Grenade

Grenade is a first-person novel about Zuzu, a filmmaker in her mid-thirties who travels to Paris for the premiere of her first feature, A Woman Is the Weather, while trying to hold together a collapsing sense of self: her marriage, her stalled career, her grief after miscarriages, and the reappearance of Paloma, the world-famous pop star who once consumed and almost destroyed her.

The novel opens with Zuzu arriving in Paris in the middle of an extreme July heatwave. She has quit smoking but still thinks like a smoker, still carrying the scar from the last cigarette she stubbed out on her thigh. She is staying with Anouk, the French actress and close friend who stars in Zuzu’s film. Anouk is glamorous, loyal, blunt, child-free, and exactly the kind of friend Zuzu needs: someone who can mock the absurdities of the film world while also protecting Zuzu’s fragile ego.

Zuzu is in Paris for the Passage Film Festival, the only festival that accepted her film. Even that acceptance feels grudging: she has only two screening slots, not the four given to more important directors, and she arrives feeling like a late addition nobody really cares about. Beneath this professional anxiety is a more private urgency. She must return to Los Angeles in three days because she will be ovulating. She and her husband Fede have been trying to have a child, and Zuzu cannot bear to lose another cycle. If things had gone differently, she would be giving birth around this time; instead she is in Paris, grieving a baby who never arrived and hoping desperately to become pregnant again.