Fabulous Nobodies

by Lee Tulloch

Overview

Before Bridget Jones, Carrie Bradshaw, and the Shopaholic, it was a world of Fabulous Nobodies

Now, back in print after fifteen years, it’s your chance to experience this hysterically wild cult-status novel for the first time.

Get ready to meet:

Reality Nirvana Tuttle
A self-described "doorwhore" at one of Manhattan’s hottest clubs. She never gets up before 2 P.M. and has vivid, two-way conversations with every dress in her closet.

Hugo "A Go-Go" Falk
Gossip columnist and documenter of all things fabulous in the fashion scene. This man is the key to turning Reality into a true Somebody.

Phoebe Johnson
Junior shoe editor of Perfect Woman magazine who has dedicated her life to looking like Audrey Hepburn—and the one woman Reality can trust with her frocks.

and Freddie Barnstable
A transvestite with an uncanny knack for finding fabulous fashions, and his sidekick, a little dog named Cristobal Balenciaga. These Fabulous Nobodies will take you on a quest to be Truly Somebody, in a city long gone but never to be forgotten: New York City of the 1980s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060797164
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/01/2006
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	591,289
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.68(d)

Read an Excerpt

Fabulous Nobodies

Chapter One

I'm standing on the door of the Less Is More club, thinking about my fingernails. I'm up here, above the throng, a fashion leader, with the crowd below almost swooning at my feet, and I'm dressed impeccably from head to toe except for three chipped nails on my right hand. Three chipped nails! This has never happened before. I always check my nails before I leave home. I know how tricky nails can be. Not a night goes by without my making sure the nail polish starts at the cuticles and ends at the tips, a perfect unsmudged slash of color. I'm not the kind of girl just to slop it on.

I'm sensitive to little details like chipped nail polish—including the wrong color combinations, or sandals worn with woolen skirts, or pale blue eye shadow—but especially chipped nail polish. Chipped nail polish is almost the most upsetting thing in the universe, after people who wear leg warmers. The fact that I am standing up here with chipped nail polish, even though everyone else is too far away to see it, is a crisis. I know that my nails are chipped, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm the only one who counts.

The nail polish is flaking off almost to the cuticles. It's bubbling and blistering in the heat like leg wax on the boil. Maybe I shouldn't have mixed any of that battleship gray house paint with Revlon Firma Nail. It seemed like a good idea at the time, especially as I didn't have the exact shade of gray at home to go with my silver Courrèges mini, which I had my heart set on wearing tonight. It's a Courrèges kind of night, all steamy and noisy, like a walk down Carnaby Street in the summer of 1965.What a walk down Carnaby Street would have been like in the summer of 1965 if I'd been born then.

I could stick to plain old Max Factor like everyone else. But that's so predictable. You can't be fabulous and predictable at the same time; this is one of the facts of life. The reason I am fabulous is that I am never predictable. Even I can't predict what I'm going to do next.

I have to act. I just can't stand here like this. Sooner or later somebody fabulous is going to come up these stairs and home in on my nails like an eagle. Fabulous people know about nails. They look for them. Sooner or later somebody fabulous is going to want to shake my hand or kiss it. Which means that sooner or later I'm going to have to take it out of my purse. A girl can't pretend to be looking for her compact all night. I wish I'd worn gloves. Gloves make serious fashion statements, and come in handy, too.

I decide. I dig around in the purse some more—it's got a plastic mother-of-pearl handle that slips neatly over my wrist—and find my emery board. I hold my hand up in front of my face, splay the fingers out, for everyone to see, and start to scratch away at the old polish. The bits of gray paint flake off all over the Astroturf like confetti at a wedding. If you're going to do something unpleasant, you might as well do it with style.

The crowd below is getting restless. They're pushing and shoving and standing on tiptoes to see what I'm doing. I can feel a tremor of irritation as they watch me unscrew a bottle and apply strokes of base coat. They're wondering how I can stand here doing my nails when it's a matter of life and death for them that they get into the club.

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who wonders why a girl would stop everything to repair her nails shouldn't be in a club like this anyway.

Fabulous Nobodies. Copyright © by Lee Tulloch. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

What People are Saying About This

Sophie Kinsella

“I was glued to this book! Reality is such a funny, sharp, fabulous character . . . and I want her frocks!”

Editorial Reviews

Lighthearted yet devastatingly accurate and witty social satire.” — Publishers Weekly

“I was glued to this book! Reality is such a funny, sharp, fabulous character . . . and I want her frocks!” — Sophie Kinsella

From the Publisher

I was glued to this book! Reality is such a funny, sharp, fabulous character . . . and I want her frocks!

Sophie Kinsella

``Life is cruel to people who aren't fabulous,'' sniffs 20-year-old Manhattanite Reality Nirvana Tuttle. In this lighthearted yet devastatingly accurate and witty social satire, former fashion editor Tulloch parodies hip young New Yorkers like Reality whose lives revolve around superficialities--wearing the right outfits, patronizing the in clubs, socializing with the right people and becoming ``fabulous.'' Fashion is sublime to narrator Reality, who names each of her ``frocks'' and sports a tattoo of the Chanel logo. As the ``doorwhore'' at a trendy nightclub called Less Is More, she haughtily decides who is garbed bizarrely enough to merit admittance. Outrageous '60s chic usually wins approval; demurely clad Jackie Onassis is unceremoniously banished. When she isn't working or scheming to get herself into Frenzee magazine, Reality cavorts with an editor of Perfect Woman who slavishly emulates the gamin look of Audrey Hepburn, and with a transvestite who owns a dog named Cristobal Balenciaga. Tulloch's cutting humor suffuses every detail, though she imparts a noteworthy message: celebrity, like its arbiters and opulent symbols, is vacuous, transient and pathetically overrated. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Cute title. Even cuter prose. Reality Nirvana Tuttle is every baby-boomer parent's nightmare: a child with no redeeming social consciousness whatsoever--though she knows what to wear when with whom. Reality's mother is an ex-hippie who gave birth to a child who has names for all of her ``frocks.'' In fact she is closer to her clothes than to people. Reality has the perfect job for a person whose life is her wardrobe: she decides who gets into the Less Is More Club, a trendy New York City nightclub, a job more commonly known as ``Doorwhore.'' Though the novel is peopled with some eccentric characters, it all just goes on and on without much point. The first-person narrative gets cutesier and cutesier and is really more self-conscious than anything else and eventually grates. Even on a comic level, it's hard to care about someone so shallow and vapid.-- Rosellen Brewer, Monterey Cty. Free Lib., Seaside, Cal.

Library Journal