"Pre-empting MeToo, The Comeback follows a child star taking mysterious time away from Hollywood, to show the lights of showbiz at their darkest "
From its opening prologue – the first-person voice deliberately crashing her car, along with her passenger – to its first chapters, Berman gives the reader a constant stream of questions, from the seemingly small to the global: why is this famous actress depressed, back living in suburbia with her resentful family?
Why did her seemingly wonderful marriage end? Why doesn’t the producer who forged her career work with her anymore? Why, in her other world, was her younger sister expelled?
Berman navigates the lines of answering or opening these questions further, leaving some mystery even at the end.
Berman creates a satisfyingly sarcastic narrator in the disappearing star Grace Hyde/Turner, a woman who has been treated so badly she feels self-destruction is almost like taking her agency back. Constantly asked by strangers to say the most famous line from her film, Grace is as likely to tell them to fuck off as to cry. I was interested to see from the author note that Berman started writing this before the Me Too movement became a public conversation.
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At the height of her career and on the eve of her first Golden Globe nomination, teen star Grace Turner disappeared. Now, tentatively sober and surprisingly numb, Grace is back in Los Angeles after her year of self-imposed exile, determined to be a better person and reconnect with the people she left behind. When she is asked to present a lifetime achievement award to director Able Yorke - the man who controlled her every move for eight years - she realizes that she can't run from the secret behind her spectacular crash and burn for much longer.
| Primary Genre | Thriller and Suspense |
| Other Genres: |
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At the height of her career and on the eve of her first Golden Globe nomination, teen star Grace Turner disappeared. Now, tentatively sober and surprisingly numb, Grace is back in Los Angeles after her year of self-imposed exile, determined to be a better person and reconnect with the people she left behind.
The Comeback features in the following genres: General Fiction, Fiction, Thriller and Suspense, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literary Fiction
Paperback, Ebook (Epub), Hardback. Not Available.
The Comeback was written by Ella Berman and published by Berkley an imprint of Penguin Random House Group
The Comeback has 378 pages