Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,45

a couple of hours, and after several years of doing this, I have eight unsold screenplays. This has become one of those jokes you once thought were hilarious, but after telling it so many times, it’s turned rancid.

The three screenplays I like most are Winter Equinox (I realize there’s no such thing), Old Growth Forest, and So Close to Home. So Close to Home is the most autobiographical of any film I’ve written so far, and it’s probably also the one I’m most ambivalent about. The protagonist lives in a tiny apartment in one of the most complicated cities in the world, and he works with famous people who live in beautiful houses that a few of them earned enough money to buy before their eighteenth birthdays. Some of these people worry that they aren’t nearly as talented or as interesting as they’re supposed to be, and they go on to make unnecessary trouble for themselves and those closest to them. What they want in their secret hearts is simplicity—less clutter and more substance, both objects and people—but they’re not sure how to achieve either of these things. They’re often lonely and undereducated, superstitious, grudge-bearing, worried, and envious about how much publicity (which to them, equals love) their friends and competitors are getting for their latest projects. Even though they are actors, skilled at creating a facade, they cannot keep these feelings from glaring through from time to time.

Most days they speed from one highway to the next, from one lunch meeting or fitting or screening to the next, feeling like they’re missing something, that this thing, whatever it is, will always be missing.

I don’t have any solutions to their problems, but I love these characters. They are children inhabiting beautiful adult bodies. They are victims of their own appetites, but I suppose this is true of everyone. They will stuff themselves with junk before dinner or sleep with their friends’ wives or drive their cars over cliffs because they own ones they don’t know how to drive or else they are desperately lonely. Their nightmares are other people’s daydreams. At least, that’s how I’ve chosen to write it.

Chapter 6

Unpacked Suitcases

1.

When they met, one of the things she liked about him right away was that he let her finish her own sentences, even if she had to pause for a second or two to find the right words. She had worked with other directors who talked for or over her, putting words in her mouth, trying to convince her that she felt or wanted something that she didn’t. She hadn’t completed her senior year of college, and three years later she remained self-conscious about this omission, despite her successes in the “real world,” which was supposed to be where success counted most. Twelve credits stood between her and her diploma because she had permitted her acting career to preempt other responsibilities, but no one she knew considered this a foolish choice, except maybe her parents. If her decision to leave school hadn’t turned out so well, she could always have returned to Austin to finish her degree—if she didn’t get herself pregnant or become a drug addict or shack up with some deadbeat boyfriend who made her sell T-shirts (or herself) on Venice Beach—which were the sorts of things that she suspected her parents had initially feared.

Another thing about Renn that Elise had liked immediately was that he hadn’t tried too hard to impress her, not in the way she had become accustomed to men and boys doing over the past five or six years, ever since, as her sister Belle, three years older and ironically, much plainer, had declared, Elise had become “aggressively beautiful.” There were, she had to admit, few shortages or deficits in her life, except maybe for free time and privacy, a fact that, she had a feeling, would wear on her more in the future than it did right now. Her fame was still a novelty to her, and on some mornings she awoke and felt, unaccountably, like laughing: the knowledge that she had made it as an actress, that her fame and sudden affluence were not a mirage, dawning on her with the same pleasurable warmth that she felt when newly in love.

They had been filming in New Orleans for a little over two weeks when she and Renn became lovers. She had never before gone to bed with a man more than a couple of years her senior. She also hadn’t gone to