Namedropper - Softcover

Emma Forrest

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0749324945 ISBN 13: 9780749324940

Publisher: Mandarin, 1998

Synopsis

Meet Viva Cohen: a teenage schoolgirl bombshell. Her bedroom walls are plastered with posters of silver-screen legends, and underneath her school uniform she wears vintage thigh-high stockings. Her best friends are a drugged-out beauty queen and an ageing rock-star, and she lives in London with her gay uncle, Manny. Viva spends her days gate-crashing gigs, skiving her exams and trying to live life as glamorously as her number one icon, Elizabeth Taylor. But then she sets out on a pilgrimage: in search of real love, experience and Jack Nicholson. Wicked-tongued, star-fixated, clever and restless, Viva is like no other girl - and this is no ordinary summer ...

About this title

About the Author:

Emma Forrest began her writing career as a journalist, contributing to the Sunday Times, Independent, Guardian and Saturday Telegraph magazine. Her recent second novel, Thin Skin, was published in 2002 by Bloomsbury. She is twenty five years old and lives in Manhattan, where she is at work on her third novel.

From Publishers Weekly:

Viva Cohen, a self-proclaimed "insecure teenage Jew," is the starstruck heroine of Forrest's zippy, pop-conscious debut. When Viva's mother decides to live a life of New Age ashram hopping, Viva is raised by Manny, her gay uncle in a North London flat coated with posters of Elizabeth Taylor. With Manny as her father figure, "Liz" as her matriarch, and her two best friends, Ray, a 33-year-old rock star, and Treena, a feckless bombshell, Viva, at 17, knits up her life with celluloid threads. She dresses up as Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer, and she's both lighthearted and cynical about love. The novel is a love story of sorts, but the objects of Viva's affection are in a constant state of teenage flux. In London, it's Ray, who's more big brother than romantic interest; in Edinburgh, it's Ray's opening act, Drew, an anorexic self-mutilator who shares Viva's love for Marilyn Monroe; and in Las Vegas it's Dillon, a misunderstood tweenie pop heartthrob. Eventually, she and Treena achieve their ambition of staying at the Chateau Marmont in L.A., but disillusion follows. Unlike the unnamed protagonist of contemporary Rebecca Ray's Pure (a fellow Brit, Forrest, at 22, is just two years older than Ray), Viva remains refreshingly chaste. Losing her virginity, Viva believes, is simply too complicated without the correct camera angle or the prospect of a second take. Her would-be silver screen life is as exasperating as it is self-aware. Although Viva's teenage angst and pop obsessions may grate on the nerves of anyone over 30, Forrest deftly juggles her heroine's adolescent fantasies into an entertaining novel. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mandarin
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0749324945
• ISBN 13: 9780749324940
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 234