Those of us with former spouses in the film industry know this delicious fiction for what it is really is - an accurate picture of the games men of Hollywood play with the women in their lives. Not for the faint of heart.

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Product Description

IN HOLLYWOOD, THEY LIKE TO LOVE 'EM AND LEAVE 'EM.

The Starter Wife

A scathingly funny novel from the bestselling author of Maneater.

When her husband, Kenny, dumps her by cell phone (!) mere months before their ten-year wedding anniversary, Gracie Pollock is dazed and confused. Though life as the wife of a semi-famous Hollywood studio executive often left her yawning, Gracie always believed she and Kenny were different from other Hollywood couples. She never thought she'd be a starter wife.

But Kenny has upgraded, and with images of his new pop tartlet girlfriend everywhere Gracie turns, she seeks refuge at her best friend's Malibu mansion. Then a mysterious hunk saves her from drowning and suddenly drowning in her sorrows seems like a waste of time. And when she takes up with Kenny's boss, one of Hollywood's better-known Lotharios, she discovers that maybe life after divorce -- Hollywood-style -- isn't so bad after all!

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #233365 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Review
"The third and funniest in a succession of novels about the cutthroat social mores of the entertainment industry by a woman who has witnessed them up close."-- The New York Times Book Review

"Lively, wry."-- The Washington Post Book World

"Fearless and fabulous. Only an insider like Gigi Grazer could have so much wicked fun with the intricacies of Hollywood's power couples."-- Lauren Weisberger, author of The Devil Wears Prada

About the Author
Gigi Levangie Grazer is the author of three prior novels: Rescue Me (2000), Maneater (2003), and The Starter Wife (2006). The Starter Wife was adapted for an Emmy Award?winning USA Network miniseries starring Debra Messing, and later for a television series; Maneater was adapted for a Lifetime miniseries starring Sarah Chalke in May 2009. In addition, Gigi wrote the screenplay for Stepmom, starring Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon. Gigi's articles have appeared in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Glamour. She lives in L.A. with her two children and three miniature dachshunds.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: Married, with Onion Rings

Cellulite massage is not for the faint of heart. Which is what Gracie Pollock was thinking as her thighs were pounded by the grunting Russian woman who left her bruised, swollen, and otherwise disfigured every other Monday at three o'clock for the last five years. Gracie's calendar was filled with benign-sounding yet brutal "treatments": Tuesdays were hair (blow-dry, cut, and highlights, if needed), Wednesdays were waxing or plucking, Thursdays belonged to dermabrasion or acid peels or any variety of activities involving needles and the hope of Insta-Youth, Fridays were off days, save for the second blow-dry of the week, when Gracie would compare her week of treatments to her friends' week of treatments over lunch at The Ivy.

You want irony? For the privilege of emerging from a session with Svetlana looking like she'd been locked in a freak dance with Mike Tyson, Gracie would write a check out to "Cash" for $250 and hand it over with shaking hands.

Svetlana left the room, leaving behind an imprint of garlic cloves and generations of suffering on the air. There were countless other Wives Of to punish, those who bought into the myth of defeating the onslaught of age with a pair of hardened Russian fists. Gracie groaned and leaned up from the damp, tacky massage table (a nice way of putting the modern equivalent of the rack) and onto her elbows. She willed her eyes open, her lids feeling like the only part of her body that had escaped Soviet vengeance. She slowly twisted her head to the side to assess the damage in the veined, mirrored tile lining the walls. Mirrored tile, Gracie thought, all the rage when Sylvester, the lisping Supreme Ruler of Disco, was at the top of the charts. "For a tax-free two-fifty a pop," Gracie muttered, "Svetlana the Terrible could swing a subscription to Elle Decor."

But the veined tile with the mirrored surface served its purpose. Here's the scoop. Gracie Pollock looked ridiculously good in that her polished exterior straddled the territories claimed by both adjectives, ridiculous and good. Each time Gracie peered at her reflection, she was startled, as though she had run into a formerly plain-wrapped high school friend who had transformed herself into a middle-aged version of Jessica Simpson. What are the odds of looking better at forty than at sixteen? Gracie thought to herself. About the same as crapping a gleaming pile of Krugerrands.

Let's start with the hair. Said hair being the color of that expensive European butter no one can pronounce. Domestic butter, according to Gracie's colorist, not being, well, buttery enough. And this hair was thick. Thick, as though somewhere in the Hamptons, Christie Brinkley had awakened looking like Michael Chiklis with hips. Gracie's original mousy brown, tongue-in-light-socket chicken wire had been colored and wrestled and yanked and stretched and stretched again into submission by a fine-boned man of unknown sexual and other identity named Yuko, then brightened with highlights every three weeks and lengthened with extensions, rewoven every twelve weeks. Her forehead was as unlined as the hood of a new Porsche, due to the same poison found in warped green bean cans she was warned about as a child. Her lips were soft and full. Thank you, the pitiless Collagen God. The teeth? Straight and white. The teeth were hers. The teeth, she'd grown herself.

I did grow those teeth myself, right? Gracie thought.

Yes, Gracie reassured herself as she bared her teeth like a rich blond rottweiler into the veined mirror. Those are my teeth.

She growled at her reflection.

Let's move on. The breasts were a perfect full B cup. Gracie had given birth and breast-fed -- and yet her nipples pointed due north. Nature? Or the magic hands of Dr. Barbara Hayden? You decide.

The tummy, save for the bumpy scar which Gracie had not yet "done" above her pubic bone, was hard and as hard earned as the diamond on her left hand. The arms, brown and muscular and hairless as newborn Chihuahuas. The legs, Gracie's bête noir throughout her teenage years, were as sleek and taut as the skin on an apple.

Just looking at them made her weary.

Maintenance was a Mother Fucker.

Gracie stuck her tongue out at her reflection. The blond, green-eyed, perky-breasted woman rudely assessing her was not related to the soft-fleshed, brown-eyed girl she'd been more or less satisfied with for thirty years.

This Gracie, by all accounts, appeared perfect. Media friendly. Easy on the eyes and hard on the 401(k).

Then she looked down at her hands. Good Lord, not the hands, Gracie thought. The dead giveaway. The Dorian Gray painting in the attic. The skin on her hands was changing. Freckles that had once been a badge of youth and vigor were now a sign of encroaching age -- the inevitable, inexorable spiraling into the Martha Raye Terra In-firma.

Gracie hadn't told anyone, not even her close friends, but in the last two years, she had failed the pinch test. Failing the pinch test is something best kept close to the bustier -- if Gracie pinched the back of her hand (which she did several times an hour), the skin no longer snapped back. It slid back.

Eventually.

And those freckles. What could blast them out? Gracie hovered over her hands with a critical eye. What could possibly eliminate the speckled insurgents? Laser, acid peel, that pricey SPF 1,000 Greek sunscreen, bleaching creams, fotofacial, collagen, harvested fat cell shots. She had tried everything. And still the pinch test failed. Still the freckles persisted.

Gracie tucked her hands away, hiding them like a dreaded family secret. She sighed. And then she thought about her elbows. Gravity is a bitch, she thought.

"Do not" -- she wagged her finger at her reflection -- "appraise the elbows!"

Gracie felt her body was a time bomb, just waiting to jump back into its normal state, should the narrowest opportunity appear. She lived in a world where people fought their natural condition on a daily basis -- every day in L.A. was Halloween. Those weren't masks she'd see in the women's dressing area at Saks or in the salon chairs at Cristophe or suspended over glass noodles at Mr. Chow -- those were faces. Gracie feared she'd wake up one day and the skin around her face would be pulled into a bow in the back of her head.

Gracie was on the precipice. Was she going to be the recently Asian Joan Rivers, or what once was Brigitte Bardot? She'd have to make a choice.

One pull of the pin, Gracie knew as she peered over her shoulder at her proto-human reflection, and the whole thing would blow.

The trouble started with the earring. This wasn't just any earring -- like that silver Celtic cross Gracie had lost in a public toilet at Santa Monica Beach because she was so freaked out by the thought of homeless people wandering in while she peed in a doorless stall. This wasn't one of the pair of pink diamond and platinum three-carat studs Gracie and every other stuck-in-a-loveless-marriage-but-with-a-generous-allowance Wife Of had her eye on at the Loree Rodkin case at Neiman Marcus, aka Needless Markup, just waiting for her husband to slip up for an excuse to buy. No, this wasn't just any earring. This was a delicate gold-wire hoop suddenly attached to her husband's heretofore unadorned, exhibiting middle-aged tendencies (more hair, additional length) right earlobe.

File Gracie Pollock's story under "hindsight is twenty-twenty," with the understanding that her sight was definitely up her hind end at the time. But how was Gracie to know that the demise of her nine-year, ten-month, three-day, eighteen-hour marriage could have been foretold mere weeks ago by a tiny piece of metal in a middle-aged man's ear?

"Yo, ho, ho, a pirate's life for me," sang Gracie, wife of Kenny Pollock, president of Durango Studios, as her ever-tardy husband loped over to their usual corner table at Ivy at the Shore, their (and every other Power Lister's) watering hole of choice. Kenny was twenty minutes late, as always. Somewhere between "punctual" and "rude" there was "Kenny time": twenty minutes late. Not ten minutes, not fifteen minutes. Twenty. Sometimes Gracie wondered if he waited out in the car until half past nineteen minutes -- his lateness was as precise as the creases ironed into his jeans. (How precise were those creases, you ask? So precise that Kenny measured the creases himself, with a carpenter's measuring tape. If the crease was off center, bodily threats would be faxed to the dry cleaner.)

"Investors meeting at the studio," Kenny said, kissing Gracie's upturned cheek, ignoring her rendition of the Disney classic with a shrug of his long-ago-college-football-player shoulders. Gracie noted that he did not issue an apology for his tardiness -- another in a long line of power moves. She knew the drill: "Sorry" is for people who have to care. "Sorry" is for people who may need a job someday. "Sorry" is for Pussies. Kenny greeted their dinner guests. "Or were we their guests?" Gracie asked herself. "One forgets." The dinner had been set in November of the previous year. Most of their dinners were set months in advance -- Gracie and Kenny could barely get through the first week of January without knowing exactly how their year would lay out. They knew exactly who they would have drinks at the Four Seasons bar with on March twelfth, who they'd be entertaining at home with a chef's barbecue on May seventh, whose summer vacation home in the Hamptons or Martha's Vineyard or Point Dume they'd find themselves watching fireworks from on July fourth, whose winter vacation home in Aspen, Telluride, or Sun Valley they'd find themselves skiing out of come Thanksgiving Day weekend.

The pair they were eating dinner with tonight was a married couple -- the man, a slithery, amphibious, soon-to-be-unemployed network chief (everyone except for him, from the valet parkers to the Sumner Redstones, seemed to know this) and the wife, a former stripper and back-page material Playboy Bunny trying to hide her past, along with her overenthusiastic breasts, under ...

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Customer Reviews

Don't get me Started!
Because she is a real-life "Wife Of," Gigi Levangie Grazer has been hailed as the "on the inside" Hollywood chick-litter. Inexplicably, it turns out, because "The Starter Wife" is full of the vapid, name-dropping superficiality that any housewife from Nebraska could dream up.

Gracie is a "Wife Of" -- wealthy, toned, dyed and perfectly preserved, and married to a Hollywood heavyweight with one kid. Until Kenny hits midlife crisis -- he dresses loudly, gets an earring, and then tells Gracie that he wants a divorce. In the dizzying whirlwind of divorce, Gracie finds out that he's having an affair with Britney Spears (presumably in the months before she started slumming it with Kevin Whatsisface).

A concerned pal lends Gracie her Malibu house, so the newly-divorced can get her bearings and life back on track. And as she wanders the California beaches with her gay pal and married neurotic friend, Gracie finds herself desired by not just one but two men -- a handsome homeless man, and Kenny's dissatisfied has-it-all boss. Can she become more than Kenny's "starter wife"?

Okay, it has a different plot -- one that Shar Jackson might find emotional satisfaction in, admittedly. But the core of "The Starter Wife" is yet another thin plot, with a moronic heroine and lots of name-dropping. It's even worse that much of Grazer's name-dropping is out of date -- since this book went to press, Brad and Jen have broken up. So no one's worried about them procreating.

Grazer's lack of inspiration shows through in the storyline itself, which meanders aimlessly between Hollywood-expose cliches and middle-aged-woman-reinvents-self cliches. The writing meanders as well, as if the author is desperately trying to fill up space. Grazer even has the excruciating taste to name Gracie's gay pal "Will." It's not witty or cute, just embarrassing.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is that Gracie -- the wronged Wife Of-turned-Starter Wife -- is a pill. Despite the men going gaga over her, the supposedly smart Gracie comes across as a bitter airhead, obsessed with age even when she's feeling good about herself. Kenny is a cliche of the Selfish Ex, while Will is a cliche of the Lovable Gay Pal. Only Lou, a tired mogul who wants to know what people really think of him, comes across as a real person.

With more Hollywood tale-telling and absurd cliches, Gigi Levangie Grazer slumps even further in her sophomore effort. Sure it's just a fluff book, but it's really BAD fluff.

This book would be better if it were cut in half.
I wanted to like this book. The first 150 pages or so are like indulging in a slightly more literary version of the tabloids. It's kind of weird, though, because the book is totally fictional...and she's using real names.

I like the parts where she's fighting with her soon-to-be ex--and there's a funny section on exclusive parties attended only by Hollywood A Listers and their wives. The book is also fun, for a while, for those of us who live in LA--you know where everything is, and you can knowingly smile when she mentions that La Cienega is the accepted border to Westside LA. That wears out by page 150, and the book becomes and insipid romance novel.

I only finished reading the Starter Wife because (1) The first 150 pages were decent, and I kept thinking it might pick up again; and (2) I can't stand to drop a book I've started. The book doesn't pick back up--and the only reason I found myself laughing past p. 150 was because it was ridiculous.

Really bad, especially if you're not from LA
I bought this book because while Maneater wasn't a masterpiece it was fairly well written and entertaining. I hate to give bad reviews but I feel the professional reviews are so misleading that I want to save someone else their time and money. This book could have been much better if Mrs. Grazer had made it more of a satire and less of a "comedy". The "jokes" are fairly groan inducing and really should have been left out. Even better would have been to make it more of a serious tone but I know that is not her forte.

The only part of the book I find mildly entertaining are the location based comments on Los Angeles and only because I live here, but I don't really know how much someone living outside of LA cares if a book character goes to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on San Vicente Blvd.

Giving two stars instead of one because I'm actually going to finish it, and I don't have a problem not finishing a book if it's awful.