Girl of My Dreams: A Novel - Softcover

Peter Davis is an author and Academy Award­–winning documentary filmmaker (Hearts and Minds). The son of screenwriters, he grew up in Los Angeles. Girl of My Dreams is his fourth book and first novel.  
 
 

“Nostalgia in a novel, especially in a first-person narration, has to be earned. From the opening suicide of a stuntman—“taker of all falls”—a screenwriter recounts “the damage I caused in bygone days.” This is a bildungsroman of Hollywood dreams and cover-ups, a novel of “failure and conspiracy” on a lavish scale. “Movies and fame: what a perfect marriage, each dependent on projection,” the young writer observes, after admitting: “I’m the sucker who tells the story because the rest are gone.” There’s even a daughter named after a movie studio, and the Communist Party is, finally, just “another dream that had been imported to Southern California.” Perhaps our screenwriter’s most challenging story is telling a little girl that her mother has been murdered. When the Communist witch-hunters are raging in Hollywood, our writer runs off to Rome and buries himself in spaghetti Westerns. A fast-paced novel of ambition, deceit, and disillusionment, Girl of My Dreams is as thrilling as a hit movie; yet it’s also an indictment of the way the movie business works. The language is impeccable; the architecture is so tightly constructed that the ending is both inevitable and not what we’re expecting.” —John Irving, National Book Award–winning author

“Thrumming with kinetic energy, Girl of My Dreams is a mad dash through Hollywood in the 1930s. With insight and humor, Peter Davis explores the magic of filmmaking, the vagaries of fame, and the lives of the many players and participants—from directors to actors to writers—who populate this outrageous and captivating world.” —Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times­–bestselling author of Orphan Train

“Girl of My Dreams is irresistible. It has been a long time since I read anything so interesting in every way.” —Joan Didion, National Book Award–winning author