A breezy, affably written amalgam of memoir, advice, and workplace survival guide from the front lines of the entertainment...
A TV writer reflects on carving out a career in male-dominated Hollywood.
Scovell, a veteran writer, producer, director, and show creator, minces few words when skewering the toxic atmosphere for female talent in Hollywood. In her frank memoir, the author, who collaborated with Sheryl Sandberg on Lean In, escorts readers through the beginnings of her career writing for SPY magazine in the 1980s while unpacking the emotional baggage of two botched marriages. At 26, she spontaneously flew from New York to Los Angeles to meet with an executive producer only to be placed in the first of many competitive, sexist, “penis party” writing teams, learning one industry lesson after another. A talent for comedic timing and impressive spec scriptwriting ushered Scovell into the writers’ meetings of some of TV’s top programs over a career that now spans over three decades. She reflects on the mixed success of scriptwriting for an impressive array of popular programs, including The Simpsons, Coach, and Murphy Brown. She also created and produced Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Charmed and even wrote jokes for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. “The ratio of fun versus not fun varies from show to show,” she acknowledges, commenting that “the people, the process, and the product” are the determining factors. As Scovell’s career matured and her confidence bloomed, so did her role as a wife and mother of two. Her fearlessness was clearly evidenced when the David Letterman sex scandal broke and the author made a controversial and risky career move by speaking out about a marked lack of gender diversity in the late-night TV arena. Photographs, newspaper mentions, and script clips further illuminate the author’s rise to prominence. While arguing that the industry still has a long way to go “in changing its casual acceptance of inappropriate behavior,” Scovell counts herself among the many who have made successful careers in show writing and creative collaboration.
A breezy, affably written amalgam of memoir, advice, and workplace survival guide from the front lines of the entertainment industry.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-247348-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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