In a story with chilling real-world parallels, Meredith, a drug-addled Hollywood starlet, has been raped by a powerful Hollywood mogul who has the power to make or break her career. When she decides to speak out against “The Rug,” as she calls him, Hollywood predictably closes ranks against her. And after a spectacular public meltdown involving a spate of ill-advised Twitter rants, she escapes to Paris.
Hiding out in the City of Lights, Meredith is rescued by the suave and attractive Nina during a threatening encounter with a couple of boorish American businessmen at a Parisian ice cream shop. Meredith becomes infatuated with her savior, and she eventually lets down her guard, sharing her sordid history and her tell-all memoir-in-progress. As the founder of an international women’s rights nonprofit, Nina is perfectly positioned to publish and promote Meredith’s story.
Hewing closely to the Harvey Weinstein playbook, Nina is in fact an ex-Mossad operative working for an Israeli spy agency in the employ of The Rug, and has been engaged to uncover defamatory information about Meredith and suppress her story. And Nina is not the head of a European women’s rights organization. She is in truth Smadar (originally Samara), a former Bosnian refugee who was airlifted to Israel as a child with her mother from their war-torn country. They were rescued by the grateful descendants of the family that her grandparents had hidden during the Holocaust.
The relationship between the two women, who are pitted against one another by a misogynistic power structure, is fascinating to follow. As the action moves to Florida, where Meredith holes up with her mentally ill, neglectful mother in a sprawling retirement development that recalls The Villages, Meredith becomes a more formidable adversary than Smadar could’ve ever expected.
This twisty and piercing novel challenges the usual #MeToo narrative, inviting sympathy and understanding for both women, as well as anger and disgust. A notoriously unreliable narrator, Meredith makes it clear to the reader, if not to herself, that she is often acting against her own best interests; it can be frustrating to observe the unraveling of a narcissistic celebrity. And in the case of Smadar, it’s obvious to the reader that she has walled herself off from human connection as a survival mechanism. Once an aspiring actress herself, Smadar sees Meredith as a “lucky dog.” She has nothing but disdain for Meredith’s willingness to blow up her movie-star life rather than simply moving past her painful experience.
Alternating chapters relate each woman’s point of view. Author Helen Schulman brilliantly adjusts her writing style when moving between these perspectives, juxtaposing Meredith’s first-person, gossipy confessional with Smadar’s distant third-person narration. Some of the strongest writing in the book can be found in Smadar’s backstory. In an early chapter describing Smadar’s family life in Sarajevo before the war, the narrator slips into a disorienting, haunting second person: “Do you live in a beautiful city?”
In an author’s note, Schulman explains that the Rose McGowan/Harvey Weinstein case — in which an undercover ex-Mossad agent was hired to befriend McGowan — served as the inspiration for the novel. Schulman wrote it to investigate a vexing conundrum: how could one woman do this to another woman? These fully imagined characters go a long way toward answering that question.
Lauren Gilbert is Director of Public Services at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, where she manages the Lillian Goldman Reading Room and Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute and arranges and moderates online book discussions.
