What is Jessica Brockmole reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jessica Brockmole, author of Woman Enters Left.

Her entry begins:

This fall there’s been a lot of nonfiction on my reading stack, some for research, some for pleasure. One that fascinated me was Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption, about the changing role of the American consumer from the Great Depression to the postwar era, and Virginia Scharff’s Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age, which traces the relationship between women and automobiles in the early twentieth century. Although I...[read on]

About Woman Enters Left, from the publisher:

In the 1950s, movie star Louise Wilde is caught between an unfulfilling acting career and a shaky marriage when she receives an out-of-the-blue phone call: She has inherited the estate of Florence “Florrie” Daniels, a Hollywood screenwriter she barely recalls meeting. Among Florrie’s possessions are several unproduced screenplays, personal journals, and—inexplicably—old photographs of Louise’s mother, Ethel. On an impulse, Louise leaves a film shoot in Las Vegas and sets off for her father’s house on the East Coast, hoping for answers about the curious inheritance and, perhaps, about her own troubled marriage.

Nearly thirty years earlier, Florrie takes off on an adventure of her own, driving her Model T westward from New Jersey in pursuit of broader horizons. She has the promise of a Hollywood job and, in the passenger seat, Ethel, her best friend since childhood. Florrie will do anything for Ethel, who is desperate to reach Nevada in time to reconcile with her husband and reunite with her daughter. Ethel fears the loss of her marriage; Florrie, with long-held secrets confided only in her journal, fears its survival.

In parallel tales, the three women—Louise, Florrie, Ethel—discover that not all journeys follow a map. As they rediscover their carefree selves on the road, they learn that sometimes the paths we follow are shaped more by our traveling companions than by our destinations.

Learn more about the book and author at Jessica Brockmole's website, and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

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Writers Read: Jessica Brockmole.

--Marshal Zeringue