last, each one landing her at the next, as little by little she made her way across the red carpet and into the lobby and down the aisle of the theater; until finally she found herself sitting in a seat in the center of a crowded room as the lights went down and her own name floated up on the screen in four-foot-high letters: Written and directed by Claudia Munger.
The crowd applauded warmly; a few crew members whooped in the back of the room. As the opening sequences spun across the screen, Claudia found herself suppressing a hiccup of hysteria: It was all so bizarrely surreal. Really, if you’d told the other ninety-two members of Claudia’s graduating class at Mantanka Senior High that their classmate would someday become a filmmaker who would attend her Hollywood premiere accompanied by her famous-on-college-radio husband, they would have laughed in your face. Not just because people in Mantanka didn’t tend to stray far from the confines of Kallington County, but because Claudia was not the likeliest candidate for even minor celebrity. Prematurely tall, slightly plump, and suffering from a vicious overbite (the result of a childhood car accident), adolescent Claudia had suffered as the target of the mean girls in her class, a gaggle of acid-jeans-wearing, Whitesnake-listening, Sun-In-lightened featherbrains who used her as the butt of every joke. Claude the Clod. The torturous orthodontic headgear she wore throughout her junior and senior years—a byzantine contraption that encased her entire head in reflective steel—didn’t help matters. Crippled by self-consciousness, Claudia spent the better part of high school locked in her bedroom, losing herself in classic movies that she watched on the VCR her parents had given her to compensate for their guilt about her dentistry.
But her orthodontist knew what he was doing. By the time she arrived at university, as far from Mantanka as she could imagine—which, at that point, was still only Madison—Claudia had lost the extra weight and the oral accessories and had, in their place, a perfect set of gleaming white teeth and a new understanding about the power of reinvention. She dyed her hair black, got a lizard tattoo on her ankle, and immersed herself in Alterna-Culture (Lite Version). What she wanted to be, she eventually decided, was a filmmaker. Not an actress—she didn’t have that theatrical bent, and she would never be mistaken as the prettiest girl in the room—but the person behind the camera, the one who controlled what you saw on the screen. The visionary. To imagine an entire world and then just will it into being: That was power.
She’d thrown herself into college with the thrilled abandon of a prisoner released from long incarceration, joining every college film club she could imagine, becoming the president of the Cinema Society and the director of the university’s StudentTV and finishing with a straight-A transcript that qualified her for the UCLA film program—even if it didn’t get her the scholarship she needed to afford school. That she managed by living with her parents for two torturous years after college, working three jobs, and saving every cent until she could climb on a plane for Los Angeles with enough money in her pocket to pay for subsidized housing and a steady diet of burritos.
By any measure, her early years in Los Angeles were a success, a blur of well-received student films and house parties and love affairs with interesting if generally unavailable guys. But at the center of every accomplishment was always the fear that this Claudia, the attractive ambitious confident one, was somehow a fraud—that the real Claudia was the brace-wearing outcast hiding in her bedroom back in Mantanka. Hollywood was a town built on judgment—your body, your finances, your credentials, all were constantly on parade—and there were moments when she felt she couldn’t bear the scrutiny: She was sure that if they really looked hard she would inevitably come up short. Even after she finished film school with a student Oscar for her experimental short and entered into a coveted (if humiliating) job as assistant to a narcissistic director of blockbuster supernatural thrillers, she felt she didn’t quite belong here in the land of bluster and self-righteousness. Maybe she wasn’t cut out for a life of perpetual anxiety.
Still, she churned out three earnest little scripts, passion projects that because of their so-very-edgy subject matter (prostitutes in North Dakota; suburban parents who murder their kids; a nonlinear drug addiction redemption story) were doomed never to be made. Her film-school friends