A Star Is Bored
Charlie lands the job as eccentric actress Kathi Kannon’s assistant by chance. He starts as a fan--and an employee desperate to keep his job. He soon becomes essential and as she depends on him more, he wonders where he starts and she ends–and whether he can save her from herself.
This was a fun audiobook listen, filled with snark and Hollywood absurdities. It’s fiction, but a great choice if you love a good tell-all (the author is Carrie Fisher's former assistant, though he makes clear this is not a memoir).
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Publisher’s Description
She needs an assistant. He needs a hero. Charlie Besson is tense and sweating as he prepares for a wild job interview. His car is idling, like his life, outside the Hollywood mansion of Kathi Kannon, star of stage and screen and People magazine’s Worst Dressed list. She’s an actress in need of assistance, and he’s adrift and in need of a lifeline. Kathi is an icon, bestselling author, and award-winning movie star, most known for her role as Priestess Talara in a blockbuster sci-fi film. She’s also known in another role: Outrageous Hollywood royalty. Admittedly so. Famously so. Chaotically so, as Charlie quickly discovers.
Charlie gets the job, and his three-year odyssey is filled with late-night shopping sprees, last-minute trips to see the aurora borealis, and an initiation to that most sacred of Hollywood tribes: the personal assistant. But Kathi becomes much more than a boss, and as their friendship grows Charlie must make a choice. Will he always be on the sidelines of life, assisting the great forces that be, or can he step into his own life’s leading role? Laugh-out-loud funny, and searingly poignant, Byron Lane’s A Star is Bored is a novel that, like the star at its center, is enchanting and joyous, heartbreaking and hopeful.