Alison B. Hart's "The Work Wife," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Work Wife: A Novel by Alison B. Hart.

The entry begins:

The Work Wife is a novel, set over the course of one day, that’s told from the perspective of three women in the orbit of billionaire movie mogul Ted Stabler—his personal assistant Zanne, his wife Holly, and his ex-business partner Phoebe Lee. Maybe it’s because I wanted to be a screenwriter before I ever wanted to be a novelist, but I’ve always enjoyed dreaming up who would play my characters in the movie. So let’s give my Hollywood novel the Hollywood treatment!

Zanne’s the hardest for me to cast. She’s Joan Jett without the makeup, Snow White if she were a daddy. Zanne Klein’s a tough nut. She grew up in LA as the only child of a single mother, the product of an affair between a professor and his teaching assistant. When she was thirteen, her mother died, and Zanne was shipped off to Boston to live with a father and a step family she never knew. All of the ingredients are there for her to develop a substance abuse problem, and she does. At 18, she gives the finger to her dad (and the free tuition she could get at the college where he teaches) and heads back to LA to work on a film crew. Zanne was striking even as a child, and never knew what to do with all that attention from men, which felt barbed and hostile. But when she finds herself struggling to make ends meet on the peanuts she’s paid as a production assistant, she picks up extra work as a “model,” paid to attend parties and look pretty, and sliding perilously toward dangerous situations. Eventually, she leaves LA, comes out as gay, gets clean, and by the time we meet her on the morning of this one extraordinary day, she’s built up a hard shell around herself. There are a lot of actresses who could play Zanne, but I picture her like...[read on]

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My Book, The Movie: The Work Wife.

--Marshal Zeringue