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A Stranger Like You: A Novel
by Elizabeth Brundage
Paperback : 272 pages
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“…An intense, provocative thriller about power, war, and the portrayal of women in film.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Brundage is an astonishing writer…This is the best novel about the ...
Introduction
“Fascinating…operates at the highest tension point.” – Los Angeles Times
“…An intense, provocative thriller about power, war, and the portrayal of women in film.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Brundage is an astonishing writer…This is the best novel about the underbelly of Hollywood since The Day of the Locust.” – The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Brundage is a storyteller supreme.” – Wally Lamb
"A pithy, ironic L.A. noir full of broken dreams and snappy repartee." -Stewart O'Nan
In Hollywood, every story begins with a premise, every action has a consequence. Screenwriter Hugh Waters is confident of his script’s direction when he gets on a plane bound for Los Angeles; his plan is just to have a talk with Hedda Chase, the young Ivy League studio executive who pulled the plug on the film deal that was about to change his life. But when the conversation goes awry and Hedda declares his story implausible, Hugh decides to prove her wrong. He reenacts his terrifying ending – casting Hedda as victim. Now her destiny, and her brilliant career, hangs in the balance. Set against the high-voltage backdrops of Hollywood, a tense film set in Abu Dhabi, and the back roads of Death Valley, A Stranger Like You is a taut and provocative novel about three unforgettable characters whose lives become impossibly bound. It’s about who gets to tell the story, and the lengths to which we’ll go to make our dreams come true.
Excerpt
It begins in late September, when you first see the car. It is raining and you are happy for the rain because you have grown irritable with so much sun and the rain soothes you somehow and reinforces the fact that you were not born in this sun-bleached emotional wasteland, but back east where people are moodier and unapologetically disenchanted. The sky is grim, the air cool, and you are driving home from the studio as on most afternoons around this time, only today is different because of the rain, the long line of traffic down Los Feliz Boulevard. The car is parked on a grassy corner, adjacent to one of those prehistoric mansions, an enormous, mushroom-colored Spanish Colonial entrapped in vines. It is a blue BMW, an older model, a For Sale sign taped on the windshield. You think of stopping, but in truth you are not the sort of person who buys things from strangers—you have come to rely on the expertise of people you trust for getting you what you need, when you need it, and you are not really comfortable pursuing things on your own. For the several weeks that follow, you notice the car as you pass by, as the grass grows up around it, dappled with fluffy dandelions, and you begin to dream about owning it, driving home in it, showing it to your colleagues at the studio, your small collection of important friends. ...
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Discussion Questions
1. A Stranger Like You narrates the abduction of Hedda Chase twice: first from the perspective of her kidnapper (chapter one) and later from the viewpoint of the victim (chapter thirteen). What does the reader gain from the retelling that was not present the first time? How has the reader’s perspective on the crime been altered by the intervening chapters?2. We are given to understand that Hugh Water’s screenplay for The Adjuster is vulgar, exploitative, and misogynistic. How does Elizabeth Brundage manage her novel, which is largely about that screenplay, in such a way as to keep it from being subject to the same criticisms?
3. Ironically, the screenplay that actually gets someone killed in the novel is not Hugh’s but Tom Foster’s more socially conscious script about the stoning of an Iraqi woman, which leads to the death of Fatima Kassim. Was Foster irresponsible in writing this film? Is Hedda right when she wonders what right Americans have to judge the practices of other cultures?
4. Imagine that you are a director filming the screen version of A Stranger Like You. Describe in detail how you would shoot a particular scene from the book.
Notes From the Author to the Bookclub
Note from Elizabeth Brundage: Having trained as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, I had always wanted to write about the movie business, a place where real problems are transformed into carefully machinated structures (screenplays) and played out inside a two dimensional world that we, as viewers, accept and believe as real. As Americans we are very influenced by the movies we watch. I wanted to write about a guy like Hugh Waters, who’s been passed over and ignored all his life – and isn’t going to take it anymore. I wanted to look at Hugh as a kind of domestic terrorist, whose revenge, in his own mind, is a valiant act. Hollywood is a fascinating place where it seems anything is possible, but under that shiny optimism is an atmosphere of deception. Hedda, the producer who rejects Hugh’s project, plays a role in the manufacturing of deception, but on the inside she’s vulnerable; alone. And Denny Rios, an Iraq-war veteran in the throes of PTSD, suffers his own version of deception. These three characters come together and become impossibly bound. They are not all good or all bad. Like most of us, they wear the bruises of our troubled times. I tried to unravel what motivates our behavior, the decisions we make, and the gestures we share – of both kindness and menace – that ultimately shape our lives.Book Club Recommendations
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