Secret Celebrity

Can a girl in Hollywood ever trust her girlfriends not to sleep with her famous boyfriend? What's the fastest route out of the life slump that particularly afflicts thirty-five-year-olds who've already done a decade in the "the business"? Should PDPs (Public Displays of Privacy) be outlawed? And what is a "secret celebrity" anyway? Carol Wolper answers these and other burning questions in this sharp-eyed and sly novel, the perfect follow-up to her bestselling The Cigarette Girl. Secret Celebrity tells the story of Christine Chase, a thirty-five-year-old filmmaker who is seeking deliverance from ambivalence about everything in her personal and professional life via her latest documentary subject: Richard Gault, a famously elusive, mythically cool cultish actor/musician who went underground in the seventies rather than sell out. In the process of searching out her secret celebrity and discovering how the legend was born, Christine learns a lot about the kind of people willing to pay the steep price of fame, those who'll pay anything just to trail in its wake, and the kind of people you couldn't pay enough. . . . Achingly inside, hilariously acute, and right on the money, Secret Celebrity is a novel that sends up our celeb-obsessed culture.