Overview

Part-time actress, full-time party girl Lorelei Branch isn’t famous yet, but she’s perfected a Hollywood lifestyle full of clubbing, fashion, and the latest juice cleanse. When Robin, her sister-in-law and agent, throws a plum job her way, Lorelei jumps at the chance and auditions to be the new girl on television’s hottest reality show, Flo’s Studio. Enter Colleen, Lorelei’s pill-popping mother, who wants nothing more than to see her daughter win the fame and glory she never had a chance to pursue herself. But Lorelei’s dream of becoming the next reality star is dashed when she loses the spot on Flo’s Studio to a stunning African woman. In an attempt to defend her daughter against what she calls a rigged contest, Colleen goes ballistic and delivers a racist rant on live television, sparking a national media frenzy. Lorelei flees the limelight, humiliated and broke, with her slacker boyfriend Don and heads for Reno where she begins to self-destruct. Meanwhile, the rest of the Branch family starts to come apart at the seams. Colleen and her husband, Carl, are quietly drifting apart. Darren, Lorelei’s older half-brother, is stuck in Florida working on a contentious film set while his wife, Robin, continues the tedious regimen of fertility drugs meant to help them conceive a child. Desperate to bring the family together again and make things right, Colleen hatches a plan to stage an intervention for Lorelei on the reality show Real Happy Family. Soon the entire Branch family is entangled in a mission to bring the prodigal daughter back into the fold. Will Lorelei ever forgive Colleen? Will Real Happy Family air their most sensational intervention yet? All roads lead to a seedy Reno hotel room, where a reality TV crew is waiting.

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9781477801000

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Reviews

A witty debut that puts an entertaining reality TV spin on a perennial topic: mother-daughter dysfunction. -People The leading ladies here are the stuff of reality-show legend, but Widger's supporting cast are the ones who are impossible not to watch. One couple blunders through infertility; the other grapples with authenticity and aging. We were pulling for the whole gang - and loved the surprise twists at the end. -Glamour This entertaining debut novel unsparingly takes on damaged family ecosystems and the show-business machine. Widger has created a delicate suspension bridge out of her characters' relationships to one another and the world, and throughout the course of the novel, she steadily, craftily adds weight, making for compulsive reading. -Kirkus Reviews Real Happy Family, Caeli Wolfson Widger's debut novel, is an authentic story about the artifice of reality television and America's obsession with it. It's no small order to find depth in a genre synonymous with vapid depravity, but Widger does - not in the shows themselves, but in the complicated dynamics of a family willing to put their dysfunction on display... Set primarily in Los Angeles, the novel resembles the city itself, where a superficial veneer belies a more complicated truth... Widger's prose really moves; it's as if she has her foot on the accelerator the entire time. The novel's shifting perspective is most fun when Lorelei is at the wheel - reading her is like partying with a speed freak without the awful comedown. -Los Angeles Review of Books Widger skewers Hollywood fame hunters in her sharply funny debut...a thoroughly enjoyable read. -Booklist Real Happy Family is a cautionary tale about conscienceless reality TV producers, the desperate people who believe reality TV can kickstart a Hollywood career, and the lengths that these people will go to make it, even at the expense of family, health, and morals. -Sarah's Bookshelves I loved that this wasn't a fluffy-take on reality TV or a profile of a struggling actress. It feels real and borderline scandalous in a man-behind-the-curtain way, without being sensationalized with the glitz and glamour of typical celeb-fiction reads. To top it all off, it's smart and witty, in all of the right places. -BellingFam Real Happy Family is a book about Hollywood, but its look at the plight of the might-have-beens is a refreshing change of pace from the lifestyles of the rich and famous tomes that dominate the genre. As it turns out, you can be a hot mess without fame and fortune. -Words for Worms Cinematic in its rendering, Real Happy Family glides effortlessly between the lives of characters living the underbelly and upper crust of the Hollywood dream, and the bottom dwellers who feed off the fallout. With the precision of an expert director, Widger leads the reader gawking and cringing past the train wrecks of Colleen and Lorelei, but exposes their hearts, and somehow leaves you cheering for a real happy ending for them all. -Chandra Hoffman, author of Chosen Reminiscent of The Corrections, Caeli Wolfson Widger's Real Happy Family is everything you hope for from a first novel but rarely find: a must-keep-reading-even-though-it's-2 am-plot packed with turbo-flawed yet loveable characters, all capped off with electric prose. I could not put it down. Had me hooked from page one. Bound to be read and talked about from coast to coast. I feel lucky to have been in on the secret before the rest of the country discovers Widger's smart and funny debut. -Deirdre Shaw, author of Love or Something Like It Real Happy Family is the twenty-first century version of Nathanael West's Day of the Locust, a report in 2013 on what has happened to West's Hollywood-and America-during the last seventy-five years. Like West's book, it is both an anatomy of the times and a prophecy of our continuing confusion. -Jay Martin, author of Nathanael West: The Art of His Life

“A witty debut that puts an entertaining reality TV spin on a perennial topic:  mother-daughter dysfunction.” —People “The leading ladies here are the stuff of reality-show legend, but Widger’s supporting cast are the ones who are impossible not to watch.  One couple blunders through infertility; the other grapples with authenticity and aging.  We were pulling for the whole gang — and loved the surprise twists at the end.”—Glamour “This entertaining debut novel unsparingly takes on damaged family ecosystems and the show-business machine. Widger has created a delicate suspension bridge out of her characters’ relationships to one another and the world, and throughout the course of the novel, she steadily, craftily adds weight, making for compulsive reading.” —Kirkus Reviews “Real Happy Family, Caeli Wolfson Widger’s debut novel, is an authentic story about the artifice of reality television and America’s obsession with it. It’s no small order to find depth in a genre synonymous with vapid depravity, but Widger does — not in the shows themselves, but in the complicated dynamics of a family willing to put their dysfunction on display…  Set primarily in Los Angeles, the novel resembles the city itself, where a superficial veneer belies a more complicated truth… Widger’s prose really moves; it’s as if she has her foot on the accelerator the entire time. The novel’s shifting perspective is most fun when Lorelei is at the wheel — reading her is like partying with a speed freak without the awful comedown.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “Widger skewers Hollywood fame hunters in her sharply funny debut...a thoroughly enjoyable read.” —Booklist “Real Happy Family is a cautionary tale about conscienceless reality TV producers, the desperate people who believe reality TV can kickstart a “Hollywood” career, and the lengths that these people will go to “make it,” even at the expense of family, health, and morals.” —Sarah’s Bookshelves “I loved that this wasn’t a fluffy-take on reality TV or a profile of a “struggling” actress. It feels real and borderline scandalous in a man-behind-the-curtain way, without being sensationalized with the glitz and glamour of typical celeb-fiction reads. To top it all off, it’s smart and witty, in all of the right places.” —BellingFam “Real Happy Family is a book about Hollywood, but its look at the plight of the “might-have-beens” is a refreshing change of pace from the lifestyles of the rich and famous tomes that dominate the genre. As it turns out, you can be a hot mess without fame and fortune.” —Words for Worms “Cinematic in its rendering, Real Happy Family glides effortlessly between the lives of characters living the underbelly and upper crust of the Hollywood dream, and the bottom dwellers who feed off the fallout. With the precision of an expert director, Widger leads the reader gawking and cringing past the train wrecks of Colleen and Lorelei, but exposes their hearts, and somehow leaves you cheering for a real happy ending for them all.” —Chandra Hoffman, author of Chosen “Reminiscent of The Corrections, Caeli Wolfson Widger’s Real Happy Family is everything you hope for from a first novel but rarely find: a must-keep-reading-even-though-it’s-2 am-plot packed with turbo-flawed yet loveable characters, all capped off with electric prose. I could not put it down. Had me hooked from page one. Bound to be read and talked about from coast to coast. I feel lucky to have been in on the secret before the rest of the country discovers Widger’s smart and funny debut.” —Deirdre Shaw, author of Love or Something Like It “Real Happy Family is the twenty-first century version of Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, a report in 2013 on what has happened to West’s Hollywood—and America—during the last seventy-five years.  Like West’s book, it is both an anatomy of the times and a prophecy of our continuing confusion.” —Jay Martin, author of Nathanael West: The Art of His Life

Author Information

Caeli Wolfson Widger received her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. Her work has appeared inAnother Chicago MagazineandThe Madison Review.

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