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    How I Became a Famous Novelist
    How I Became a Famous Novelist
    How I Became a Famous Novelist
    Ebook334 pages5 hours

    How I Became a Famous Novelist

    By Steve Hely

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    This story of a slacker who sets out to take the book-publishing world by storm is “a hilarious send-up of literary pretensions and celebrity culture.” (USA Today).
     
    Pete Tarslaw wants some fame and fortune and, perhaps most importantly, the chance to get back at his ex-girlfriend at her upcoming wedding. After listening to a vapid author prattling on during an interview, while nubile young women watch adoringly, he figures becoming a literary icon must be the easiest con game going . . .
     
    This “gleeful skewering of the publishing industry and every cliché of the writing life” pinballs from the college town of Boston to the fear-drenched halls of Manhattan’s publishing houses, from the gloomy purity of Montana’s foremost writing workshop to the hedonistic hotel bars of the Sunset Strip (The New York Times Book Review). The tale of how Pete’s “pile of garbage” titled The Tornado Ashes Club became the most talked about, blogged about, admired, and reviled novel in America will change everything you think you know about literature, truth, beauty, and those people out there who actually still care about books.
     
    “Nothing is sacred and all is skewered: critics, Hollywood, MFA programs, students, literary journals, panels, conferences and resulting hook-ups . . . I rooted for Pete, a scheming underachiever whom the late great humorist Max Shulman would have been proud to call his own. I may have read a funnier book in the last 20 years, but at this moment I’m hard-pressed to name it.” —Elinor Lipman, The Washington Post
     
    “A pitch-perfect takeoff on the insipid conventions of the best-seller racks . . . caustic wit with an unexpected depth of emotional insight.” —Austin American-Statesman
     
    “How I Became a Famous Novelist has a laugh-out-loud quotient inappropriately high for reading in public.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 14, 2009
    ISBN9780802199829
    How I Became a Famous Novelist
    Author

    Steve Hely

    Steve Hely writes for the Fox animated comedy American Dad! He was twice president of The Harvard Lampoon, and has been a writer and performer on Last Call with Carson Daly and a writer for The Late Show with David Letterman, the latter earning him an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Variety or Comedy Show.

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    Reviews for How I Became a Famous Novelist

    3.5/5

    170 ratings23 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Funny concept, entertaining execution. When you have a premise that is the point like this, it’s hard to find a decent conclusion. So the ending wasn’t as great as the rest of the book, but overall it was still a lot of snarky fun.
    • 3/5
      I really couldn't stop myself from reading a book about a guy who decides to become a famous novelist in order to completely humiliate his ex-girlfriend at her wedding, the aptly titled How I Became a Famous Novelist, by Steve Hely. Pete creates his best-seller, The Tornado Ashes Club, by assembling every hackneyed convention and tired metaphor he can muster and meshing it all together with overpoweringly "lyrical" prose. Pete's list of rules for best-sellers (hastily assembled during a research trip to Barnes & Noble) include: "Abandon truth," "At dull points include descriptions of delicious meals," and "Evoke confusing sadness at the end." Hely primarily uses Pete's transition to author to provide a searing criticism of the publishing industry. Publishers are portrayed as having no idea how to recognize quality writing:

      You know like when a kid is just screaming and screaming, and the mom just keeps throwing toys at it, but the kid keeps screaming, and it looks like the mom's about to cry, too? . . . That's what it's like! The editors are the mom! Readers are the kid. And the editors just keep throwing stuff at them, but they don't know what to do!

      Readers buy poorly written books by the millions, and literary masterworks are consigned to the pulping machine. Hely opens almost every chapter with an example of wince-inducing prose from a "best-selling" author.

      In retrospect, it probably would have helped if I'd been able to identify the real bestselling authors that no doubt are represented by the broad caricatures with whom Pete finds himself interacting. However, I've read enough books to be amused by the faux bestseller list (including A Whiff of Gingham and Pecorino: On a hilltop villa in Sicily, an American divorcee finds new love with a local cheesemaker involved in a blood feud.), and these lines alone made me laugh out loud (after Pete expresses his views on the "con game" of writing on national TV):

      "You might have to apologize to Oprah."
      "What'd I do to her?"
      "She's just--that's who you apologize to."

      Although the book didn't hang together as well as it could have, and ended with a whimper rather than a bang, it was worth a few laughs as a reminder to appreciate literature (but never take anything too seriously).
    • 4/5
      If one could persuade Douglas Coupland to write about a single protagonist, and that was mixed with Neal Stephenson's Zodiac, bent toward criticism of the American literary gestalt, you'd get something like How I Became a Famous Novelist. The book is a first person account of an unmotivated run-of-the-mill guy who suddenly has dual motivation from a wedding invitation from his ex-girlfriend and envy of a seemingly faux-authentic author seen on TV with the main character's favorite anchorwoman. He suddenly takes his writing talent he'd been heretofore using in dubious ways and embarks on a campaign to try and simulate the success of a modern novelist. The book is at times laugh-out-loud funny, and beautifully walks the line between criticism and romance over America's literature machine and poetic romanticism. Minor character Miller Westly makes this a screenplay possibility, ideally played by Robert Downey Jr. opposite leading man Luke Wilson? The social commentary alone is worth the read but the characters and humor flesh it out.
    • 5/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)Projects of metafiction (for example, books about authors writing books about authors) are notoriously difficult to pull off, simply because of the large circle-jerk factor involved, and the way such a project can easily spiral down into an endless navel-gazing masturbation session; now add the extra complexities of trying to make such a project a wacky comedy, in that by definition such humor is required to be broad and full of stereotypes, and it becomes easy to see why for every Wonder Boys that exists, we also have a thousand Swimming Inside the Suns. But lo and behold, it's actually pulled off by former Letterman writer and Emmy nominee Steve Hely in his 2009 How I Became a Famous Novelist, even more impressive in that this is his debut novel. I have to confess, it had me laughing so hard this week while out at the cafes, I was getting dirty looks from the people at the tables around me; and that's a rare thing for me anymore, something I always take as a good sign. As with all books of this type, it's not going to be for everyone, and for sure a wide swath of you will end up furiously rolling your eyeballs at it no matter how good it is; but for those who occasionally enjoy a well-done comedy that takes the p-ss out of the publishing industry, this will be right up your alley.Because that's what this basically is, a complete and utter indictment of nearly every aspect of the publishing industry, tackled one sector at a time; for, see, the entire thing is seen through the eyes of our "anti-villain" main character Pete Tarslaw, a bitter slacker who writes fake college application essays for ignorant rich high-schoolers for a living, and who was born with a natural gift for mimicking the writing styles of others. Pete randomly decides one day that he wants to have a bestselling novel, simply as a way of showing up his ex-girlfriend at her wedding, coming up in another six months; and this is where Hely starts his cynical look at the industry as well, by poking holes in the careers of such bestselling hacks as Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, Mitch Albom and Nora Roberts, not to mention adult-education writing workshops and the tittering female fans of Victorian erotica who populate them. But if this was all the story consisted of, it'd be worthy of not much more than a short at McSweeney's or the like; the book only gets truly brilliant after Tarslaw actually gets the book signed, at which point we enter the world of tired, jaded, pencil-pushing editors at the mercy of their corporate overlords' marketing departments, which serves as just the starting point for the universe of dysfunction Tarslaw enters once his book is actually out.That's the biggest thing I want to emphasize today, that the main reason Famous Novelist works so well is that Hely has a complex understanding of just how the publishing industry works, displaying a wide range of hatred instead of just concentrating on easy targets like so many metafictional comedies do -- by the time the story is over, he has offered up vicious parodies of such diverse character types and institutions as oversexed academes, televangelists who manipulate bestseller lists through their cash-flush congregations, trashy afternoon talk shows designed for New Age soccer moms, earthy Vermont lesbians, Brooklyn-dwelling hipster douchebags, the Iowa Writers Workshop, Entertainment Weekly, product placement specialists, the ABA BookExpo, and pretentious non-producing MFA students, not to mention such easily recognizable real people as Lindsay Lohan, Harvey Weinstein, Barbara Walters, James Frey, Michiko Kakutani, Harriet Klausner, Jessa Crispin, Miss Snark, and yes, yours truly*. And that's the real key to a book-length metafictional comedy working, is that Hely makes his skewering both expansive and specific, not only working hard to come up with as much stuff to parody as possible, but making many of these parodies so obscure that only the truly dedicated will get them, even while leaving in enough broad references to Stephen King and Danielle Steele that a general audience can enjoy it too.But the final key to Famous Novelist being so successful is something almost the opposite of all this, and is why so many metafiction projects end up falling flat on their face, which is that Hely injects a healthy dose of sincerity and heart into the story as well, ironically showing us by the end why storytelling is so important to society in the first place; and in a twist so ingenious that I wanted to jump out of my chair and scream "FREAKING BRILLIANT!," Hely accomplishes this through an episode of Oprah, using a premise typical of her show as an entirely snot-free example of why people bother reading books to begin with, despite the thousand headaches and fools he just got done describing in the 300 pages previous. Certainly a metafictional project doesn't need to have such a non-ironic element in order to be a success, but certainly Famous Novelist is much better than other such novels for it, and is the detail that will have you continuing to think about this book long after you're done reading it.Now, make no mistake, an author can only get away with one book like this in their career, and it's still to be seen whether Hely has the chops to write another novel this solid once getting away from highly gimmicky concepts; but at least this book is nearly perfect for what it aims to be, high praise from a guy who usually can't stand such self-referential tomes. It comes highly recommended to my fellow erudite book lovers, and especially those so mired in the industry that they will get all of the dozens and dozens of jokey references made within.Out of 10: 9.4*Well, okay, he doesn't mention me specifically; but he does have this whole brilliant rant about nihilistic, overeducated, self-hating litbloggers who maintain websites with arcane and meaningless names, a category I fit into as snugly as a hand into a glove.
    • 4/5
      ha! so funny.
    • 4/5
      This was a hoot. Having just finished a book that felt like the product of a Writer's Workshop, I was primed to be amused by a skewering of the genre. The narrator sets out to write a best selling work of literary fiction, in the Nicholas Sparks vein. His rise and fall is a spot-on look at the crapshoot of publishing. Funny guy.
    • 4/5
      Without doubt one of the funniest books I've ever had the pleasure of reading...and I mean literally laugh-out-loud funny...not the "smile to yourself, that's amusing" that passes for most books which claim to be "uproarious." The premise is especially delightful for serious book lovers: How many of us have seethed at the list of best-sellers dominated by self-help pablum, self-indulgent memoirs, predictable connect-the-dots detective mysteries, or the latest zombie/vampire/werewolf teen-aimed knock-off? Well the narrator of "How I Became a Famous Novelist" decides if other hack writers can get rich and famous churning out such dreck, why can't he? The result is a truly hilarious satire on modern "literature" and what happens when the lure of fame becomes a hook and threatens to derail the rest of your life. Hely, by the way, has the comedic chops to pull this off--he's a producer on one of television's funniest sitcoms--"30 Rock", and this novel about novels allows him to stretch his full sense of humor to great effect.Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      ha! so funny.
    • 4/5
      The beginning of this book was very contrived and awful, but right around the time the author travels to the rural countryside to write it finds its pace. The anecdotes Hely relates to the reader are sharp and clever, and the character dialogue is enjoyable to read. I liked the way the main character starts to actually believe the bullshit he writes, and is incredulous when the few odd people don't buy into the mass-market hype. Including snippets of manuscripts and articles added to the book's atmosphere without weighing it down too much.This was not a great book, but it was a fun and short read once it got going.
    • 3/5
      Laughed out loud a lot. Though I would recommend it to anyone who loves literature, reads the popular bestsellers, or is in publishing, it's still just a one-time-through, quick read.
    • 4/5
      Very funny at times. The fake New York Times Bestseller list is very good. I am pretty sure I just read A Whiff of Gingham and Pecorino!
    • 5/5
      A slacker dude decides the best way to get money and women is to write a best-selling novel; which he does. This is a flawless, hilarious satire of the book industry, and anyone who works in it should read this book. Hely is a writer for David Letterman, and it sure shows. Perfect.
    • 4/5
      If you've every thought about what it takes to be a best selling novelist, this books for you. Every fiction stereotype is sent up and perfectly skewered. Favorite line "you'll have to apologize to Oprah" know one knows why, that's just what author's who mess up have to do - apologize to Oprah.
    • 5/5
      This novel is undeniably funny, and it's Steve Hely's comedic voice, channeled through his alter-ego (memoir-writer Pete Tarslaw) that draws you into the story. Employed as a ghost writer for hopeless student application essayists, Tarslaw seems destined for a life as an underemployed slacker. But when Tarslaw's college ex-girlfriend invites him to her wedding, he suddenly finds the motivation to write a novel so that he can attend as a rich-and-famous writer and upstage the event with his star presence.Tarslaw embarks on a manic quest to pen and market a preposterous story called "The Tornado Ashes Club" that cobbles together sentimental elements of popular literary fiction in a way that Tarslaw hopes will yank the heartstrings of the foolish book-buying masses. As his con begins to succeed, however, Tarslaw begins to feel embarassed by the fraudulent work he has perpetrated. This is where the story crosses over from comedy to something more meaningful.As Tarslaw gradually learns that many readers are able to judge an honest story from a con and that some writers are genuinely dedicated to their craft, the story evolves from a scathing parody of the publishing world to a genuine-feeling search for truths. Sure the mainstream publishing business is in trouble, as evidenced everyday by the financial woes of the publishers and the crazy marketing strategies used to push books on a public that would rather watch TV, surf the Net, or vegetate at the movies, but Steve Healy makes a strong case that what's popular in the fictional world is often a better barometer of literary merit than what the professional critics decree.This book is a must read for writers, publishers and readers who are interested in a funny-yet-frank look at the business of penning and selling books.
    • 4/5
      This book suckers you in. You think it's just a funny book, and that the author has no integrity. By the end, you realize this wasn't just a comedy (though it is very funny, especially in the beginning). I really can't say more without spoiling things. You may learn something about yourself from this book, I will say that. Very well done. Surprisingly good, coming from a television writer.
    • 2/5
      Hateful and a bit heavy-handed, but often very funny. If you like books about people you don't like, you might like this, but I like to like people so I didn't really like it.
    • 4/5
      Picked this book up, and it made me laugh out loud in the first few pages. Such a slacker-dude Cinderella story. It's silly. Thank you to my SantaThing Santa for choosing this for me!
    • 5/5
      My first thought about the author, Steve Hely, a former writer for The David Letterman Show, is that he writes dialogue and constructs scenes with such apparent ease that I appreciate even more how rare that talent actually is.
    • 5/5
      The Set-UpTo impress his former girlfriend at her upcoming wedding, Pete Tarslaw decides to become a famous novelist. Figuring it couldn't be all that hard, he spends an afternoon at a bookstore studying bestselling books. His studies reveal the keys to a successful book:Rule 1: Abandon truth. Rule 2: Write a popular book. Do not waste energy making it a good book.Rule 3: Include nothing from my own life. Rule 4: Must include a murder.Rule 5: Must include a club, secrets/mysterious missions, shy characters, characters whose lives are changed suddenly, surprising love affairs, women who've given up on love but turn out to be beautiful.Rule 6: Evoke confusing sadness at the end.Rule 7: Prose should be lyrical. (Definition of lyrical: "resembling bad poetry.") Rule 8: Novel must have scenes on highways, making driving seem poetic and magical.Rule 9: At dull points, include descriptions of delicious meals.Rule 10: Main character is miraculously liberated from a lousy job.Rule 11: Include scenes in as many reader-filled towns as possible.Rule 12: Give readers versions of themselves, infused with extra awesomeness.Rule 13: Target key demographics.Rule 14: Involve music.Rule 15: Must have obscure exotic locations.Rule 16: Include plant names.He then churns out The Tornado Ashes Club (click on link for an entire fake website set up to promote this entirely fake book), which eventually becomes a bestseller, leading to Pete's subsequent rise to fame and an eventual showdown with his nemesis, Preston Brooks (another fake author), at a book conference. In the end, Pete realizes the truth about good writing (it can't be manufactured) and the book publishing industry.My ThoughtsI can't see why anyone who likes to read wouldn't want to check out this hilariously funny, spot-on satire of popular fiction. I was cracking up throughout the book. Mr. Hely's jokes and parodies are spot-on—from the fictional Entertainment Weekly review to excerpts from his "novel" to his skewering of pop author stereotypes. (If Pamela McLaughlin isn't based on Patrica Cornwell, I'll eat an entire pack of Thin Mints by myself.) There are so many good parts that I could do an entire review with just excerpts. But that would probably be illegal in some way so I'll settle with just a few.Being lazy about research: I had no intention of spending my nights on ride-alongs with homicide cops, or mapping magical empires and populating them with orcs.On literary fiction: But becoming a professor called for a particular kind of book, a "literary" book. These books can be identified in two ways. One: at the end of a work of literary fiction, you're supposed to feel weirdly sad, and perhaps cry, but not for any clear reason. Two: The word "lyrical" appears on the back cover of literary fiction.On reviewing his work: That night, after a dinner of leftover salmon, I reviewed the work I'd done. A lot was garbage. There were strange repetitions. The word taciturn was used four times in one sentence. Genevieve was thrice described as robin-throated. The Black Hills were said to "rise from the land like the calluses and corns and warts from God's own foot."On guessing the plot of Preston Brook's new novel: I played a game of trying to imagine what new heights of sentimentality and emotional prostitution he'd reached: little children going to look for long-lost brothers with hobo satchels over their shoulders. Two orphans falling in love and trying to raise a child the way they'd wished they'd been raised. A veterinarian who travels the country healing the hearts of old worn-out dogs. But my wildest flights of shamelessness could not outdo the Master. Preston Brooks's new book was called The Widows' Breakfast. Amazing, right there. He'd beaten me with the title alone. But the subject was five widows-yes, one of them was black. They meet in 1942, when their husbands are all training to be pilots in World War II. And starting in that year, they have a tradition of getting together for breakfast on the morning after the funeral, anytime one of their husbands dies.If any of these excerpts or the rules of a successful book excerpt made you smile, I'm here to tell you that there is TONS MORE of this in the book. This is a comedy goldmine (as it should be as Hely is ones of the writers for the very funny sitcom 30 Rock). If you don't read it, you're just missing out on the best satire I've read in ages. Seriously, you need to read this book.My RecommendationThere is just no way to go wrong with this book! It is laugh-out-loud funny satire of popular fiction and publishing. C'mon, what more could you, as a lover of books, want? Unless you are so reverent about books that you cannot bear to have them made fun of, I think this book would make you laugh. I loved it and recommend it wholeheartedly. Just remember: Take nothing seriously. It is all fake, but there were times when I got totally sucked in because the parodies are just so spot-on. I'm giving it 4.5 stars. I guarantee you'll never look at the best-seller list quite the same way again. And you have to love an author who goes to the trouble of creating a fake web site and fake blog for his fake author's fake book.
    • 3/5
      This is very light reading about a guy who figures out that many of the authors on the current bestseller lists are just really good con-artists and he wants in. He comes up with some hilarious rules for writing a bestseller and sets off to write a schlocky romance-and-redemption story filled with heinous clichés and such. He also wants to be famous just so he can upstage his ex-girlfriend at her upcoming wedding. But the character's trashing of the bestselling ilk that passes for entertainment these days is the good stuff. It's often quite funny and possibly hits pretty close to home on occasion. This book can be read very quickly and should appeal to the cynic in you. Oh, also: all the blurbs are fake.
    • 5/5
      Truly laugh-out-loud funny books are too rare, but this is one of them. I was hooked from the first chapter and by the end of the second chapter I’d picked up a second copy to give to a friend so I could stop messaging her constantly about how funny this book is. This is a faux memoir about a cynical young writer who decides to write a best selling novel for one main reason: spite. The book is a cynical look at the publishing world mocking best-selling authors, publishers and reviewers. It smartly skewers all of them. It is impossible for me to walk through a bookstore without chuckling thinking about this book.Healy looks both at common literary devices as well as the calculations that may or may not (but probably do) occur in publishing houses, college literature departments as well as the minds of authors. Ironically, you can’t write a book this funny without being well-read and a pretty good writer yourself, which Healy clearly is. This is a book that should appeal to anyone, but is a must read for any lover of books. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely is a novel about a novelist attempting to write a best-seller novel. Mr. Hely is a published author and television writer.Pete Tarslaw wants to be famous so he could have money, women, and a life of leisure. Pete’s day job is to write essays for college students, it’s an easy job and he figures that he can write a best-selling novel.Even though his novel is a “pile of garbage”, it becomes a best-selling, most blogged about, and even admired book. Success is not what Pete imagined, and when he starts telling the truth his ideals turn upside down.This was a clever book about writing and the publishing industry, as well as a criticism of best-sellers. I have read many best-sellers which I didn’t think were well-written, interesting, or had something to say.Some I couldn’t even finish.How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely satirizes what all of us bibliophiles already know. The fictional author writes a book full of clichés, lyrical descriptions, and commonalities he found in other novels. These are carefully arranged to create a formalistic novel almost guaranteed to top the best-sellers’ list.Or in his words “a pile of garbage”.I find that attitude is condescending, people like to read what they like to read. Whether it would be romance, history, or even graphic novels.Reading is reading.No one is making fun of others for not liking certain foods, why would literature be any different?Many of the books I read, few people even pick up. But I am not going to tell people that they have bad taste, and neither do you and for that matter neither does the New York Times or your literature professor.As for the book, it is funny at times and makes some good points. Pete Tarslaw, our aspiring novelist, learns a cheesy lesson at the end, which kind of defeats the point of the satire. I liked the first half of the book about Pete’s development process. The second half, however, lost the wit and wink which made the novel engaging.
    • 4/5
      If you've ever wondered why hackneyed, badly-written books become runaway bestsellers, you will love this fast and funny send-up of the publishing world. When the hero is laid off from his job writing college applications for iliterates, he decides to write a bestseller and turn up at his ex-girlfriend's wedding as a rich and famous author.

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    How I Became a Famous Novelist - Steve Hely

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