Messy, Complicated Love Stories and Mental Health Awareness Month: An Exclusive Guest Post from Katie Cotugno, Author of Birds of California, Our May Fiction Pick
Paperback $16.99
Birds of California
Birds of California
In Stock Online
Paperback $16.99
A Hollywood romance for the ages, Birds of California is a read-in-one-sitting, swoony read that showcases the lives of two former child stars who find their way to each other as adults. A timely rom-com set in a post #MeToo Hollywood, Cotugno’s adult debut is unsurprisingly both witty and full of heart. The perfect book to slip into your tote and escape into on the beach. In this essay from Katie Cotugno, find out about what inspired this book as well as the connection the book has to Mental Health Awareness Month.
A Hollywood romance for the ages, Birds of California is a read-in-one-sitting, swoony read that showcases the lives of two former child stars who find their way to each other as adults. A timely rom-com set in a post #MeToo Hollywood, Cotugno’s adult debut is unsurprisingly both witty and full of heart. The perfect book to slip into your tote and escape into on the beach. In this essay from Katie Cotugno, find out about what inspired this book as well as the connection the book has to Mental Health Awareness Month.
Halfway through my new novel Birds of California, the main character, Fiona, loses her temper on a nosy photographer: “Is this what you wanted?” she demands. “Congratulations, I’m a psycho! You win!” A former child star who dropped out of the spotlight following an extremely public unraveling and a stint in a psychiatric hospital, Fiona is living quietly with her dad and sister and working at her family’s print shop. Her therapist at the hospital diagnosed her with PTSD, which feels humiliating: “She was on a television show,” she thinks later in the novel, “she didn’t serve two combat tours in Iraq.” Everyone else—including Sam, her dreamy former costar—seems to be able to hold it together. So why can’t she?
May is Mental Health Awareness month—a moniker that always kind of makes me laugh, being someone who is and always has been acutely aware of her mental health at all times. I’ve suffered from anxiety and panic basically since I was in utero, and I go through life making a constant series of small calculations: have I built in enough recovery time after that big work trip? Can I bail on this event if need be? Have I put enough safeguards into place—sleep, nourishing food, time outside far away from my computer—to keep the wheels from coming off the cart entirely?
I am emphatically not famous, but there are forward-facing parts of my job as a writer, and I think a lot about the intersection of fame and mental health. I know the feeling of trying to hold it together in public while a haunted carnival blinks and whirls wildly away inside my brain, and I feel lucky to have been able to navigate my own struggles in relative private and not in front of millions of onlookers eager to use my obvious suffering as idle entertainment while getting a pedicure or waiting in line at the grocery store. I came of age at the same time as Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan—gobbling up the details of their rise and fall along with the rest of America, hungry for every morsel of their “crazy” behavior. It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I realized these were women struggling in many of the same ways I’ve struggled, but that there was a key difference between us: While I have a support system that is deeply invested in my health and happiness, they were often surrounded by people with financial incentive to make sure they remained unwell.
I wrote Birds of California in part as a way of reckoning with my own complicity in a system that uses the mental health crises of young women for fun and profit, but I also wrote it because I like to write about messy, imperfect people falling in love. Fiona’s struggles with her mental health are part, but not all, of her identity, just like they’re part—but not all—of Britney’s and Lindsay’s and mine. We are all so much more than our various diagnoses. And we all deserve messy, complicated love stories of our own.
Join us on Tuesday, May 24 at 7 PM ET, as New York Times bestselling author, Katie Cotugno, discusses BIRDS OF CALIFORNIA – a sharply sexy and whip-smart romantic comedy where sparks fly and things get real set against the backdrop of a post #metoo Hollywood – with Taylor Jenkins Reid. You must purchase a ticket on Eventbrite to join this event. Please visit here to learn more.