Fallout Girl: A Hollywood Lights Novel by Katie Rose Guest Pryal @krgpryal @BlueCrowBooks

“Fallout Girl is a love story wrapped inside a heart-rending struggle for personal freedom.” —Sonja Yoerg, author of All the Best People

Fractured family, deadly secrets, and a woman on the run in L.A.

The day she buries her mother, Miranda George jumps on a plane from North Carolina, telling no one where she’s heading. She wants to disappear and start over. She arrives on the Los Angeles doorstep of college friend Daphne Saito, and even though Miranda hasn’t seen Daphne in years, Daphne welcomes Miranda into her home and her makeshift L.A. family.

The problem is, Miranda is on the run from family. All family. Family, in Miranda’s experience, can get you killed.

Miranda takes off again, but this time her plan is much more sinister. She certainly doesn’t expect her friends to track her down. When they bring her back from the edge, the question remains: will Miranda be able to save herself and her newfound friendships? Or will she remain strangled by the past?

“A dangerous, sexy, motorcycle ride of a story, which pulls off the feat of being both humorous and heartbreaking at the same time.” —Sandra Block, author of the Zoe Goldman series

Here’s Katie to tell us more…

Thank you, Anne, for hosting me on your blog today. Fallout Girl, which released on Monday, is the fifth book in my Hollywood Lights series. (Each novel stands alone: I call them “linked novels.”) Each of my Hollywood Lights heroines, like many people who transplant to L.A., is hoping to leave something behind—but running away never works, and that something she hopes to leave behind? It always catches up to her.

In Fallout Girl, the heroine Miranda thinks she has a plan that will help the people she cares about even as it puts herself in danger. Although Miranda has a tough shell, she’s always been willing to sacrifice herself to take care of others. So she concocts this plan, and it involves dashing across the country the day of her own mother’s funeral. And that’s just the start.

But at every turn, her plan is derailed. Her plan isn’t derailed by a foe, but rather by her friends—by the people who love her. At every point in her journey, someone who loves her forces her to reconsider the pain that her actions might cause.

In this way, even though Fallout Girl is about family secrets, and mental illness, and other subjects that some people might find dark, it is, at its core, a love story. It’s about the love friends have for one another. It’s about the love that family has for one another. And it’s about good-old romantic love with a happy ending, and how that, too, can save us.

I was inspired to write this book by two separate things. First, I imagined a particular character, one that could catch the attention of Sandy, the only movie star character in my Hollywood Lights books. He’s older than the other characters, and jaded. It takes a lot to rattle him. And I thought, what if I could write a character who could rattle him? What would she be like? And I started there.

The second thing that inspired me was mental illness. I wanted to write a character with a psychiatric disability, in particular, bipolar disorder. As I discuss in the author’s note in the back of the book, it was really important to me to get Miranda’s character right, and to do right by her as a disabled character. Disabled characters rarely get represented in fiction, and when they do, they rarely get represented well.

For example, a disabled person lives her life without contemplating being disabled all the time. If being disabled is a character’s normal, it ceases to be something she constantly thinks about. Just like non-disabled people, a disabled person has stuff to do, like laundry or going to the post office. While she is going to the post office, she is unlikely to be thinking things like this: “I’m a bipolar person going to the post office. As a bipolar person going to the post office, my experience of the world is different than those who are not bipolar people going to the post office.” Probably being bipolar won’t cross her mind at all. Probably she’ll be wondering if the post office takes Amex, or if the line will be long because of the holidays.

But that’s not how disabled folks are usually depicted in fiction or film. Instead, they’re depicted as always talking about or thinking about being disabled. I didn’t want that for Miranda. I wanted to do better than that. I hope I succeeded.