Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures (Straub) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
At once a delicious depiction of Hollywood’s golden age and a sweet, fulfilling story about one woman’s journey through fame, love, and loss.
Boston Globe


In her big-hearted first novel…Emma Straub follows…[an] actress's 50-year journey from summer stock extra to screen star to has-been. It's a witty examination of the psychic costs of reinvention in Hollywood's golden age…Straub…is terrific at capturing the gilded cocoon created by the Hollywood studios for its stars that was both seductive and insidious.
Caroline Preston - Washington Post


Straub vividly recaptures the glamour and meticulously contrived mythology of the studio-system era.
USA Today


Straub’s brisk pacing and emotionally complex characters keep the story fresh.... This bewitching novel is ultimately a celebration of those moments when we drop the act and play the hardest role of all: ourselves.
O, The Oprah Magazine


Straub makes masterful use of the golden age of Hollywood to tap contemporary questions about the price of celebrity and a working mother’s struggle to balance all that matters.
People


Dramatic, human and historical: like a classic Hollywood movie…Straub knows when to linger and when to be brief, and her portrayal of Elsa/Laura’s relationships is exquisite.... Peppered with stunningly crafted sentences and heart-twisting storytelling, the richness of this full life is portrayed with perceptive clarity.
BUST Magazine


In her debut novel (after her early-2012 story collection, Other People We Married), Straub weaves together snapshots of the long, large life of Elsa Emerson, the youngest daughter in a family of quintessentially blonde, corn-fed Midwestern sisters living in Door County, Wis. In the late 1920s, the family runs a summer playhouse, and Elsa’s first role, as a flower girl in Come Home, My Angel, coincides with a family tragedy. These two events shape her passion for acting and her desire to slip into a different character than that of the good, homespun girl she is. At 17, a few years before WWII, she moves to Los Angeles and finds Hollywood the perfect stage for her metamorphosis into Laura Lamont, a dark-haired, serious-eyed starlet who carries with her an air of mystery and gravity completely apart from her idyllic Midwestern upbringing. Written in a removed prose, Straub brings Elsa to life with the detached analysis of an actor examining a character, exemplifying Elsa’s own remote relationship to her identity. Through marriages, births, deaths, and career upheavals, Elsa and Laura coexist, sometimes uneasily—until Elsa learns to reconcile her two selves. An engaging epic of a life that captures the bittersweetness of growing up, leaving home, and finding it again.
Publishers Weekly