Read The Actress: A Novel Online
Authors: Amy Sohn
The Actress: A Novel (37 page)
Which scene or character was the most fun for you to write, and which scene or character was the most difficult?
I loved writing Bridget, who is both an amalgam of 1980s women executives and a product of my imagination. It’s great fun to write a character who manipulates other people, and I loved the Bridget-Steven scenes, where she exerts power over him. I also liked the idea of writing about an underrepresented minority in Hollywood whose personal taste happens to be extremely mainstream. Some of the most important women in 1980s Hollywood had an eye toward mass entertainment. Not all women are “political” filmmakers just because they are women.
The ending of the book was tricky, because I had to find a resolution that made sense for Maddy and Steven that at the same time felt true to modern divorce. Modern marriages, as opposed to Victorian-era marriages, provide a unique challenge to novelists because prenups, postnups, family law, and different mores have changed the stakes and the fallout. I knew that Maddy and Steven would have to remain in each other’s lives, but that’s a kind of prison, too—to have to keep seeing the person you would like to erase.
Do you think there are a lot of closeted actors and actresses working in Hollywood and hiding who they are from the public today? If so, why do you think this is the case in a town considered by many to be so liberal?
Statistically, it’s likely—but I believe that will change dramatically over the next ten years and even more so over the next twenty-five. With the advancement of marriage equality and evolving views around homosexuality, the American public can now buy a gay actor in a straight role, just as it can buy Sean Penn as Harvey Milk. The filmmaking machine is lagging behind public consciousness, but it’s lagging behind public consciousness on many other levels, too, by feeding us action sequences disguised as films, by offering bland and meaningless roles for women, by moving away from an emphasis on writing and character. There is real stagnation in commercial entertainment. Soon a new, younger generation will take the reins of power in Hollywood—they will become the studio chiefs and heads of development—and we’ll see major motion picture stars who are openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual. It will be interesting to see how those performers change and shape content.
Where do you think Maddy ends up ten years after the conclusion of the novel? What about Steven—do you think that he would ever reveal the truth about his sexuality?
I hope that she can find love again, but that’s for the reader to imagine. As for Steven, I wrote a draft in which Steven came out, but it didn’t feel authentic to his character. Steven is the last of a particular generation, one that became famous in Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s. He grew up in a nation that had radically different ideas around homosexuality, so it’s no easy feat for him to shake those ideas. He always felt this need to invent himself as someone different from who he was—more cultured, more political, more literate. He has invented a self for himself that has very little relation to his real self, and he’s afraid his real self cannot be loved.
With that said, it’s amazing what awareness of mortality does to people. It makes people file for divorce, get pregnant, start living as a different gender, email exes to rekindle old romances, and it makes some people come out of the closet past the age when they are eligible to join AARP.
What are you working on next? Do you think you’ll return to Hollywood and the world of film as a setting, or even to the characters in
The Actress
?
I have just begun thinking about a period novel that deals with women’s psyches and relationships.
The Actress
is definitely a “way we live now” book, but as I developed Maddy Freed as a character, I became passionate about exploring women’s lives and minds. I am interested in the way women’s experience over history has been defined by social strictures. As a mother of a daughter, I feel a mission to keep telling women’s stories and keep giving them voices in my fiction.
About the Author
A
my Sohn was born in 1973. She is the author of the novels
Motherland,
Prospect Park West,
My Old Man,
and
Run Catch Kiss
. She has been a columnist at
New York, New York Press,
the
New York Post,
and
Grazia
. She has written TV pilots for such networks as HBO, FOX, and ABC. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
ALSO BY AMY SOHN
Motherland
Prospect Park West
My Old Man
Run Catch Kiss
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright
©
2014 by Amy Sohn
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2014
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Interior design by Akasha Archer
Jacket design by Jackie Seow
Author photo
©
Piotr Redlinski
Jacket art
©
Ilona Wellmann/Archangel Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sohn, Amy.
The actress : a novel / Amy Sohn. — First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
pages cm
1. Actresses—Fiction. 2. Gay actors—Fiction. 3. Fame—Fiction. 4. Secrets—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.O435A26 2014
813
’
.54—dc23
2014005673
ISBN 978-1-4516-9861-9
ISBN 978-1-4516-9863-3 (ebook)
Contents