I never intended to move to LaLaLand, much less to work in Hollywood.
I’d been living in Manhattan and working in book publishing for long enough to let the bloom fall from the rose. Simultaneously in love with New York and absolutely over it, I’d contracted a serious case of Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That.” So, when Tinseltown came calling with a job offer for a Creative Executive role, I bid the East Coast farewell and headed for The Hills.
It was 2015, and the entertainment industry had worked up an appetite for adapting books into box office success. Fortunately, almost nobody in the vicinity of a studio lot actually read them, so it was a plum gig. Admittedly, the hours were endless and expectations were high, but I wasn’t exactly shoveling rocks for a living.
While Hollywood remains famous for attracting purveyors of “indelicate” behaviors, such as throwing…
