Based on a True Story is a wry and daring debut, serving up razor-sharp wit that cuts through the tangled webs (and cobwebs) of human desire, friendship, and motherhood. Fans of Hollywood — old and new — will embrace Elizabeth Renzetti’s troubled heroine, with her dash of Norma Desmond. From page one it’s obvious that this is a novelist who is ready for her literary close-up.
Description
A delectable satirical novel about celebrity culture, journalism, truth, lies, consequences — about the fictions we tell ourselves and the fictions we tell others.
Augusta Price (not her real name) is famous in England for playing a slatternly barmaid on a nighttime soap opera and for falling down drunk in public. Now, she has no job, no relationship with her long-lost son, and a sad shortage of tranquilizers — but she has had an improbable hit with her memoir (which is based on a true story, but only very loosely).
But when Frances Bleeker — an insecure and not very successful American tabloid journalist — tells Augusta that a man she once loved has written a book, Augusta becomes terrified that her life story will be revealed as the web of lies it really is. She sets out on a trans-Atlantic journey from London to California to seek revenge on her former lover — a journey that will require the reluctant help of Frances.
Reviews
With Based on a True Story, Renzetti has offered up a story that is fun to read – because this novel is a hell of a lot of fun…– but that is also, like Renzetti’s newspaper writing, incisive, street-wise, and written with the deft hand of a truly talented scribe… This book also offers insight into addiction, insecurity, the way our upbringings define us, and the nature of true love, how blind it can be – but also how it, above all else, can be what raises a person out of the depths of failure and despair.
Based on a True Story is a seriously funny book
I couldn't put it down.
