Sherrill should know. Like her heroine Clementine at the glossy Flame, Sherrill has profiled dozens of movie stars for The Washington Post, Esquire and Vanity Fair and has–as her alter ego puts it–listened, “very carefully, to [their] lofty musings. Their stories, their memories, their self-absorption. I nodded. I said little. (The less I said, in fact, the more they talked.) And then I sat in front of my computer trying to devise ways of bringing them to life.” This breezy roman a clef reads like the spun-sugar puff pieces it sends up. But unlike those shallow stories, it goes a little deeper and tries to figure out why society is so obsessed with celebrity. Clementine looks for guidance to Hollywood legends Gloria Swanson, Loretta Young and Myrna Loy and a charming gay British assistant named Franklin. But in the end she realizes that in order to find happiness, she needs to stop glorifying the lives of others and instead take a long look at herself.
