“I probably would have written a worse comment than you did,” I said. “In fact, I feel like writing one now.”
“Don’t,” Melanie Joan said. “I’m in enough trouble as it is.”
“I was just kidding,” I said. “Kind of.” I asked if she could email me theStronger Alonemanuscript.
Melanie Joan let out a mirthless laugh. “At least somebody will read it,” she said.
A few seconds after we hung up, I received an email from Melanie Joan with a PDF of the manuscript attached. I opened it and started to read. It was better written than her romance novels, but still a little over-the-top for my taste. I decided towrite down all the names of the people she mentioned negatively, then try to figure out if any of them could be Book Babe.
One candidate jumped out right away—the unnamed actress, whom Melanie Joan referred to in the book as Tallulah Airhead. (If her readership was, as Woodrow had said, “aging out,” he might have tried suggesting a pop-culture reference that was less than a hundred years old.)
In any case, her final standoff with “Tallulah” was described in the book’s prologue:
As I approached her trailer, my heart pounded. I’d already been through so much in my life—terror, trauma, debasement no woman should be forced to endure, most of it at the hands of people I thought I loved and trusted. But none of it had prepared me for this moment—when I would come face-to-face with the person who was actively destroying my greatest creation, Cassandra Demeter—ofA Girl and Not a God. I had just watched the dailies. Not only was her acting an embarrassment (drinking and diet pills were rumored to have been involved), but she had rewritten blocks of dialogue without permission, turning my heroine into a simpering fool. The ingratitude! I knocked on Tallulah’s door, though I hated showing her that courtesy. If her trailer hadn’t been leased by my own production company, I’d have broken it down.
“Go away!” she called out. “I’m meditating.”
It was as if my entire life had prepared me for this moment—the burn of each indignity making me stronger. I was a sword forged in fire, ready to do battle. “You’re a disgrace,” I told her through the trailer door. “You’re destroying my life’s work. And you are fired.”
By the time she’d gotten off her meditation pillow and opened the door, I’d called security.
“Ouch,” I said.
A Girl and Not a Godhad been released on Netflix four years ago. It had been quite a hit. The actress who’d apparently replaced Tallulah Airhead—a then-unknown by the name of Meredith Tanner—had won an Emmy. I remembered calling Melanie Joan and congratulating her. She’d never mentioned the fact that Meredith had been a pinch hitter, and why should she? Melanie Joan Hall had won the game. Until, perhaps, now.
I called Melanie Joan.
“Who is Tallulah Airhead?” I said.
She made that sound again. Rosie jumped off my lap and scurried out of my office.
Nine
Once my dog was safely ensconced in her bed under Blake’s desk, I got back to Melanie Joan. It took a lot of cajoling on my part, but eventually she breathed out the name of the despised actress: Natalie Blythe.
“Never heard of her,” I said.
“Of course you haven’t,” Melanie Joan said. “I made sure of that.”
“How?”
“Let’s just say I very discreetly spread the word about her lack of professionalism.”
“Ah.”
“Listen, Sunny, I don’t need your moralizing.”
“ ‘Ah’ is moralizing?”
Melanie Joan let out a heavy sigh. “Did you know that shemanaged to steal several designer dresses from the wardrobe department on her way out?” she said. “She’s lucky I didn’t have her arrested.”
“You said in the book that she rewrote ‘blocks of dialogue’ inA Girl and Not a God.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you remember her writing style?”
She snorted. “What writing style?”
