The Starter Wife Read Online Free PDF

of trying to place her. She considered celebrity naming a sort of virtual crossword puzzle:
Is she on a sitcom? In a movie? Action movie? Romantic comedy? Is she British? One of the hundreds of Australians? (Does anyone in that country not act?) Does she sing? Under thirty? Over thirty? Dating a tennis star? Dating Ben Affleck? Just broken up with Ben Affleck? Pregnant with Ben Affleck’s twins?
    After she’d turned forty, Gracie realized that she was recognizing fewer and fewer “recognizable faces.” Gracie had no interest in a network called the WB—Gracie wasn’t even sure what WB stood for—and they had no interest in her. FOX left her cold, except for that show with Kiefer Sutherland, whom Gracie still expected to look like the Lost Boy she lusted after when she was young, not the grizzled Manly Man (whom she still lusted after) he’d become. NBC and ABC were passable. CBS? Gracie didn’t know what that was, but apparently she would in her retirement years. And Gracie didn’t understand—wasit her, or were there just so many more “famous” people than there were fifteen years ago?
    And was Gracie the only one who wasn’t famous?
    Gracie was midway through dinner by the time she was up to her third witty remark—she had finally met her self-imposed quota. Maybe Gracie would go beyond the expected and dole out four, although she usually kept herself to three per dinner, so as to not appear as detached as she felt. During their years of courtship and marriage, Kenny and Gracie had attended hundreds of affairs and endured endless hours of small talk. So much small talk that Gracie had developed a foolproof method for dealing with it. She’d even broken down the elements of these nights into categories of engagement:
You Had Me at “I Made the Cover of Variety”: Always greet with a warm smile (bonded is good, veneers are better), a litany of your recent successes (ignore flops and wayward children), a full-body-slam hug, and finally a kiss—a double kiss if in vogue.As in dancing, let the man lead.
They will, anyway.
Hair, Wardrobe, Vacation Homes: After the greet, the first ten minutes of conversation must center on these three items. As in: “Love, love, love your new hair” (meaning, literally, “new hair”—Japanese extensions still stubbornly all the rage), “Where did you get that belt?” (Garage sale? Your mother’s closet? Prada?), and “Have you been to your second home in (Sun Valley, Aspen, Telluride, Park City, Martha’s Vineyard, Promises rehab in Malibu) lately?”
Where are you going for (fill in the blank): Christmas vacation? New Year’s? Spring break? Presidents’ Day weekend? Where are you summering?
3a. Where are you staying? (See above.)
The Democrats: Politics is a fine topic to bring up in Hollywood—everyone is in agreement over who is good and who is bad. In fact, politics is considered a polite topic of conversation, and also a way to work in that one knows who the current president is.
The Republicans: They eat babies; they steal from grandmothers; they are awful; everyone hates them. Repeat ad infinitum. Unless, say, you are in the presence of the few Red Celebs: Arnold, Mel, the still controversial Charlton Heston.
Where do your kids go to school? It is assumed that the child or children attends a private school, though rarely has a parent attended one. And the parents of children in one private school are suspicious of parents of children in a different private school. Why are they in that school? Why are we not in that school? Are we wait-listed for that school? Why? How many hours of homework does your kid have? (Why doesn’t our kid have that much homework?)
    There are no parents more obsessed with getting their kids into Harvard than the Hollywood parent, though few had gone there themselves, and if they had, had probably been fired from their jobs by now. Here’s a tip: Moving to Hollywood? Keep your Ivy League degree to yourself.
    Religion? Seldom brought