Our Home Movies: A Novel

Our Home Movies is a story about a storyteller - Marty Nyrop - on the edge of realizing an ambition that only a few obsessive individuals ever achieve. He's directing his first feature film and it stars Laura Trent-Sampson, a world-renowned celebrity. But instead of transforming his life with this dream-come-true, Marty's next move is to throw away his hard-won career by bolting from the movie set with the actress's newborn baby in his arms. What on earth has he done to himself? And to the child? By abducting the son of his negligent, emotionally destructive performers, Marty makes an irrevocable choice: no more actors for this baby he's suddenly claimed as his own, no more directing for himself, and so, as only a parent would fully understand, no more Marty entirely. He flees knowing only that he's determined to give this still-nameless child a chance in life that he and his brother, the child's father, never knew.

Yet seventeen years later, he must fight for his now-teenage son's future again when Laura, the enduringly famous birth mother, suddenly reappears in their lives with her own reality-TV crew in tow, intent on undoing everything Marty has achieved as a father.

Our Home Movies is a search for connection - with children, siblings, parents, and lovers - even as those connections are misshapen by the moviemaking process and its aftermath. It's about the desire for celebrity, the price of gaining business and creative power, the real-world meaning to be found in Romantic Comedy, the explosive synergy of an actor's need for approval twisted together with a director's need for control, all of it braided with an American character trait that insists we're entitled to reinvent ourselves. Each issue is bound up with the others to make Our Home Moviesa worthy addition to the "Hollywood novel" bookshelf.

Author Sherril Jaffe, a PEN Award winner and Professor Emerita of Literature and Creative Writing at Sonoma State University writes:

Our Home Movies is amazingly accomplished. I am in awe at the intricacy of its construction and all that it offers to a reader - not just entrée into what it's really like, in all aspects, to make a movie, but also how it gives a way for the reader to grapple with eternal conflicts: work and family, art and life, conflicts between brothers, unresolved traumas, the Japanese internment camps - and how there is a view into the adolescent skater world, a love story, a veritable course in film theory. Like a rom-com, the protagonist Marty wins the directorship, loses it and wins it again. Great themes emerge, doppelgängers merge into each other, and the past is redeemed by the future. By the end of the novel, I will have bonded with Marty on several fronts. Although the story has been about Hollywood and the making of movies, it has also been about the fact that parenting always involves an enormous sacrifice, about the incredible force that bonds one to one's child, and about how art reflects, redeems and resolves life, and so much more. I'm in awe at how the story is structured like a chiasmus; there's a great feeling of exhilaration at the end, its lovely final emotional moment leaves me utterly satisfied, as if all of my various parts had been exercised, all the conflicts of my life resolved, all the parts falling into place, the narrative so sure-footed and beautifully structured.