A Star is Bored
Score: 4/5 Bookmarks
Thank you to Macmillan Audio for gifting me a review copy of A Star is Bored by Byron Lane, as an audiobook.
At first I really didn’t know what I was listening to. It felt a lot like a reality TV show. You know you should turn it off, but it’s such a train wreck that you can’t seem to look away, and then the more you watch the more the characters grow on you.
The main character Charlie leads an unhappy life and thinks about suicide a lot. His mother passed away when he was young and he just has his emotionally abusive father left. He hates his job, and doesn’t seem to have any real support network to speak of.
He gets put forward for a job as an assistant to an aging movie star, Kathi Kannon, who has a lot of problems of her own including drug use, bi-polar disorder, and dwindling finances. It seems like the two of them together are going to combust and be all-round terrible for each other, but somehow they help each other.
What started out feeling like the equivalent of Tweeting what you had for lunch, turned into a sweet love letter to an idol, a friend.
I didn’t read up on this one before going into it, so it wasn’t until the author’s note at the end that he mentions his time working for Carie Fisher and I put two and two together. While the author states that Kathi Kannon isn’t Carie Fisher it certainly seems to fit. The movie star mom living a stone’s throw away, the action movie franchise with a follow-up movie later on, the bi-polar struggles, the cruise-ship speaking gig that goes sideways, the trips they took and so on.
The audiobook is narrated by Noah Galvin and is 11 hours, 37 minutes. I found his performance to be on the slow side, especially in the beginning so it’s certainly one you can speed up a little. I thought he brought Charlie to life well, but I didn’t love the voice he used for Kathi. It really grated on me.
It reads a lot more like a memoir than the novel I was expecting, but it certainly grew on me. Plus, if you idolized Carie Fisher as much as I did as a kid you’ll definitely want to check this one out. Now, the only question that remains is….did she really call him ‘Cockring’ the whole time he worked for her?!
She needs an assistant.
He needs a hero.
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 a wild job interview. His car is idling, like his life, outside the Hollywood mansion of Kathi Kannon, star of stage and screen and People magazine’s Worst Dressed list. She's an actress in need of assistance, and he's adrift and in need of a lifeline.
Kathi is an icon, bestselling author, and award-winning movie star, most known for her role as Priestess Talara in a blockbuster sci-fi film. She’s also known in another role: Outrageous Hollywood royalty. Admittedly so. Famously so. Chaotically so, as Charlie quickly discovers.
Charlie gets the job, and his 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 life's 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.
