Diana

Diana is a theatrical confession novel about Annie, a failed or former actor in her early forties, living with her two children in her parents’ New Jersey outbuilding after her husband Scott has abandoned her for a wardrobe woman in New Zealand, while her old best friend Diana has just won a major Broadway acting award. It wants to be a ruthless portrait of female friendship, envy, artistic ambition, motherhood, class, sexual injury, performance, collapse, and compromise. Mostly, it is a long, self-dramatizing monologue that keeps converting every grievance, career setback, bodily function, literary reference, and parenting inconvenience into audition material.

The book opens with Annie watching Diana win on television while getting blackout drunk at her parents’ house. Diana rises from her seat, embraces a shirtless male co-star, and takes the prize that Annie once believed might someday belong to her. Annie is forty-two, effectively separated, broke, living with her children in suburban dependence, and forced to admit that Diana has “won.” After vomiting and crying on the bathroom floor, she decides that the cold war between them must end. This is less reconciliation than surrender: Annie wants to make peace only after accepting that the old contest has been decided.

From there, the novel reconstructs the friendship like a courtroom brief delivered by someone who keeps forgetting she is also the accused. Annie and Diana meet in a prestigious graduate acting program. At first Annie hates Diana: too loud, too bossy, too certain of herself. Then Diana proves talented, serious, funny, and charismatic, and the two become inseparable. They smoke, read, rehearse, talk about Art and Theater and Love in capital letters, and live in the feverish mutual admiration of young actors who believe their talent is not only real but destined.