Book Review: A Star is Bored
A Star Is Bored by Byron Lane
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Publication Date: July 28, 2020
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
The Devil Wears Prada meets Postcards from the Edge in a hilariously heartfelt novel influenced in part by the author’s time assisting Carrie Fisher.
Charlie Besson is tense and sweating as he prepares for an insane job interview. His car is idling, like his life, outside the Hollywood mansion of Kathi Kannon. The Kathi Kannon, star of stage and screen and People Magazine’s worst dressed list. She needs an assistant. He needs a hero.
Kathi is an icon, best-selling author, and an award winning actress, most known for her role as Priestess Talara in a blockbuster sci-fi film. She’s also known in another role: crazy. Admittedly so. Famously so. Fabulously so, as Charlie quickly discovers.
Their three-year odyssey is filled with late-night shopping sprees, last-minute trips to see the aurora borealis, and an initiation to that most sacred of Hollywood tribes: the personal assistant. But Kathi becomes much more than a boss, and as their friendship grows, Charlie must make a choice. Will he always be on the sidelines of life, assisting the great forces that be, or can he step into his own leading role?
Laugh-out-loud funny and searingly poignant, Byron Lane’s A Star Is Bored is a novel that, like the star at its center, is enchanting and joyous, heartbreaking, and hopeful.
I chose this book because in the acknowledgments of Steven Rowley’s book The Guncle, he accepts Byron Lane’s marriage proposal because Lane proposed to him in the acknowledgments section of this book. How cute is that? Anyway, on to the review:
Charlie is depressed and living without purpose. He interviews for a job as Kathi Kannon’s assistant and somehow gets the job, even though he has no idea how to be an assistant. Kathi is an older actress most known for starring as Priestess Talara in a hugely popular science fiction movie. She hasn’t worked in a while and she struggles with addiction and mental illness. Charlie has always been a huge fan of hers and working as her assistant is his dream job. But once he gets the job, he soon figures out it’s going to be a lot harder than he thought it would be.
Okay, so Lane used to be Carrie Fisher’s assistant in real-life and reading this book felt like reading his memoir of being her assistant. I think he probably wrote it as a novel instead out of respect to her because it’s clear in the book that Charlie loves Kathi with all his heart even though the relationship seems one-sided. I don’t think Lane would want anyone to think badly of Carrie Fisher.
Kathi lives on the same compound as her mother, Miss Gracie, (as Carrie did with her mother Debbie Reynolds) and Miss Gracie has the financial means to make sure that Kathi never hits rock bottom. She loves her daughter and wants to protect her but she’s actually not doing her any favors by being an enabler. Charlie’s main job seems to be making sure that Kathi still functions while she keeps doing drugs, mainly prescription painkillers, and making sure she stays on the medication that keeps her bipolar in check. He does his best to keep her from taking drugs but when there’s no rock bottom, it’s a lost cause.
I mostly enjoyed A Star is Bored but I did find myself wondering why Charlie loved Kathi so much when she didn’t really seem to care about him all that much. Right off the bat, he gives her his dead mother’s locket and seems to look up to her as a mother figure when she isn’t nurturing at all. After reading this book, it would be interesting to go back and reread Carrie Fisher’s memoirs to see how they match up. I don’t know if I have time for that though!
