“A Star is Bored is an absolute knockout. Riotously funny and wickedly tender.” — Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones and the Six “Wildly funny and irreverent… Lane’s writing lifts the novel far above its gossamer Hollywood setting, suffusing [the novel] with a complex sensitivity.” – The New York Times Book Review A hilariously heartfelt novel influenced in … Times Book Review
A hilariously heartfelt novel influenced in part by the author’s time assisting Carrie Fisher.
People Magazine Best Book of Summer 2020 – Named a Must-Read Summer book by Town & Country – Named One of the 14 Best Books of Summer 2020 by Harper’s Bazaar – One of Library Journal’s 2020 “Titles to Watch” – One of the 30 Best Beach Reads According to Parade Magazine
She needs an assistant.
He needs a hero.
Charlie Besson is tense and sweating as he prepares for a wild job interview. His car is idling, like his life, outside the Hollywood mansion of Kathi Kannon, star of stage and screen and People magazine’s Worst Dressed list. She’s an actress in need of assistance, and he’s adrift and in need of a lifeline.
Kathi is an icon, bestselling author, and award-winning movie star, most known for her role as Priestess Talara in a blockbuster sci-fi film. She’s also known in another role: Outrageous Hollywood royalty. Admittedly so. Famously so. Chaotically so, as Charlie quickly discovers.
Charlie gets the job, and his three-year odyssey is filled with late-night shopping sprees, last-minute trips to see the aurora borealis, and an initiation to that most sacred of Hollywood tribes: the personal assistant. But Kathi becomes much more than a boss, and as their friendship grows Charlie must make a choice. Will he always be on the sidelines of life, assisting the great forces that be, or can he step into his own life’s leading role?
Laugh-out-loud funny, and searingly poignant, Byron Lane’s A Star is Bored is a novel that, like the star at its center, is enchanting and joyous, heartbreaking and hopeful.
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I loved this book about an assistant to a dysfunctional Hollywood A-lister. His journey to himself was the best part, but it was so fun to read about Hollywood. The author is a former assistant to the stars, including Carrie Fisher. Can’t wait to read what he’s got coming next.
A Star Is Bored is Byron Lane’s debut novel. He once worked as a personal assistant to Carrie Fisher. Though he prefaces his work with statements that A Star Is Bored is fiction, it does seem to be a thinly disguised tell-all about Ms. Fisher. It does have a wealth of insight into America’s infatuation with stars. It’s amazing that the uber-famous can live at such altitudes and attitudes that they can emotionally abuse their hired help.
The protagonist, Charlie Besson is a Louisiana boy who moves to LA and works writing the news for an overnight news program. He has no personal life as he works while everyone else is sleeping and vice versa. He’s massively in debt from student loans and lives in a dump of an apartment. He’s turned on to a job possibility as a personal assistant to a fading star, Kathi Kannon.
He gets the job, but has no clue what it entails. Gradually he learns that he must dole out her medications, take care of her groceries, arrange her spontaneous trips to various locales around the world, put out fires as Kathi wreaks havoc with her reputation. Again, he has no life as he is at Kathi’s beck and call 24/7/365.
Charlie slowly realizes that, despite the attraction of being with Kathi, propping her up as she flits into mania and sinks into depression, he has needs of his own. He eventually has to decide whether he is living for her or for himself.
Kathi’s insanity gets to be a bit too much in her stream of consciousness texts, but the book is amusing at times, horrific at others, and definitely a vision of the American star system.
Lane draws on his experience in Hollywood as a celebrity assistant in his debut novel, the entertaining, charming, slightly melancholy story of a young man finding himself while working to keep up with the wild life of his boss, a self-destructive older actress (who is certainly inspired by Carrie Fisher but definitely not Carrie Fisher.) Meatier than you might guess from the cover, but clever, unpredictable and ultimately inspiring.
A Star Is Bored, was entertaining, yet got redundant. It was obvious that it was written about Carrie Fisher and I’d read so much about her previously that I liked getting another perspective, but I also felt it was overdone and got to a point that I wasn’t that interested in it anymore. I did enjoy Byron Lane’s visual way of writing, though and how he made the characters as crazy as they were, seem realistic and visual.
As soon as I heard about it, I knew I would adore this novel. A fictionalised account of the author’s time working as a personal assistant to Carrie Fisher, it’s warm, witty and wise. And although Kathi Kannon is *not* Carrie Fisher, she’s Carrie enough that it made me miss her madly. A lovely lovely book.
Loved it! RIP Carrie Fisher.
To read this book and not think of Carrie Fisher is absolutely impossible. Going into this I knew the author worked as Carries’ personal assistant for a few years, and the book just SCREAMS Carrie. I don’t care what the author says in the beginning about this being a work of fiction and none of this is true, blah, blah, blah…THIS IS CARRIE FISHER.
I’m a huge Star Wars fan. Like, my entire car is Star Wars, most of my clothes, and I have the Rebel Alliance symbol tattooed on my arm, huge fan. I could hear Carrie’s voice as clearly as if she were narrating. Speaking of which, the narrator (I listened to the audio version) was absolutely perfect for this. He nailed Carrie’s dry wit and her constant air of boredom flawlessly.
Being a fan of Carries and having read all her books, this second-hand look into a few years of her life was both funny and heartbreaking. Charlies life is much the same, but his life leans a little more heavily to the ‘heartbreaking’ side.
There were a couple of small nuances in the story that I found tiresome. The constant use of ‘Hey Siri’…references to Theripista and the overuse of ‘I’m thinking….”, ‘I’m thinking…’, ‘I’m thinking…’, started to become stale, but the story as a whole was really well done.
I think Carrie would have loved this book, and I hope that in writing it the author found a little bit of closure on his time spent in the presence of one of his idols. Addiction is a terrible thing, and I can’t imagine what it’s like to see someone you love so much, someone millions of people love so much, constantly flirting with overdoses and death. I think Charlie made the right decision in the end, and I hope he found a little bit of peace and comfort in sharing his story.
I requested this book through NetGalley because Byron Lane was Carrie Fisher’s assistant, and if he was good enough for her, I thought he would be good enough for me. And he was, for the most part.
This book will both make you laugh so hard you get a stomach cramp and weep like Sally Field in the Steel Magnolias funeral scene. Of course you will find yourself wondering where Carrie Fisher ends and the fictional Kathi Kannon begins. Byron Lane tells you straight off that this is fiction and you shouldn’t think Carrie is Kathi, yet similarities abound: Kathi starred in a popular science fiction trilogy that is resurrected two decades later, she struggles with addiction, and her famous actress mother lives next door to her. It makes you wonder how much Byron Lane has in common with Charlie, the book’s narrator.
I loved the throwaway lines (Tom Cruise has a restraining order out against Kathi, who sends him a sex toy for his birthday), and I loved watching Kathi and Charlie’s friendship evolve. As nutty (and tragic) as Kathi is, though, you want to be her friend. I can’t say I would like to have Charlie’s job, but I’d sure like to be invited to some of Kathi’s parties.
Charlie belongs to a group of Hollywood personal assistants, and I enjoyed those scenes, too. You also go with him on his romantic journey as he tries to find Mr. Right. (In one relationship, Charlie was surprisingly unable to read the very clear writing on the wall.) And you travel around the world with him and Kathi, which exhausts you as much as it does Charlie.
I enjoyed this book a great deal. Did I picture Carrie Fisher as I read it? Yes. Did my heart break, thinking about what happened to her? Yes. But did Byron Lane make me appreciate the time we had with her? Oh, yes.
A Star is Bored is the story of a celebrity personal assistant written by a former celebrity personal assistant. As a pop culture junkie, I couldn’t wait to read this book!
There are a lot of parallels you can draw between the novel and real life. Charlie, the book’s protagonist, gets a job working for film star Kathi Kannon. She’s Hollywood royalty (her mother is a beloved star as well) and best known for playing an iconic sci-fi character who also writes books and is a recovering drug addict. Byron Lane, the author, worked for Carrie Fisher, a film star who was Hollywood royalty, best known for playing an iconic sci-fi character who also wrote books and was a recovering drug addict. It’s hard not to read A Star is Bored wondering what actually happened versus what’s pure fiction and while that’s what makes it entertaining, more often than not, it made me sad too.
I think my biggest issue with the book is Charlie himself. He’s such a sad sack throughout and it’s difficult to root for him. There’s a subplot about his disapproving father that gives him a little more depth but it’s hard to get past his constant whining and anxiety. Also, some of Lane’s writing choices – like using a “Hey Siri” refrain – are odd and took me out of the story.
Kathi, on the other hand, is vividly painted. She comes across as brilliant and complicated, someone who sees the world through a unique lens the rest of us can only hope to get the chance to glimpse. But she’s also depicted as someone who squanders her talent and privilege and who basically obliterates anything good in her life. Sometimes it seems these episodes and tantrums are meant to be humorous but I had a hard time reading them that way knowing how Carrie Fisher’s life ended. Even if Kathi’s story is completely fictional, it’s almost impossible not to project elements of it onto the star we all know when there are so many similarities between Lane’s real boss and the one he put in his book.
Thank you to NetGalley, Henry Holt & Company and the author for an ebook to review. All opinions are my own.