A Star Is Bored by Byron Lane

 

It's kind of sad that this book is called A STAR IS BORED because a Nenia was bored while reading this book. It was me. I'm the Nenia. I wanted to like this book because I kept seeing it all over Instagram and it looked like so much fun (although weirdly, even though everyone was posting PICTURES of it, I wasn't seeing all that many reviews). I guess Byron Lane was the PA to Carrie Fisher before she died so this is his fictionalized account of that with a dude nammed Charlie Besson becoming PA to an actress named Kathi Kannon who is eccentric and a little crazy who is famous for-- you guessed it-- staring as a priestess in a science-fiction movie ages ago and is now basically a has-been.

But, you know, it's not Carrie Fisher. *wink*

The tongue-in-cheek IT'S NOT CARRIE FISHER YOU GUYS STAHP shtick got pretty old after a while, to the point where I wasn't sure why the author didn't just do a tell-all memoir and call it a day. Maybe because he'd signed an NDA and this fictionalized account offers some plausible deniability about what and how many details were blurred/changed? IDK.

I also wish I hadn't known that this was kind of a parody (homage?) of Carrie Fisher because this just felt like such a caricature of her. I've read several of her memoirs and they were SO FUNNY and clever and witty. She just had a really unique, quirky view of the world, and she was so open about her struggles with addiction and bipolar, so seeing her reduced to this, like, stereotype was a little sad. I'm sure the author got to know her really well as a person but that just wasn't coming through in this book-- both the narrator, Charlie, and Kathi, came across as feeling flat and 2D.

I'm sorry to say that this is a miss for me but my friends seemed to like it so maybe you will, too.

1 out of 5 stars