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Synopsis:
An emotional thriller by novelist Bruce Wagner, I Met Someone is the story of a fictional Hollywood marriage on the precipice of disaster—and an enthralling meditation on the world in which we live.
Bruce Wagner’s I Met Someone is the story of Oscar award-winning actress Dusty Wilding, her wife Allegra, a long-lost daughter, and the unspeakable secret hidden beneath the glamor of their lavish, carefully calibrated, celebrity life. After Allegra suffers a miscarriage, Dusty embarks on a search for the daughter she lost at age sixteen and uncovers the answer to a question that has haunted for decades. With riveting suspense, Wagner moves between the perspectives of his characters, revealing their individual trauma and the uncanny connections to each other’s past lives. I Met Someone sends the reader down a rabbit hole of the human psyche, with Wagner’s remarkable insights into our collective obsession with great wealth and fame, and surprises with unimaginable plot turns and unexpected fate. Alternately tender, shocking, and poetic, I Met Someone is Wagner’s most captivating and affecting novel yet.
Review:
If you have watched David Cronenberg’s 2014 film, Map of the Stars, you have been shown a good example of Bruce Wagner’s writing. He tells Hollywood stories in short non-linear scenes weaving several different characters and stories happening at the same time that will eventually overlap and affect one another. The stories sometimes have characters doing disgusting, perverted, and illegal activities, but a majority of the characters are actors, producers, and fringe movie and TV staff trying to either change their course or find real meaning in their lives. I have not read every Bruce Wagner novel, but the structure and the character types seem to be consistent. In I Met Someone, Wagner writes a novel that he considers a companion piece to his script for Map of the Stars. The main story is about Dusty Wilding, an older actress with a storied career. She is married to Allegra, and after they have a failed in vitro fertilization pregnancy, Allegra struggles with depression and Dusty starts to think about finding the child she gave up when she was sixteen. While this is happening, Dusty and Allegra’s movie producer friend and sperm surrogate, Jeremy, is in love with a young kid, Tristan, and both of them have their secrets, including Tristian spending most of his life online being hacking information, doxing and trolling people. While Dusty is trying to figure out how to find her lost daughter, Jeremy is thinking about finding a new surrogate for his child because he really wants a child now.
The book unfolds and there are some minor characters that come and go but have more impact than they expect, but this is different for a Bruce Wagner novel in the sense that there is a more narrow focus. With a smaller cast and a simpler story, it is easier to keep track of who is who and what is going on. Sometimes this narrowness causes the story to stall when it gets deep and contemplative. This is a change because many of his characters in previous novels do not have the depth as those in I Met Someone, as if Wagner is more interested in these characters, showing them with more emotion and the struggles with the choices they have to make. This is a Hollywood novel in a sense that the characters are actors, producers, stand-in markers, and those dreaming of their next project, but this more of a human novel, with the real focus being on the humans when the cameras are no longer rolling and they are trying to navigate a life that is just as dramatic as their roles on screen.
I love Hollywood stories. I love the ideas of the private lives of actors, directors, producers, and those on the fringe of our entertainment industry. The feeling that Bruce Wagner’s novels give is that so much of Hollywood is fake, and everyone is looking for something real. The fraud is everywhere. Even if you are not the person in front of the screen, most of the people who work in the industry have a face that they show everyone else in the industry. Many times these people have used this face so long that they lose sense of who they are as a real person. This is why so many people in the entertainment industry are looking for a connection with something spiritual, something outside of their everyday life. They want something to make them feel more than the shell that has been hollowed out by the hours and days and weeks of pretending to be someone else, someone who is written for them, someone they have very little control over. This is why groups like Scientology and NXIVM become so popular with actors and their orbit; they exploit the idea that so many actors are looking for something to help them get back to a “normal feeling.” Actors are susceptible to these groups because not only are the actors seen as someone important to the organization, but the organization does not want them to be an actor, they want them to be a “normal” person who has found a deeper meaning to their existence, that their name is no longer more important than who they actually are. They are susceptible to this treatment, and it only makes sense that many people are an easy target. I Met Someone does delve deep into this some, but this is also an overarching theme in Bruce Wagner’s novels and screenplays. Most people in Hollywood are not only searching for their next project or next big break but they are searching for the person that they lost to get there. This is not my favorite of Wagner’s novels, but this is because I like the chaos of more characters doing wild stuff, but it is a good, contemplative novel about what it means to search for the person that you were before you were famous, trying to fix the problems that you left behind to get there.
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