IT'S A SIGNED COPY, INCIDENTALLY
Oh my god you guys WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT THIS BOOK I JUST READ, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT FOREVER!!!!
Okay first of all: NOBODY HAS EVER HEARD OF THIS BOOK, except maybe Irish people who are actually FRIENDS with the woman who wrote it and then self-published it for charity, because it is such a nonentity that I had to add it to Goodreads. It's called The Red Carpet, jsyk. BUT NOW I FEEL BAD, BECAUSE SURE, THIS BOOK IS OBJECTIVELY TERRIBLE, BUT, LIKE, IT SEEMS SUPER MEAN TO ADD THIS BOOK TO GOODREADS AND THEN GIVE IT A TERRIBLE REVIEW, and also I'm terrified that she'll start Googling her book and find me. PROBABLY SHE WON'T THOUGH, RIGHT? IDK let's just take it on faith that she doesn't have enough Google-fu to find me if I don't also use her name, AND LET'S GET INTO THIS:
The Red Carpet spans roughly thirty years in the life of Amy Parker, the daughter of famous Oscar-winning actress Maxine and megaproducer John. John is a controlling and physically abusive douchemonster. When Amy is six, the family makes a movie in Maxine's native Ireland, and Maxine gets in touch with her roots, reconnects with her mother who actually let Maxine believe she was her aunt until she was eighteen and there was somehow no conflict whatsoever when the truth was revealed but for some reason they still tell everyone, Amy and John included, that she's Maxine's aunt. SO Amy's enrolled in boarding school in Ireland, and John and Maxine go back and forth between there and LA and he continues to be the worst.
This continues until Amy's eighth birthday, when, following a week of family time in their Galway home, John just flips a shit for no reason, causes a huge scene at Amy's birthday dinner, attacks Maxine after Amy's been sent to bed, and, when Maxine has finally has enough and decides that she and Amy are leaving him for good, he beats Maxine into a coma. And also he kills the dog, but I have no idea what that's about. Amy wakes up and sees her dad digging a huge hole in the yard and I'm like OH SHIT HE KILLED MAXINE!!! but then the next morning Maxine's in the hospital and the dog's "at the vet" so, there's that.
So even though John presumably drove his badly beaten, unconscious wife to the hospital in the middle of the night, nobody is suspicious in the SLIGHTEST that maybe he's the one who beat the shit out of her. There's a lot said about an accident, but it's never specified what the official story was. I THINK he says she was hit by a car? But I just reread the scene where they're fighting and maybe she IS hit by a car while she's running away from him since he's trying to beat the crap out of her, it's terrible unclear:
"Maxine," John shouted.
He was closer now.
Then, suddenly, everything went black.
Because - SPOILER ALERT - thirty years later when Amy finally bothers to get some fucking answers about what happened to her mother, she's like "was Mom running from you, is that why she was in the road?" But there's no mention made before then of there even POSSIBLY being a car involved, so I had already spent three hundred pages pretty sure Maxine had been beaten into a coma, and right after Amy says that, John grabs a poker from the fireplace and beats HER into a coma, so who even knows if a car was involved? Either way the doctors are like NOTHING ABNORMAL ABOUT THIS CLEARLY BATTERED WOMAN!!!! and there is seriously never a police investigation or anything, Maxine is in a coma in the hospital for a week and then John pulls the plug and THE PRESS SOMEHOW NEVER GETS WIND OF THIS INFORMATION!!! I'm sorry, eighties or no eighties and Irish country hospital or not, megafamous Oscar winners do not get beaten into comas and die without anyone finding out. IT DOESN'T HAPPEN!
OH, also, the morning after Amy's birthday/her mother's near-fatal beating/her dog's death, John wakes her up and is like "TIME TO TAKE YOU BACK TO BOARDING SCHOOL! Mom went to the airport early and didn't bother to say goodbye to you; also your dog is at the vet." And then a week later after he pulls the plug, he and Maxine's auntmother go to Amy's boarding school to be like "so: Mom's in heaven."
He pulls Amy out of boarding school to bring her back to LA, and after two years John marries some actress named Deborah, who is A REAL SHREW and is always redecorating the house because YOU KNOW HOW SHREWS LOVE REDECORATING!!! Somehow John, who only two years earlier had been unwilling to let Maxine have the final word on ANYTHING, no matter how tiny, and then, you know, beaten her into a coma, is totally bossed around by Deborah and can't stand up to her and blah blah whatever, so if you just picked up the book at this part you'd be like "that poor guy!" because for at least two hundred pages he's just STRUGGLING FAMILY MAN JOHN PRODUCERMAN, JUST WANTS TO PROVIDE FOR HIS FAMILY, LOVES HIS WIFE BUT SHE'S SO AWFUL, POOR GUY! This happens:
"He never liked to argue with Deborah. She could fly off the handle at the slightest little thing, so he was careful, always anxious to keep her happy."
WHAT??????????????????????????????????????
Anyway Deborah has a baby, Harry, and she delivers him in like five minutes [Deborah starts to feel pain, Amy and the housekeeper, Maria, hear Deborah screaming in her room, and by the time they get upstairs Maria's like I CAN SEE THE HEAD!], and then promptly refuses to take care of him, ever, so Amy, who is ten, pretty much raises him with Maria for the first year. Then, when Harry takes his first steps towards Amy instead of Deborah, Deborah flips a shit and sends Amy to boarding school in San Francisco until she graduates from high school. Amy and her dad get in a huge fight because she wants to study theater at Trinity in Dublin and he wants her to start acting in his movies ASAP so he can recapture the glory he had when her mother was a star, and blah blah whatever she wins but agrees to do one movie when she's finished at Trinity.
WHILE AT TRINITY she meets Steve and here is them having sex for the first time, in Steve's TOTAL SERIAL KILLER POV chapter:
"My love, I've imagined this so many times," he whispered into her dark hair which was delicately scented. "You are so beautiful." He drew a deep breath. Their rhythm built up and with much laughter they tried to find their way around the hand brake, and gear lever. She whispered incomprehensible words to him and moved closer along the seat, tantalising. Now he was in that place which was so special. That was Amy. The very depths of her. Her softness so unbelievably enticing, letting him know that she loved him too. He didn't know this Amy. This was the first time they had been so close.
FOREVER UNCLEAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Okay but for real his chapter is SO CREEPY AND OBSESSIVE, I spent the next ten/fifteen years of story wondering if I was supposed to like him or be wary of him. WHICH IS NOT THE ONLY THING I FELT UNCERTAIN ABOUT ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE BOOK, BUT WE'LL GET TO DOUG IN A MINUTE.
Amy finishes college and comes back to LA to do the one movie, which she gets an Oscar nom for, but she and Steve are getting married the day after the Oscars, so she can't go to the OScars and John refuses to go to her wedding or to let anyone else go, so they don't speak for a decade because he refuses to take her calls and after a few years she stops calling, which she later describes as "you remember how it was, I never gave up!" Except she did.
Deborah gets pregnant again, tells John but isn't sure if it's his or her lover's, gets an abortion without consulting John, spends three weeks at the clinic where she had the abortion [full-service spa retreat of some kind? IDK!], has her boyfriend come visit her there, and then by the time she finally returns to the set of the movie she'd been acting in when she took off, John's production company is bankrupt because her desertion tanked the movie and also John's leaving her because EVERY LIFE IS SACRED, EVEN AN UNBORN ONE, BUT NOT THE ONE HE BEAT TO DEATH! So they get divorced and she does not give THE SLIGHTEST OF FUCKS who gets her son or what happens to him or if he even knows what's going on, it is very maternal of her.
Then ten years go by I'M PRETTY SURE, and Amy has a kid now, and Harry plays football for the Boston Red Sox [I KNOW!!!!!!!!!!!]:
"Harry had grown into a tall broad shouldered young man, a great footballer who was going to join the Boston Red Sox the following year, and begin his career in professional football."
And again later:
"Boston Red Sox," Amy said, laughing. "It's wonderful, you're going to be a great footballer."
And also later he talks about how he likes to ride at the stables near where they train. UNLESS HE MEANS SPRING TRAINING IN FLORIDA IDK WHAT HE'S TALKING ABOUT.
So a situation where John is in Ireland visiting the Galway house, breaks his leg (he's like 70 now) and ends up in an "I'VE FALLEN AND I CAN'T GET UP!" situation leads to him and Amy reuniting, and then him crashing with her and Steve indefinitely, and they never even REFERENCE the ten years they didn't speak or how it was all because John is a dick (and because Amy is an idiot, let's be honest), and this is shortly after the the 2008 collapse (topical!) and Steve's an architect whose business is going under, and the financial strain combined with the constant presence of John BASICALLY drives Steve to insanity and alcoholism and assholism, which is great for John, because the family sliding into poverty [IN A SUPER NICE HOUSE THAT STEVE DESIGNED, I'M JUST SAYING] is the perfect opportunity for him to convince Amy to come back to LA to make another movie by promising her shitloads of money. Things deteriorate, Steve flips out, Amy takes their daughter and leaves him, and Amy, John, and the daughter, Emma, all go to live in the Galway house (where Amy's mother was killed) together.
AND THEN, FINALLY, AMY STARTS TO ASK SOME FUCKING QUESTIONS AND FIND IT UNACCEPTABLE WHEN HER DAD'S LIKE "I DON'T HAVE TIME TO EXPLAIN TO YOU HOW YOUR MOM DIED, BACK THE FUCK OFF," so, that only took decades. Ultimately, she figures it out (or figures out that her mom was running away from her dad and got hit by a car, which I'm still not sure is how it happened), and John loses his shit and BEATS HER UNCONSCIOUS WITH A FIREPLACE POKER before disappearing into the night. Emma calls Steve from Amy's cell phone and is like THERE WAS YELLING AND NOW MOMMY'S NOT MOVING AND I HEARD A BANG [which I thought meant John shot himself but apparently not], and he's like GO HIDE UNDER THE BED, I WILL CALL THE POLICE AND THEY'LL BE RIGHT THERE AND I'LL BE THERE ASAP, because he's three hours away in Dublin, and also buzzed, so he has to call one of Amy's friends to drive him there after he calls the local police to be like UHHHHH HELP?
So then Amy's in a coma and there's no sign of John anywhere, and the cops seem to be pretty convinced that John had nothing to do with it? Because Emma's the only witness and she's only eight and kids don't always know what's going on, and they think Steve's a pretty compelling suspect for a little while, I think, even though there's PLENTY of evidence placing him on the OPPOSITE FUCKING COAST at the time of the attack? WHO KNOWS! And if it wasn't Steve, then probably it was just a burglar or something. This literally never comes to anything though, I think they find John's body washed up somewhere after MONTHS and everyone just stops caring.
AND THEN AMY'S IN A COMA FOR A FEW MONTHS - OR MAYBE DAYS? IT'S UNCLEAR - AND THEN SHE WAKES UP AND STEVE'S POV IS CREEPY ABOUT IT AND THEN THE BOOK IS OVER.
No, really, that's it.
BUT BEFORE I LET YOU GO, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN DOUG. Doug is John's BFF and directs all of John's movies. Maxine is creeped the fuck out by how attentive Doug is to Amy - and the first chapter actually does a VERY CONVINCING JOB of making Doug seem sketchy as fuck, he's weirdly persistent about hanging out with six year old Amy even when her mom's clearly not pleased, and also the dog growls at him a lot, so, you know: Child molester, right? And I'm like SO DEFINITELY HE IS GOING TO DO SOMETHING TERRIBLE TO AMY, and then he never does, and I'm like OKAY MAYBE WHEN SHE'S OLDER SHE'LL SUDDENLY RECOVER REPRESSED MEMORIES? And she never does. But Maxine gives Amy this talk once that's basically like IF HE EVER TOUCHES YOU, YOU TELL ME, BECAUSE UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES IS HE ALLOWED TO TOUCH YOU, because Maxine is genuinely scared that he'll hurt her daughter, and John's like YOU'RE FUCKING CRAZY, THAT'S MY BESTIE, but Amy listens to her mother and grows up SUPER wary and distrustful of Doug.
But when the book is from John's POV for huge chunks, Doug's totally this awesome guy, and there are no warning signs or anything at all! He's just a super nice and generous family friend, and I'm like IS HE A CHILD MOLESTER OR ISN'T HE? And just when I would start to think that maybe that whole aspect of the book is over with, Amy's POV would talk about how she was still really uncomfortable around him, and also on set one time in the movie she does after college he's like OH, YOU'RE SO TENSE, LET ME RUB YOUR SHOULDERS, and it is GROSS, and also when she's ten and Harry's a baby she gets really anxious one time because she's giving Harry a bath and he comes along and just grabs naked baby Harry out of the tub, and I'm just like HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BE RESPONDING TO THIS SCENE, I DON'T UNDERSTAND!!!! IF YOU INTRODUCE A CHILD MOLESTER IN THE FIRST CHAPTER HE SHOULD PROBABLY BE RECOGNIZED AS A CHILD MOLESTER BY THE SIXTIETH CHAPTER, JUST SAYING!
ANYWAY the question is finally resolved towards the very end of the book: IT TURNS OUT that Doug was just in love with Maxine and being a Super Nice Guy in the hopes that if he were a good enough friend to her, she would realize how wonderful he was and leave her husband for him. CAMERON FROM THE 10 THINGS TV ADAPTATION, BASICALLY! So Maxine was the great love of his life and all his weird molesty overtures to Amy were him trying to be her new dad, basically? OKAY. MAKES SENSE.
BUT WHAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE WAS IF HE LOVED MAXINE SO MUCH AND ALSO SUSPECTED FOR YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS THAT JOHN MAYBE KILLED HER [as revealed in the argument they have right before John breaks his leg], HOW IS HE STILL LIKE "JOHN'S MY BEST FRIEND AND I'D DO ANYTHING FOR HIM!" How do you get PAST that as a human being? WHAT IS GOING ON? And even after John does it AGAIN and puts Amy in a coma, Doug's like I'M SO CONCERNED ABOUT MY MISSING FRIEND JOHN, SOMETHING MUST HAVE HAPPENED TO HIM!
This book, I CAN'T, I JUST CAN'T! How do I talk about this book when I thank my aunt for it? WHAT DO I SAY?
[ALSO: COPIOUS USE OF ITS' TO INDICATE POSSESSION. Not it's, or its. Its'.]
Okay first of all: NOBODY HAS EVER HEARD OF THIS BOOK, except maybe Irish people who are actually FRIENDS with the woman who wrote it and then self-published it for charity, because it is such a nonentity that I had to add it to Goodreads. It's called The Red Carpet, jsyk. BUT NOW I FEEL BAD, BECAUSE SURE, THIS BOOK IS OBJECTIVELY TERRIBLE, BUT, LIKE, IT SEEMS SUPER MEAN TO ADD THIS BOOK TO GOODREADS AND THEN GIVE IT A TERRIBLE REVIEW, and also I'm terrified that she'll start Googling her book and find me. PROBABLY SHE WON'T THOUGH, RIGHT? IDK let's just take it on faith that she doesn't have enough Google-fu to find me if I don't also use her name, AND LET'S GET INTO THIS:
The Red Carpet spans roughly thirty years in the life of Amy Parker, the daughter of famous Oscar-winning actress Maxine and megaproducer John. John is a controlling and physically abusive douchemonster. When Amy is six, the family makes a movie in Maxine's native Ireland, and Maxine gets in touch with her roots, reconnects with her mother who actually let Maxine believe she was her aunt until she was eighteen and there was somehow no conflict whatsoever when the truth was revealed but for some reason they still tell everyone, Amy and John included, that she's Maxine's aunt. SO Amy's enrolled in boarding school in Ireland, and John and Maxine go back and forth between there and LA and he continues to be the worst.
This continues until Amy's eighth birthday, when, following a week of family time in their Galway home, John just flips a shit for no reason, causes a huge scene at Amy's birthday dinner, attacks Maxine after Amy's been sent to bed, and, when Maxine has finally has enough and decides that she and Amy are leaving him for good, he beats Maxine into a coma. And also he kills the dog, but I have no idea what that's about. Amy wakes up and sees her dad digging a huge hole in the yard and I'm like OH SHIT HE KILLED MAXINE!!! but then the next morning Maxine's in the hospital and the dog's "at the vet" so, there's that.
So even though John presumably drove his badly beaten, unconscious wife to the hospital in the middle of the night, nobody is suspicious in the SLIGHTEST that maybe he's the one who beat the shit out of her. There's a lot said about an accident, but it's never specified what the official story was. I THINK he says she was hit by a car? But I just reread the scene where they're fighting and maybe she IS hit by a car while she's running away from him since he's trying to beat the crap out of her, it's terrible unclear:
"Maxine," John shouted.
He was closer now.
Then, suddenly, everything went black.
Because - SPOILER ALERT - thirty years later when Amy finally bothers to get some fucking answers about what happened to her mother, she's like "was Mom running from you, is that why she was in the road?" But there's no mention made before then of there even POSSIBLY being a car involved, so I had already spent three hundred pages pretty sure Maxine had been beaten into a coma, and right after Amy says that, John grabs a poker from the fireplace and beats HER into a coma, so who even knows if a car was involved? Either way the doctors are like NOTHING ABNORMAL ABOUT THIS CLEARLY BATTERED WOMAN!!!! and there is seriously never a police investigation or anything, Maxine is in a coma in the hospital for a week and then John pulls the plug and THE PRESS SOMEHOW NEVER GETS WIND OF THIS INFORMATION!!! I'm sorry, eighties or no eighties and Irish country hospital or not, megafamous Oscar winners do not get beaten into comas and die without anyone finding out. IT DOESN'T HAPPEN!
OH, also, the morning after Amy's birthday/her mother's near-fatal beating/her dog's death, John wakes her up and is like "TIME TO TAKE YOU BACK TO BOARDING SCHOOL! Mom went to the airport early and didn't bother to say goodbye to you; also your dog is at the vet." And then a week later after he pulls the plug, he and Maxine's auntmother go to Amy's boarding school to be like "so: Mom's in heaven."
He pulls Amy out of boarding school to bring her back to LA, and after two years John marries some actress named Deborah, who is A REAL SHREW and is always redecorating the house because YOU KNOW HOW SHREWS LOVE REDECORATING!!! Somehow John, who only two years earlier had been unwilling to let Maxine have the final word on ANYTHING, no matter how tiny, and then, you know, beaten her into a coma, is totally bossed around by Deborah and can't stand up to her and blah blah whatever, so if you just picked up the book at this part you'd be like "that poor guy!" because for at least two hundred pages he's just STRUGGLING FAMILY MAN JOHN PRODUCERMAN, JUST WANTS TO PROVIDE FOR HIS FAMILY, LOVES HIS WIFE BUT SHE'S SO AWFUL, POOR GUY! This happens:
"He never liked to argue with Deborah. She could fly off the handle at the slightest little thing, so he was careful, always anxious to keep her happy."
WHAT??????????????????????????????????????
Anyway Deborah has a baby, Harry, and she delivers him in like five minutes [Deborah starts to feel pain, Amy and the housekeeper, Maria, hear Deborah screaming in her room, and by the time they get upstairs Maria's like I CAN SEE THE HEAD!], and then promptly refuses to take care of him, ever, so Amy, who is ten, pretty much raises him with Maria for the first year. Then, when Harry takes his first steps towards Amy instead of Deborah, Deborah flips a shit and sends Amy to boarding school in San Francisco until she graduates from high school. Amy and her dad get in a huge fight because she wants to study theater at Trinity in Dublin and he wants her to start acting in his movies ASAP so he can recapture the glory he had when her mother was a star, and blah blah whatever she wins but agrees to do one movie when she's finished at Trinity.
WHILE AT TRINITY she meets Steve and here is them having sex for the first time, in Steve's TOTAL SERIAL KILLER POV chapter:
"My love, I've imagined this so many times," he whispered into her dark hair which was delicately scented. "You are so beautiful." He drew a deep breath. Their rhythm built up and with much laughter they tried to find their way around the hand brake, and gear lever. She whispered incomprehensible words to him and moved closer along the seat, tantalising. Now he was in that place which was so special. That was Amy. The very depths of her. Her softness so unbelievably enticing, letting him know that she loved him too. He didn't know this Amy. This was the first time they had been so close.
FOREVER UNCLEAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Okay but for real his chapter is SO CREEPY AND OBSESSIVE, I spent the next ten/fifteen years of story wondering if I was supposed to like him or be wary of him. WHICH IS NOT THE ONLY THING I FELT UNCERTAIN ABOUT ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE BOOK, BUT WE'LL GET TO DOUG IN A MINUTE.
Amy finishes college and comes back to LA to do the one movie, which she gets an Oscar nom for, but she and Steve are getting married the day after the Oscars, so she can't go to the OScars and John refuses to go to her wedding or to let anyone else go, so they don't speak for a decade because he refuses to take her calls and after a few years she stops calling, which she later describes as "you remember how it was, I never gave up!" Except she did.
Deborah gets pregnant again, tells John but isn't sure if it's his or her lover's, gets an abortion without consulting John, spends three weeks at the clinic where she had the abortion [full-service spa retreat of some kind? IDK!], has her boyfriend come visit her there, and then by the time she finally returns to the set of the movie she'd been acting in when she took off, John's production company is bankrupt because her desertion tanked the movie and also John's leaving her because EVERY LIFE IS SACRED, EVEN AN UNBORN ONE, BUT NOT THE ONE HE BEAT TO DEATH! So they get divorced and she does not give THE SLIGHTEST OF FUCKS who gets her son or what happens to him or if he even knows what's going on, it is very maternal of her.
Then ten years go by I'M PRETTY SURE, and Amy has a kid now, and Harry plays football for the Boston Red Sox [I KNOW!!!!!!!!!!!]:
"Harry had grown into a tall broad shouldered young man, a great footballer who was going to join the Boston Red Sox the following year, and begin his career in professional football."
And again later:
"Boston Red Sox," Amy said, laughing. "It's wonderful, you're going to be a great footballer."
And also later he talks about how he likes to ride at the stables near where they train. UNLESS HE MEANS SPRING TRAINING IN FLORIDA IDK WHAT HE'S TALKING ABOUT.
So a situation where John is in Ireland visiting the Galway house, breaks his leg (he's like 70 now) and ends up in an "I'VE FALLEN AND I CAN'T GET UP!" situation leads to him and Amy reuniting, and then him crashing with her and Steve indefinitely, and they never even REFERENCE the ten years they didn't speak or how it was all because John is a dick (and because Amy is an idiot, let's be honest), and this is shortly after the the 2008 collapse (topical!) and Steve's an architect whose business is going under, and the financial strain combined with the constant presence of John BASICALLY drives Steve to insanity and alcoholism and assholism, which is great for John, because the family sliding into poverty [IN A SUPER NICE HOUSE THAT STEVE DESIGNED, I'M JUST SAYING] is the perfect opportunity for him to convince Amy to come back to LA to make another movie by promising her shitloads of money. Things deteriorate, Steve flips out, Amy takes their daughter and leaves him, and Amy, John, and the daughter, Emma, all go to live in the Galway house (where Amy's mother was killed) together.
AND THEN, FINALLY, AMY STARTS TO ASK SOME FUCKING QUESTIONS AND FIND IT UNACCEPTABLE WHEN HER DAD'S LIKE "I DON'T HAVE TIME TO EXPLAIN TO YOU HOW YOUR MOM DIED, BACK THE FUCK OFF," so, that only took decades. Ultimately, she figures it out (or figures out that her mom was running away from her dad and got hit by a car, which I'm still not sure is how it happened), and John loses his shit and BEATS HER UNCONSCIOUS WITH A FIREPLACE POKER before disappearing into the night. Emma calls Steve from Amy's cell phone and is like THERE WAS YELLING AND NOW MOMMY'S NOT MOVING AND I HEARD A BANG [which I thought meant John shot himself but apparently not], and he's like GO HIDE UNDER THE BED, I WILL CALL THE POLICE AND THEY'LL BE RIGHT THERE AND I'LL BE THERE ASAP, because he's three hours away in Dublin, and also buzzed, so he has to call one of Amy's friends to drive him there after he calls the local police to be like UHHHHH HELP?
So then Amy's in a coma and there's no sign of John anywhere, and the cops seem to be pretty convinced that John had nothing to do with it? Because Emma's the only witness and she's only eight and kids don't always know what's going on, and they think Steve's a pretty compelling suspect for a little while, I think, even though there's PLENTY of evidence placing him on the OPPOSITE FUCKING COAST at the time of the attack? WHO KNOWS! And if it wasn't Steve, then probably it was just a burglar or something. This literally never comes to anything though, I think they find John's body washed up somewhere after MONTHS and everyone just stops caring.
AND THEN AMY'S IN A COMA FOR A FEW MONTHS - OR MAYBE DAYS? IT'S UNCLEAR - AND THEN SHE WAKES UP AND STEVE'S POV IS CREEPY ABOUT IT AND THEN THE BOOK IS OVER.
No, really, that's it.
BUT BEFORE I LET YOU GO, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN DOUG. Doug is John's BFF and directs all of John's movies. Maxine is creeped the fuck out by how attentive Doug is to Amy - and the first chapter actually does a VERY CONVINCING JOB of making Doug seem sketchy as fuck, he's weirdly persistent about hanging out with six year old Amy even when her mom's clearly not pleased, and also the dog growls at him a lot, so, you know: Child molester, right? And I'm like SO DEFINITELY HE IS GOING TO DO SOMETHING TERRIBLE TO AMY, and then he never does, and I'm like OKAY MAYBE WHEN SHE'S OLDER SHE'LL SUDDENLY RECOVER REPRESSED MEMORIES? And she never does. But Maxine gives Amy this talk once that's basically like IF HE EVER TOUCHES YOU, YOU TELL ME, BECAUSE UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES IS HE ALLOWED TO TOUCH YOU, because Maxine is genuinely scared that he'll hurt her daughter, and John's like YOU'RE FUCKING CRAZY, THAT'S MY BESTIE, but Amy listens to her mother and grows up SUPER wary and distrustful of Doug.
But when the book is from John's POV for huge chunks, Doug's totally this awesome guy, and there are no warning signs or anything at all! He's just a super nice and generous family friend, and I'm like IS HE A CHILD MOLESTER OR ISN'T HE? And just when I would start to think that maybe that whole aspect of the book is over with, Amy's POV would talk about how she was still really uncomfortable around him, and also on set one time in the movie she does after college he's like OH, YOU'RE SO TENSE, LET ME RUB YOUR SHOULDERS, and it is GROSS, and also when she's ten and Harry's a baby she gets really anxious one time because she's giving Harry a bath and he comes along and just grabs naked baby Harry out of the tub, and I'm just like HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BE RESPONDING TO THIS SCENE, I DON'T UNDERSTAND!!!! IF YOU INTRODUCE A CHILD MOLESTER IN THE FIRST CHAPTER HE SHOULD PROBABLY BE RECOGNIZED AS A CHILD MOLESTER BY THE SIXTIETH CHAPTER, JUST SAYING!
ANYWAY the question is finally resolved towards the very end of the book: IT TURNS OUT that Doug was just in love with Maxine and being a Super Nice Guy in the hopes that if he were a good enough friend to her, she would realize how wonderful he was and leave her husband for him. CAMERON FROM THE 10 THINGS TV ADAPTATION, BASICALLY! So Maxine was the great love of his life and all his weird molesty overtures to Amy were him trying to be her new dad, basically? OKAY. MAKES SENSE.
BUT WHAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE WAS IF HE LOVED MAXINE SO MUCH AND ALSO SUSPECTED FOR YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS THAT JOHN MAYBE KILLED HER [as revealed in the argument they have right before John breaks his leg], HOW IS HE STILL LIKE "JOHN'S MY BEST FRIEND AND I'D DO ANYTHING FOR HIM!" How do you get PAST that as a human being? WHAT IS GOING ON? And even after John does it AGAIN and puts Amy in a coma, Doug's like I'M SO CONCERNED ABOUT MY MISSING FRIEND JOHN, SOMETHING MUST HAVE HAPPENED TO HIM!
This book, I CAN'T, I JUST CAN'T! How do I talk about this book when I thank my aunt for it? WHAT DO I SAY?
[ALSO: COPIOUS USE OF ITS' TO INDICATE POSSESSION. Not it's, or its. Its'.]