assistant; and Maggie Amato, the lesbian artist played by legend Debi Mazar who owns the fabulous loft they all seem to live in at one point in the series.

They become this unbreakable group, along with one man—Liza’s millennial ex, Josh, played by Nico Tortorella, a tattoo artist entrepreneur with a heart of gold. Liza goes back and forth with Josh and Empirical’s editor in chief, Charles Brooks, the well-meaning head honcho who is age-appropriate for Liza played by Peter Hermann. Having sexual relations with the boss while editing his ex-wife’s novel is one of the situations that comes up with the ill-begotten romance between Liza and Charles. This novel leaped offscreen onto our bookshelves as Marriage Vacation reviewed by she lit.

With all the drama mostly involving Liza’s back-and-forth relationships, the girl group feeds on their mistakes with men and women. The girlboss-in-making Kelsey seems to be pick the men who want to compete with her success in one way or another, with one ill-fated relationship leading to a death by scaffolding (very NYC) and an evil twin (very soapy). As Liza and Kelsey lean on Maggie, Lauren, and Diana, they also support female writers with some of the most familiar scenes of the series occurring in the closed office session with a new writer who is revolutionizing the newer subgenres, e.g. sick lit, teen environmentalist memoir, and boomer erotica.

Shelving racial diversity

“Younger” Ep. 612 (Airs 9/04/19)

The show’s cast is all-White, which is normal on TV shows to have an entire cast of the same racial makeup, but it resonates with the real-life publishing industry, unfortunately. The show failed to right this diversity and inclusion oversight with its choice of guest stars in earlier seasons.

Charles Michael Davis, who played Kelsey’s frenemy lover Zane Anders for three seasons, added much-needed melanin as a regular cast member, but he and his character had to depart in the final season due to his commitment to NCIS: New Orleans. As his character left the script, the show featured two writer characters who contributed to Millennial’s next phase.

Dylan Park, played by Yeena Sung, appeared in “The F Word,” the episode that introduces Inkubator. She is a future author with a novel that Kelsey and Liza try to get published through Empirical since Millennial by this time has been absorbed into the publisher thanks to the investors’ wishes. But editor in chief Charles is not interested, so Kelsey and Liza have the novel published by a release of a chapter every week in The Cut. Though an Asian American millennial female author is brought into the storyline, she only makes one appearance, failing to become a substantive character while her book really becomes the character.

The final season then brings in another author of color, Azealia King, played by De’Adre Aziza, a Black woman who has won the National Book Award. She’s so impressive that Charles wants to publish her next book. Her character appears in the last two episodes, almost as if the writer’s room realized they didn’t have enough female authors of color featured throughout the series.

Out of an industry that is 74% cisgender female, publishing is 76% White, according to the Lee and Low Books’ report. Numbers for professionals of color are broken down by 7% Asian descent, 6% Latino/Latina, 5% African descent, and less than 1% Native American and Middle Eastern.

Despite the diversity successes and failures of imagining the cutthroat Manhattan book publishing scene into an addictive summer TV series, the show still gives feel-good vibes and is expertly written with relatable moments. Live or relive the half-hour series on Paramount+ and Hulu.

Categories
what's lit

Bookish TV Throwback: Maya Wilkes’ Book Launch on ‘Girlfriends’

Girlfriends fans rejoiced last month when star Tracee Ellis Ross shared on Instagram a video of her former co-stars Golden Brooks, Jill Marie Jones, and Persia White. As they all prepare for a long-awaited reunion appearance tonight on Tracee’s current TV gig, ABC’s Black-ish, fans may wonder if the book that defined Girlfriends will come up in conversation.

The reunion even produced an Entertainment Weekly first-look profile of the Black-ish episode that will revolve around Tracee’s character’s Rainbow and her feminist friends from college. But Girlfriends, a UPN sitcom that celebrated four single Black women living in 2000s Los Angeles, produced its own best-selling Oh Hell Yes! by Maya Wilkes, played by Golden.

Oh Hell Yes! is the fictional self-help book told in a “homegirl” tone. It obviously paved the way for today’s hits from mostly white women authors like Jen Sincero’s You Are a Total Badass to Rachel Hollis’ Girl, Wash Your Face.

“The Way We Were” is Maya’s book launch episode, running on Feb. 21, 2005, over a decade before TV shows that brought a book into the storyline actually worked with a real-life publisher to get the book on shelves, a newer tactic made popular by bookish shows like Younger and Jane the Virgin have done.

Maya (Golden Brooks)

To give some background, Maya is a single mom and recent divorcee who works as a paralegal for lawyer Joan Clayton, played by Tracee. Joan’s friends from UCLA includes Toni Childs, played by Jill Marie, and Lynn Searcy, played by Persia. So they’re all friends navigating the highs and lows of being professional Black women in the big city. At the time, the show was coined as a comedic Black version of Sex and the City or an updated Living Single.

Maya is nervous at the book launch inside the fictional Crenshaw Bookstore. They huddle behind a bookshelf to calm Maya before her “authoress” debut. (Maya dramatically called herself an “authoress” throughout the series).

“Don’t let fear make you its bitch,” Toni soothes Maya.

“Wow, that’s good. Who wrote that?” Maya asks.

“You.”

Maya freaks out about forgetting her own advice and heads to the podium. Joan is avoiding William, played by Reggie Hayes who’s also a lawyer and the fifth unofficial “girlfriend.” William shows up at the book-signing, after their awkward short-lived relationship.

As the event starts, each of the friends read an excerpt. “Don’t be hatin’ what your mama spent nine months creatin'” is one of Maya’s proverbs read aloud.

Joan (Tracee Ellis Ross)

Lynn (Persia White)

Toni (Jill Marie Jones)

After the readings, Maya thanks her cousin/publicist, her current boss William, and her friends.

“I also have to thank my girls,” she says. “Joan, Toni, and Lynn. You three have been my rock for these past few years, and the inspiration for my book. Because if y’all haven’t been manless, crazy heifers, there wouldn’t have been anything to write about.”

During the book-signing, Maya’s ex-husband Darnell, played by Khalil Kain, makes a surprise appearance to get his book signed. Of course, Maya takes this the wrong way, which leads to a fake cookout at Joan’s house the next day so she could wear her booty shorts for Darnell. But when Darnell, the sole attendee, shows up trying to figure out the situation, he breaks the news he’s engaged to his girlfriend.

Oh Hell Yes! played a pivotal role across seasons as Maya began writing the manuscript in her community college class as an essay. While dropping gems of wisdom at her cousin’s hair salon, customers became hooked to Maya’s no-nonsense advice to living your best life. This leads to a self-publishing adventure, where she’s even selling copies on the freeway ramp to drivers. She does finally get a big-time publishing deal, but she loses that deal once she can’t concoct a follow-up.

The show was ahead of the self-publishing wave and the self-help book wave. Books like Oh Hell Yes! are everywhere in bookstores, especially from women who have built a career through the internet and social media. As a Black female author, Maya also went the self-publishing route since it’s still hard for women of color to get book deals from top publishers.

If you’re looking for a binge, Girlfriends has eight seasons currently airing in reruns on BET and TV One and is available on streaming via CW Seed.

Categories
what's lit

‘Queen Sugar’ TV Review: Oh Mamere

Queen Sugar -- Ep 401 -- "TBD" -- Photo Credit: Skip Bolen / 2019 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved

With creating the season around a character’s memoir, Queen Sugar has focused on the traumas the memoir brought up for all the characters in the series. Wednesday’s episode emphasized those traumas and spurred an OWN Twitter chat.

Ahead of the episode, OWN held a three-hour Twitter chat under the hashtag #QueenSugarTalks to get viewers to discuss the issues of trauma and addiction. The episode starts with Nova (Rutina Wesley) and Charley (Dawn-Lyen Gardner) Bordelon going on a retreat in the woods. Feelings come out: Nova tells Charley she hates being invited on getaways she couldn’t afford. She feels small on Charley’s dime. They realize,  as half-sisters, they still don’t know each other due to a lifelong level of competition and separation.

The addiction storyline comes in when Darla (Bianca Lawson), the former flame of Nova and Charley’s brother Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe), meets up with an old friend from her partying days. Her friend acknowledges Darla’s sobriety at the restaurant but asks Darla if it’s fine she still has a drink. Then she goes on and on about one of the last parties they went to eight years ago. She says Darla was so high that she went up to a room at a house party with two guys.

The walk down memory lane appears to be the night when Darla’s son Blue (Ethan Hutchison) was conceived. Darla can barely recall those moments and the revelation of a second man throws her into a tailspin at a nearby bar. Violet (Tina Lifford), the Bordelon aunt, soon finds a disheveled Darla in a park and takes her home where Darla unveils why she lied about Blue’s paternity for years. She said she buried the rape because of the shame of being hooked on drugs and alcohol. Violet calls Ralph Angel to come to Darla’s house, and Darla shares the story.

Charley’s son Micah (Nicholas L. Ashe) takes Blue to a carnival, where they get split up in the bathroom area. While Micah’s back is turned looking at his smartphone, Blue dashes to the women’s restroom to avoid the line to the men’s restroom. Micah asks people in the area if they had seen Blue, and when he gets no answers, he ventures off. Blue comes out of the restroom and ends up with a police officer to wait for Micah to find him. Since last season, Micah has been dealing with the trauma of being arrested and jailed by a white cop over an alleged traffic violation.

The trauma between the sisters and Darla have been brought up by Nova’s memoir Blessing and Blood, the book that’s been tearing apart the family since the beginning of the season. Micah’s trauma is in the book also, but it became known when it happened. As the women’s trauma is amplified, so is the trauma for the men. Micah’s recurring trauma around police brings him to a mild panic attack while Ralph Angel is still absorbing how his son is not biologically his. With two episodes left in the season, viewers may see more evolution of the trauma stemming from the memoir.

Categories
what's lit

‘Queen Sugar’ TV Review: Of Several Centuries + All the Borders

Based on the critically acclaimed novel by Natalie Baszile, Queen Sugar follows the Bordelons, a black family who owns a sugarcane company in Louisiana. As some of the members are experiencing a higher profile, it seems like the entire family is seeing the repercussions of their success.

The season has highlighted how middle daughter Nova (Rutina Wesley) wrote a memoir revealing family secrets—unbeknownst to her family. The tension grows by the episode.

Darla (Bianca Lawson), the ex-fiancee of Nova’s brother Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe), arrives at her job to find Nova’s book facedown on her seat. The way the book is flipped open, it looks like it’s on the pages describing Darla’s journey in and out of drug addiction. She’s embarrassed that her past life has been made public and has followed her to work.

Nova runs into her police officer ex, Calvin (Greg Vaughan), who now owns a security company, and tells him over lunch how he’s mentioned in her book. Another ex now appears on the book tour since she was sleeping with her professor-mentor for the last two episodes.

There are bookmarks of destruction: The vandalism of Aunt Violet (Tina Lifford)’s restaurant in the beginning and the family-owned mill on fire in the end.

The second episode starts with Nova running to Charley and Ralph Angel as they watch the firefighters contain the mill fire. But her siblings are still unhappy to see her. After learning the fire most likely was caused by arson, Charley and Ralph Angel storm off to approach the nemesis sugarcane business family matriarch, Frances Boudreaux (Annalee Jefferies).

“They looked at me like I wasn’t one of them. They looked like I was a stranger. Not even a stranger, like an enemy,” Nova cries into the phone to Calvin. “I lost my family.”

Calvin runs over to Nova’s house to check on her. Micah comes over at the same time. Once Calvin goes into another room to take a call, Micah questions Nova on how she’s comfortable being with a white ex-cop who could’ve beaten the black and brown residents of St. Josephine. Last season, Micah had been mistreated by a cop during a traffic stop, creating distrust for him and his family over police presence. During that time, Nova’s profile rose as a result of her coverage on cops targeting unarmed black men, which led to her book deal. Nova later asks Calvin if he ever saw another police officer “abuse black people.” He says he looked the other way and he left the force since he had lost his relationship with Nova over the racial tensions in their town.

Nova’s book alone has destroyed her relationship with her family, but as she copes with that loss, she’s been gravitating to her toxic relationships from the past. The college professor she had an affair with turned up on the tour and now it’s her married cop boyfriend returning as divorced and retired from the force.

With her tour, Nova hasn’t really had the chance to mend the relationships at home like she thinks she has. She returns home over the mill fire, but it’s reminiscent of a few weeks ago when she ran to Violet’s home after noticing her aunt’s ex-husband, whom she had interviewed for her book, terrorizing her aunt.

The impact of the memoir is weaved brilliantly into the season with Nova enjoying the success of her book but feeling the fire of burning bridges.

“Queen Sugar” has new episodes on Wednesday nights at 9 p.m. on OWN.

Categories
what's lit

‘Jane the Virgin’ TV Review: Chapter Sixty

Tyler Golden / The CW

After a weekslong break in the sultry telenovela spoof, Jane the Virgin returned with another author dilemma that agents and publishers just recently started talking about: social media.

Jane’s romance novel finally comes out to the tune of 10,000 units. This makes Jane nervous since, like most new authors, she assumed more books would be published. With the underwhelming number of books available, she worries about the marketing.

The marketing team tells her she needs to get book buyers with unveiling her dramatic life — from being accidentally inseminated with a hotelier’s sperm by the hotelier’s ob-gyn sister while a virgin to losing her police officer husband in a twisted drug ring scheme associated with the hotel. These events and more — as you can imagine — were documented in the local news, therefore her notoriety could attract readers. It’s not the classy way Jane wants to find an audience. 

Though Jane doesn’t want to share her life, her publisher tells her she needs to do just that through social media to get 20,000 followers to qualify for the Miami book festival. Yes, that many to talk at a book festival. And her social media channels are lacking, but luckily her father, a telenovela superstar with thousands upon thousands of followers, plans to help her. The romance department opens up for Jane with her father’s younger hot co-star actually getting her the followers by faking a public breakup.   

The episode ends happily with Jane chatting about her life on stage with her favorite author, Maria Semple of Where’d You Go, Bernadette, autographing three books, and having 5,000 more books published.

Again, Jane’s novelist life comes together so well with some real-life hiccups. When I heard the advice from literary agents about upping social media to market your book last year at the Los Angeles Times book festival, I couldn’t believe the added amount of work to be an author. It’s a new phenomenon to use social media to fetch book sales, even before there’s a book. Modern technology makes life harder sometimes. Now, back to Twitter to see if my latest post attracted any followers. 

Categories
what's lit

‘Jane the Virgin’ TV Review: Chapter Fifty-Six

Scott Everett White / The CW

The CW’s “Jane the Virgin” is one of my fave TV series about an aspiring novelist. In its third season, main character Jane Villanueva had a normal trajectory to novelhood with being a student then a teacher then a literary agent assistant while mostly being a hotel waitress. Magically, last week after finishing her romance novel based on her dead husband, she gets a book deal. Now, her career really sounds like made for TV. 

Within one episode, she turned her work into an author showcase and received a book deal totaling $50,000. What she does wrong seems like a teachable moment: Don’t quit your day job until you cash every check.

Despite her luck, Jane doesn’t seek consultation about the financial side of the deal and quits her job with the demanding literary agent she’s been working with only for a few episodes, or technically a span of three years. When the publishing house sends the contract of the breakdown of the money, she learns it’s not all in one check but in increments over time until the book is published. 

Crisis mode. She needs her job back. Cycling with her ex-boss and making the extravagant promise of luring an author back to the firm doesn’t work. In the end, she’s back to waitressing at the Marbella hotel. It’s an easy fallback choice with familial connections, but she had a desirable position for a budding novelist. She messed up. Or the effect of her error may melt away once the book is published in a year, or at the end of the season this spring in TV time. 

The telenovela-inspired show likes to factor frantic moments into Jane’s life, so this book deal may see more dings before blossoming into her dream.