Secrets of my Hollywood Life: Family Affairs, by Jen Calonita
Calonita, Jen (2008). Secrets of My Hollywood Life: Family Affairs. NY: Little, Brown. 314 pages.
You know what’s weird? There are currently two hardback popular series running right now that have almost the exact same plot! One of them is Jen Calonita’s Secrets of My Hollywood Life and the other is Lola Douglas’ True Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet. You know what else is weird? I kind of like both series.
In Family Affairs, the third installment of Calonita’s series, heroine and narrator Kaitlin returns to the set of the popular and long-running drama she’s starred in after a summer acting in an action/adventure blockbuster. When she discovers that the season’s script will feature a new character claiming to be the long-lost sister of Kaitlin’s character, both Kaitlin and Sky (Kaitlin’s frenemy who plays Kaitlin’s real sister on the show) worry that their roles are being usurped. Even worse, the actress cast to play this temporary role is a total brown-noser and schemer and is lobbying for script re-writes that would make her character permanent. When the Hollywood press prints lies about Kaitlin and Sky and touts their show’s new guest star as the next “It Girl,” the co-stars start to suspect that the so-called “It Girl” is sabotaging their careers.
This is Hollywood drama of the best kind: beautiful and bitchy rivals, behind-the-scenes action, shameless celebrity and luxury brand name-dropping. The plot is familiar, but, as always, plays well. Calonita knows (especially since she seems to have produced variations of this plot in the earlier series installments) that while good girl heroines of Kaitlin’s type affirm the myth that even popular/celebrity girls have heart, good girl readers get more satisfaction from reading about the gorgeous, ruthless, stop-at-nothing types who emerge as stock characters in Hollywood narratives of competition. Of course, in stories like these (unlike in life), the good girl almost always wins; the good thing about the Hollywood fantasy is that we know there’s another bad girl just around the corner.