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Your next favorite book
is waiting.
A Novel
by Elizabeth Castellano
From the author of the Good Morning America Book Club pick Save What's Left comes a witty and sharp-tongued novel about an actress whose manuscript is thirty-seven years overdue—and the life moments that led to its delay.
Maria Astorini, once popular character actress and late-night talk show darling, is having a moment. The B-list actress has survived deaths, divorces, a famous mother, a Hollywood blacklist, a string of public embarrassments, an aging face, financial ruin, an empty nest, a difficult best friend, and a worldwide pandemic. Now, she's back and bigger than ever. A small, unexpected role has heightened her celebrity status and propelled her, at age sixty-five, into the limelight. And then, along comes the call Maria has spent decades avoiding. It's her publisher asking, "Where is that book?"
Maria knows the world doesn't need another celebrity memoir. To finally fulfill her contract, Maria writes, or attempts to write, or, at the very least, sends a pile of pages meant to vaguely resemble the book she promised to deliver nearly four decades earlier.
In a series of bite-sized anecdotes, she candidly recalls her past, chronicling the significant, and insignificant moments of her full, funny, and extraordinarily unpredictable life.
Maria hasn't been able to write a book about her life—she's been too busy living it.
"I loved this book, filled with deliciously nutty, bite-sized vignettes that go down so easy. Like Grace Paley, Elizabeth Castellano is a master of low-key humor refracted through an eye for the absurd. Her voice is cynical without turning hopeless, comedic but never straying into satire. Pure pleasure." ―Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of Wreck and Sandwich
"The superb Elizabeth Castellano has written a delicious, hilarious, and completely original (fictional) memoir by an actress who has to honor a book contract from 40 years ago. And it's a doozy. The components of a complicated life⎯love, family, and history, unspool in surprise, delight, heartache, and pain. I didn't want this novel to end." ⎯ Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of The View from Lake Como
This information about Proof of Progress was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Elizabeth Castellano lives in New York, and is the author of Save What's Left and Proof of Progress.
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