A Star Is Bored by Byron Lane

I received a copy of this novel from NetGalley.

★★☆☆☆

I picked out this book after reading the jacket cover. I found the description of the plot charming and hoped that the story would be witty and a lighthearted read. The novel, based upon the author's experiences as a personal assistant to Carrie Fisher, actually left me feeling a bit despondent. The first-person narrative is overly detailed and anxious. I had a hard time reading beyond the first three chapters as I felt that the author struggled to convey to the reader the awe that was clearly inspired by meeting and working for the famous actress. The author continually stated that he felt the force of the actress's charisma and that her "shine" and "wit" made him want to continue to be in her orbit. As a reader, these statements didn't really jive with the descriptions of the interactions described on the page.

The narrator's internal dialogues, which did read like train-of-thought monologues, I found to be tedious. After three chapters in which not much happened, I decided that I would skim the rest of the novel. While I wasn't strongly emotionally invested in the narrator or the budding relationship between employer and employee, I continued to hope that the story would inject some of the lighthearted and zany tales promised in the description. I was disappointed to find that the narrator, who I tended to pity more than empathize with, made poor decisions and was blatantly naive in certain portions of the novel. While the resolution was nice, and there was some personal growth on the part of the narrator, I certainly didn't feel the "shine" that was mentioned throughout.

The cast of supporting characters, from the overbearing mother-of-the-star to the antagonistic and domineering narrator's father didn't feel fully realized. Even the character of "Kathi Kannon" wasn't engaging. I found Kathi to be unsurprisingly egoistic and not at all charming. The random things she said and did weren't playful, clever, or humorous but seemed to be signs of underlying neurosis and should have been warning signs to the narrator. The narrator's relationship with Kathi, while it developed through the novel, was never the one that the narrator claimed, that of a mother-son dynamic, nor was it a professional employer/employee relationship. The narrator claimed that there was friendship, but it felt more like he was using Kathi to overcome some of his own childhood trauma, but that he was too selfish to recognize that he was neither her friend, her good-minder, nor her son. 

In the end, I finished the novel but I'm not sure I took more from it than perhaps gratefulness that my childhood hadn't been as traumatizing as the narrator's, that I hadn't experienced any type of employment as terrible and all-consuming as that of the narrator, and that I likely wouldn't be reading another novel by this author again.

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