The Cigarette Girl - Softcover

Carol Wolper

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330390740 ISBN 13: 9780330390743

Publisher: Pan, 2000

Synopsis

A furiously funny, clear-eyed novel about a non-bimbo's dating adventures in a town that celebrates bimbosity.

Elizabeth West is twenty-eight, which means she's just entered The Zone--that seven-year span in a woman's life when the pressure to find Mr. Right is at its most intense. For Elizabeth, however, the quest is not about Mr. Right so much as it is about Mr. Maybe. And on some nights, all she's looking for is a little distraction . . .

What complicates Elizabeth's quest are the particulars of her situation. She is a writer of testosterone-heavy screenplays--the blow-'em-up vehicles for eight-figure stars and their bad-boy directors--and therefore deals on a daily basis with men who traffic nearly exclusively in bimbos, which, like smog and palm trees, are a fixture of the L.A. landscape. Though her job requires her to sound like one of the boys (sample dialogue: "I don't deal with dickbrains"), she's very much a girl, from her cell-phone codependency to her chronic attraction to dangerous men. With her female friends succumbing to marriage or morphing into Spermtrappers (women who hunger to be impregnated--husband optional), Elizabeth finds herself questioning the long-term benefits of remaining an SCU (self-contained unit) and looking with new eyes at the mating options around her.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

An excruciatingly witty debut from screenwriter Wolper, set in Hollywood and full of glam-girl insights on love, sex, successand the search for Mr. Maybe. Elizabeth West is a down-home Hollywood girl, the sort who understands the etiquette of twin beds in Palm Springs and designer champagne at story meetings. A screenwriter, Elizabeth has made her name in the very macho sub-world of action-moron films, and much of her job is consumed by questions of finding the right firearms for the right scene. Although estrogen is usually a put-down in her patois, she is surprised to find herself gradually succumbing to the biological clock. Shes 28, after all, which puts her at the start of the zone: the prime years (2835) for finding a man and settling down. But, living in Hollywood, Elizabeth cant exactly start hanging out at church socials. She has to come up with a treatment, then polish off the edges as she goes along. Theres Jake: a director of some note, whos been Elizabeths mentor and (at 40) father-figure for some time. She admits to a crush on him, but there are problems, not least of which is his girlfriend Blaze. Davids a thirtysomething architect who looks great and can eat a girl into a coma, but his idea of commitment is a three-day weekend. Nigel is an acid-tongued Brit who owns a trendy restaurant in Malibu but is standoffish and spastic in that annoyingly English way. The only decent man in Elizabeths life seems to be her best friend Andrew, who runs an art gallery and warns Elizabeth when shes flying too close to the flames. Can she start something there? No way. This is Hollywood, after all, where decency marks you as a loser. Elizabeth will have to make the best of a bad hand. Or will she? Slick to the max: after about ten pages, Wolpers high-testosterone romp begins to sound like Cynthia Heimel on speed. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

A Los Angeles screenwriter like her protagonist, Wolper seasons her slick and accomplished debut with enough new phrases to create a Seinfeldesque vocabulary. At 28, Elizabeth West is entering the Zone, that period between 28 and 35 when women go from being happily single to depressingly single, feeling biologically compelled to settle the issues of marriage and children. But Elizabeth, who scripts action movies and can talk MP5 semiautomatic carbines with the best of them, is reasonable enough not to be looking for Mr. Right. Content to settle for Mr. Maybe, she seeks him among a group of men who include the unattainable director of her film, an architect who "knows all the moves" and her ex-boyfriend, a snake who gives the British a bad name. As she moves closer to completing her selection, however, she must compete with a pack of beautiful bimbos who would make almost any woman feel like a "subfemale gender," even the kind of ultramodern heroine who refuses to play by the infamous man-trapping Rules. Set against a backdrop that includes Lakers games and Oscar parties, the novel is packed with caustic wit, insider knowledge and raunchy girl talk. The dialogue is straight from the hip, with Wolper confidently lampooning the cult of celebrity in a town where the next best thing to knowing Jack Nicholson is knowing a great story about him. Not surprisingly, Elizabeth scripts herself the kind of pyrotechnically bizarre twist of a happy ending that lets the reader know there's a screenwriter in the house, while at the same time proving that there's more than one blueprint for life in the '90s. Agent, Angela Janklow Harrington. Major ad/promo; foreign rights sold in the U.K., Germany, Italy, Holland and Sweden. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0330390740
• ISBN 13: 9780330390743
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336