Okay I probably should have known better than to read a book written by the wife of Brian Grazer, the director, since there is a good chance that being a ‘wife of’ in La-La Land may be the only reason a book this bad could get published. But read it I did.

The premise is sort of promising. Gracie Pollock is the “Wife Of” famous director Kenny Pollock. She is living the dream life- beautiful house, lovely child, dinner parties with the rich and famous, work outs with celebrity trainers, the right hair, Botox injections … you get the picture. When Gracie is unceremoniously dumped by her husband, by cell phone no less, she has to begin to find the person she lost while catering to her husband’s every whim. So does she go back to writing children’s books, her previous career? No she doesn’t, she moves to a friends house in Malibu and begins her hunt for husband number 2.

Although trying to make Gracie a bit of a sympathetic character, Grazer does not succeed. I found her annoying, shallow and often stupid. The trajectory of Gracie’s love life is unbelievable, and the ‘happy ending’ can be spotted a mile off. Also disconcerting was the use of real celebrities as characters. Kenny leaves Gracie for singer Britney Spears, and everything in that relationship rang hollow, because it’s all so dated already. Using invented characters would have probably been far more creative, but that would elude the point of this book, which is to name drop as often as possible. Skip it.

Mailed to a PBS memebr in NC