LIKE THIS, BUT FUNNIER

A once up-and-coming, now out-of-work LA screenwriter is trapped when the worst idea she’s ever had sells.

Caroline Neumann doesn’t think of herself as someone who would snoop in her therapist husband’s patient notes, become obsessed with a line she reads there, stalk and befriend the patient in question, and develop a TV show based on the woman’s life—thereby jeopardizing her husband’s career and her own, as well as their marriage, and even before that, utterly atomizing her sanity and peace of mind as the tiny bad idea spirals relentlessly into a huge, terrible project with lots of dollar signs and many important people involved. And yet this is exactly what she has done. Just as unbelievably, the line in question, written in the session notes of a special education teacher, is this: “Dream: strangles students’ parents> meat grinder> school garden: Anger.” If it seems unlikely that a story about a murderous teacher might be the best way to revive a floundering pitch based on a book about something else entirely, it must be said that few novels have ever communicated the profound absurdity of what goes on behind the scenes in Hollywood as vividly as Cantor’s achingly funny debut. For example, the opening moments of an important Zoom meeting: “Jon, Logan, Tommy, Marc, and Andrew then debated the merits of different locations for vacation homes for what felt like an egregiously long time but clearly fulfilled some kind of masculine bonding ritual that established once and for all that they were all very rich and had huge dicks and would live forever. The women on the call wore looks of patient indulgence. The assistants had turned themselves back into black squares.” As she desperately tries to torpedo the project before her trespass comes to light, 34-year-old Caroline is also dealing with the fact that her husband, who used to share her lack of interest in parenthood, is now pressuring her to freeze her eggs in case they change their minds “later.” What later? She never wants to end up in what she thinks of as the “Mom Hole.”

This hilarious book also delivers moving insight into the things insecurity can make women think and do.