They’re also bound by their extreme selfishness and delusion. She’s a big fan of the Instagram account run by Emily, and that tenuous parasocial connection is all that ties Emily and Dawn together… at first. She’s got a son who hates her, a best (and only) friend whose girlfriend hates her, and a truly remarkable skill for pointing her finger at anyone and anything else other than herself when it comes to identifying the problems in her life and their causes.
She’s a nightmare Leo with a tendency to blackout on Cook’s champagne and wake up in a graveyard of empty pizza boxes and Red Bull cans. In Riverside, California, Dawn is a middle-age lesbian with a lot of anger issues and zero boundaries. She subsists on blue Gatorade and turkey slices, and she gets off on lying to her parents about her mediocre life, her lies so absurd and grandiose (like, for example, that she is an astrological advisor to Elon Musk) that surely only an over-confident Scorpio could think they could ever get away with such a thing. She doesn’t really have friends, spending her evenings alone at the Mirror Box, a burlesque dive near her apartment, occasionally hooking up with her earnest ex-boyfriend Thomas who she not so secretly loathes. An internet astrologer, she churns out birth chart readings for a fixed price and posts unoriginal memes gobbled up by the masses. With no real training and no discernible ambition beyond this self-obsessive desire to be famous, she fails to become a star in the traditional sense and instead becomes an Instagram star whose business is, well, the literal stars. She moved to Hollywood when she was 18 in order to become a star, carrying with her a lifelong bitterness toward her academic parents who denied her the chance to become a child star when she was supposedly “discovered” on a playground in elementary school. In Los Angeles, Emily is a Winona Ryder-obsessed Scorpio who owns the same signature Juicy tracksuit in every color. When their worlds collide, chaos begets chaos. Here are two people so buried beneath the wreckage of their lives - wreckage they themselves have caused - and so deeply in denial about it that it’s shocking. The book is told from two alternating and highly unreliable narrators. The 200 Best Lesbian, Bisexual & Queer Movies Of All TimeĮxalted - a riotous new novel from Anna Dorn - is exquisite chaos.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.