Confession, I enjoy celebrity gossip.
Back in the summer of 2012, I was visiting a friend when the news broke about Katie Holmes leaving Tom Cruise. It was such a shocking story at the time and the few details the were publicly available sounded like something out of a spy novel.
Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper by Hilary Liftin is a thinly veiled speculative version of the TomKat split. Liftin has a past career of celebrity ghostwriting, which gave certain aspects of her story some detail another author might not have had. In other areas though, Liftin wrote as as if her main character was an observer of her own life.
I wanted to enjoy this book. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it but I found how closely it paralleled the publicly known details of the real-life events distracting. The seams where Liftin grafted her fictionalized version onto the story were pretty large and obvious.
The parts of the story that felt authentic and inhabited were when the main character was reflecting on how easy it is to ignore red flags when we’re happy and want to believe good things about the people in our life.
I can’t help but think this story could have served as a good jumping off point or inspiration rather than a nearly direct retelling of well-known celebrity gossip. There were the glimmers of some deeper themes about fooling ourselves when we think we’re in love, about how we interpret the motivations of other people and the lengths we’ll go to to protect those we love.
