What would you do if you were a fading film star whose publisher recently discovered that you had owed them a book manuscript for for 37 years?
New Suffolk author Elizabeth Castellano tackles just such a premise in her second novel, “Proof of Progress,” a zinger-filled fictional memoir by an also fictional actress and late-night talk show darling, Maria Astorini.
The launch of this new book will be held at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 19 at the Cutchogue- New Suffolk Library.
Ms. Castellano’s first novel, 2023’s “Save What’s Left” was a devilishly astute skewering of the seemingly unstoppable trend of enormous houses popping up along the North Fork, filled with many recognizable local references.
“Proof of Progress” takes a more expansive world view, but the East End makes a few cameos (Maria hides out on Shelter Island for two months on Shelter Island after a breakup, and stays at the Silver Sands in Greenport while attending a wedding).
It’s a series of tightly woven, maddening vignettes told from the point of view of a woman who is decidedly out of touch with how her actions feed in to the bizarre circumstances that befall her.
Maria may have gotten away with never writing this memoir, she tells us in the “author’s note” at the beginning of the book, except that “some work-at-home remote intern from Louisville, Kentucky is tangentially related to some idiot I talked to in a bookstore in Plymouth, Massachusetts three years ago.”
Maria’s life is filled with these moments, beginning with the opening pages, in which she is a nine-year-old girl whose father has just bought her a pair of red tinted glasses and made her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then “drops down to his knees and dies” in the middle of her kitchen.
“I hate to say it like that. But that’s how it happens. Just like that. He is there and then he isn’t. Our life is ordinary and then it is extraordinary.”
The next week, she falls down while running and bites off half her tongue.
“Six months ago, the most important thing about me, the most interesting thing, the thing I was known for, was that I was fast,” she writes. “When you’re a kid and you’re fast, it’s like having a superpower. People challenge you to race. You’re unstoppable. You’re tough. You’re free. You show off. When you’re fast, you run everywhere. For nine years, I was tough. I was unstoppable. I was fast. Now, being fast isn’t the most interesting thing about me anymore. It isn’t even close. I am the kid whose dad died. I am the one who bit her tongue off.”
But while she may no longer be on a foot race, there’s no doubt she spends her life running. She ends up being known for a whole host of other things over the course of her career. You have to read the book if you want to find out.
Maria’s tongue most definitely recovers. Even the publicists for this book promise it is a “sharp-tongued novel,” and it delivers, in one-liner after one-liner, as Maria and her mother move into an abandoned oceanfront hotel known as the Pink Lady, her mom becomes a motivational speaker, Maria makes friends and enemies in college for calling out a future Congressman dating her roommate for the rat he turns out to be.
She stumbled into show business and then lost her career by virtue of sheer stubbornness. At 65, as she’s writing the memoir, even her reflection on lifelong friendship while giving a commencement address goes awry.
In the author’s note that precedes the memoir, she puts her fame in context.
“I’m not some Hollywood A-lister by any means. But if I did die, you’d hear about it. At least, I think you would,” Maria wrote. “I’m big enough to interrupt regular programming. Barring a nuclear disaster or the death of Dolly Parton or some similarly catastrophic event, there’s a good chance you’ll be informed of my passing. If the San Andreas fault decides to finally act up, if the Big One hits, then no, I don’t have a chance of making the evening news. But surely, I would still be mentioned in a hurricane.”
Then, Dolly Parton died in real life after the book was printed, and the real author wasn’t sure what to do.
“I thought of her as immortal,” said Ms. Castellano. “Of course when she died, I felt terrible that was in the book. I called my brother and asked him what to do, and he said ‘it’s not like you killed Dolly Parton.'”
Many of these vignettes are built on real stories Ms. Castellano, 36, has collected over the years.
“The tongue thing did happen to my mom,” she said, deadpans. “Then she became a speech pathologist.”
“I wanted to share significant events in Maria’s life, but come at them from an unusual angle,” she said. “When you put all the small moments together, it’s a big life.”
“I have a funny family, and we’ve always been encouraged, if you have a funny story, to share it when you come home at the end of the day,” she said. “People who are funny are always observing — you have to be interested in people and find people funny.”
There are some ways in which this book is true to Ms. Castellano’s life, even though she’s not a 65-year-old actress. Her interaction with the publishing industry has also been a roller coaster.
Her first book, “Save What’s Left,” was part of a two-book contract with Anchor, but a few months after that book’s release “Anchor stopped existing,” she said.
“They call it being orphaned — my editor was gone, the imprint was gone,” she said.
Meanwhile, she was writing another novel, and when she got to the last page, “I realized it didn’t work and I had to throw it out.”
She then hit on the idea of a fictionalized memoir, working with a handful of vignettes from the novel that didn’t work out.
“They were small anecdotes and stories about childhood and marriages,” she said. “I wrote them, by accident, in little snapshots, but it worked. I thought if I could get 30 stories it would be a miracle, but I ended up with 104.”
She ended up selling the new book to Harper Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, where she was assigned a new editor, Sara Nelson.
“She was very supportive, right from the get-go,” said Ms. Castellano. “She understood what I was doing and had the same vision for it.”
Writing a fictional memoir is no small feat — you have to embody someone who is decidedly not you. But Ms. Castellano enjoyed the challenge.
“There is a specific style to Maria — she writes in short staccato sentences, in the present tense,” she said. “I wanted Maria to have a very assured voice but be very reflective.”
“I’d like to be more like Maria,” she said. ” She’s very resilient. She goes through a lot, but she bounces back.”
Ms. Castellano is working on writing something else now, but after the saga between her prior two books, she won’t say what it is.
Meanwhile, you can catch her sharing Maria’s life lessons Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Cutchogue- New Suffolk Library at 27550 Main Road in Cutchogue. Register To Attend Here.
— Beth Young
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