Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius

by Carrie Courogen

2024 National Book Critics Circle finalist — John Leonard Prize for Best First Book • Named one of 2024's Best Books by The New York Times, NPR, Publishers Weekly, Vulture, Newsweek, Literary Hub, and more.

"A deeply researched, psychologically astute new biography of May by Carrie Courogen...The book is written with a brash literary verve that feels authentic to its subject, and it does justice both to May’s mighty artistry and to the complex fabric of her life, linking them persuasively while resisting facile correlations between her personal concerns and her blazing inspirations." — Richard Brody, The New Yorker

"Casual, sympathetic and compulsively readable." — The New York Times Book Review

"A minor miracle...a fascinating, three-dimensional portrait of a brilliant, complicated artist" — The Los Angeles Times

Miss May Does Not Exist , by Carrie Courogen is the riveting biography of comedian, director, actor and writer Elaine May, one of America’s greatest comic geniuses. May began her career as one-half of the legendary comedy team known as Nichols and May, the duo that revolutionized the comedy sketch.

After performing their Broadway smash An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Elaine set out on her own. She toiled unsuccessfully on Broadway for a while, but then headed to Hollywood where she became the director of A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid, Mikey and Nicky, and the legendary Ishtar. She was hired as a script doctor on countless films like Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Tootsie, and The Birdcage. In 2019, she returned to Broadway where she won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in The Waverly Gallery. Besides her considerable talent, May is well known for her reclusiveness. On one of the albums she made with Mike Nichols, her bio is “Miss May does not exist.” Until now.

Carrie Courogen has uncovered the Elaine May who does exist. Conducting countless interviews, she has filled in the blanks May has forcibly kept blank for years, creating a fascinating portrait of the way women were mistreated and held back in Hollywood. Miss May Does Not Exist is a remarkable love story about a prickly genius who was never easy to work with, not always easy to love and frequently often punished for those things, despite revolutionizing the way we think about comedy, acting, and what a film or play can be.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Film, Biography Memoir, History, Comedy, Memoir

400 pages, Hardcover

First published June 4, 2024

About the author

Carrie Courogen is the author of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood's Hidden Genius. She is a writer, editor, and director based in New York.

Reviews

[Melanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm really torn about this book. As a big Elaine May fan, I believe she deserves to be better known and her place in Hollywood and comedy history celebrated. It's for this reason also that I only grew more ambivalent while reading MISS MAY DOES NOT EXIST. This is very well-researched (though I found some of the citations inconsistent in style), but the access issues permeate the text like it's being haunted. It's not exactly a fair comparison, but I couldn't help comparing this to the recent, very well-written (and oft-cited here) biography of Mike Nichols by Mark Harris. Harris had advantages with his subject that Courogen does not: Nichols is deceased, met the author several times before said passing, led a very public life with a lot of documentation to prove it. May, by contrast, is still alive, deeply private, and opted not to participate in this project multiple times. The resulting project is a book-long write-around profile that successfully puts together a complete CV of May's career in comedy, film, and theater. It's when Courogen dips into psychobiography to form a Grand Unifying Theory of Elaine that she loses me. The frequent shifts into second person - "You can hear the words too" "You could tell them instead" - are deployed to get the reader to fill in the gaps left by May with the reader's own feelings. Second person, to me, is a crutch that writers lean on when they want the reader to feel something but cannot actually provide evidence of that feeling in other, direct ways. The writing generally is too conversational and casual for my taste, especially for a serious project drawing on this much research.

A good biography does absolutely not require the participation of its subject (and many great biographies are all the better for lacking it), but MISS MAY DOES NOT EXIST is home to one of the strangest relationships between author and subject that I've read in years. The introduction sets a worrying tone, where the author describes several borderline and textbook instances of stalking her subject over the course of three years. It opens on the author wearing a wig on a park bench across from May's apartment building, hoping for a glimpse of May. Later: "I spent $200 printing and mailing her 341 pages of museum scans of old family documents she hadn't known existed, [...] walked by her building hoping I'd happen to see her coming out of it, attended events she RSVP'd to, then ghosted at the last possible moment." But a blessing ultimately doesn't matter to Courogen, because she asserts that May can't be trusted to be truthful:

"With Elaine's penchant for elusive privacy, the facts she personally presents as true must always be taken with a grain of salt. We are all, to varying degrees, unreliable narrators of our own lives [...] Elaine, though, wants you to know that you're being set up, wants you to question what is a fact and what is a good story. It's the mark of someone both acutely aware of the mind's ability to present alternate versions of reality--and of someone so distrustful of others that she expects the feeling to be mutual."

Well, here it is mutual. The rest of the book is centered around a thesis of circular logic: May's truth has never been told, and I, her biographer, am the only one you can trust to tell it because May herself will tell you lies. The reader comes away with the impression that Courogen has cast herself as the Charles Kinbote to May's John Shade, the lone scholar-poet working to enlighten the most minor details of another life while also bending every piece of the text to fit her own, twisted theory. This reader, who was not at all uninformed about May's career going into this, came away wondering if I could trust the author any more than I could trust May herself.

Review copy provided by NetGalley.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood's Hidden Genius by Carrie Courogen is a 2024 biography I bought on the basis of its subject and terrific title, without unpacking the writing first. May is a playwright/ actor/ screenwriter who directed for both stage and screen. Of her four pictures as a director--A New Leaf (1971) which she starred with Walter Matthau and wrote, The Heartbreak Kid (1972), and from her screenplays, Mikey and Nicky (1976) and Ishtar (1987)--two were commercial mishaps savagely reviewed in the press.

Unlike Dorothy Parker, the Silent Generation's famed quipster, May would be well compensated by Hollywood, as one of the most successful script doctors of the 20th century. As half of Nichols/ May, she revolutionized comedy recording in the late 1950s. May's achievements stand by themselves without her gender being introduced as a qualifier. Here's what film historian Quentin Tarantino had to say about Mikey and Nicky on his podcast Video Archives, including what May disclosed to him when he phoned her recently.

Oh. I almost forgot there was a book here. I started skimming early and abandoned it at the 80% mark. Courogen was handicapped due to May's refusal to participate in the book, leaving the writer to use newspaper or magazine archives to quote her. There are many potholes in the narrative--not as deep as if she were writing a biography on William Shakespeare, but holes--that the author attempts to fill in with writing that was way too breezy and non-substantial, as if she were writing about Morris the Cat from the Friskies commercials. She even refers to Nichols and May as "Mike" and "Elaine" throughout.

If Elaine was being discriminated against for her gender, she supposed later than it was only because, well, she had acted too much like her gender. It wasn't that she was a woman, it was that she acted like a woman, playing nice and docile, then getting into trouble when she flipped the switch, said fuck it, and stood her ground. As a woman, you're damned if you're too nice, damned if you;re not nice enough. Elaine, years later, thought it better to stick to the not-nice route from the start.

It's writing like this that made me wish the author would get her feet off the table and put her shoes back on. It's not lazy so much as it comes off cavalier, taking the focus off May and make the book more about Courogen writing about May. The book did give me a layman's overview into the writer's life and career, with enough information to continue research on my own, at least of her work.

First sentence: Imagine for a second that you're twelve years old and a recent transplant to Los Angeles, the new girl once again; you've lost control of what number school you're on now.

Favorite passage: "There's a big technical side which she could never master," Paul Sylbert, the film's production designer, explained. "She can't light a cigarette without burning her hand. She works on impulses, intuitions. It's easy to do on a typewriter, but impossible to do when you have other people standing around." Elaine herself would go along with that. "I'm not a pro as a director," she claimed at the time. "I'm a pro at thinking about movies. I'm a pro at talking about them. You ask me anything about a movie and I can answer you in movie language: budget, schedule, gross, net, distribution. I'm a pro at that."



John Cassavetes, Elaine May and Peter Falk on the set of Mikey and Nicky

[Antigone · Rating 3 out of 5]

That Miss May does not exist is Elaine May's own declaration, appearing in the liner notes of the first Nichols and May comedy album, and is amusing in that context. Here it makes me question my fascination with biographies of creative women who have no desire to explain themselves. Meryl Streep. Patricia Highsmith. Edith Head. Zelda Fitzgerald. Or those who had to be dragged in by their heels: Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball. I suspect it's because I know so very many difficult women myself and am aware of how tricky it can be to develop an understanding of them - with no assistance whatsoever. So, I am on the author's side in all of this, at least for as long as I can be. If she foils you, even posthumously, well...it's not a book, then, is it?

Courogen tried as hard as any human being might have tried to obtain cooperation from the mercurial May. That she would like points for this is both earnest and naive. And so you worry for her, while at the same time being glad about it because Elaine clearly would have eaten her alive. And your opinion of Elaine rises because, again clearly, this was a generous act in much the same way Valmont was generous in his release of Madame de Tourvel. Letting go of prey is not an easy thing for a carnivore to do. I say this as prey...and the occasional carnivore.

What we're left with, in terms of biography, is a very well researched history of Miss May's career (the comedy, the plays, the films; the writing, the acting, the directing), equipped with recollections from several co-workers and confidants, alongside some moderately plausible psychological pondering on the dynamics of her work ethic. Courogen scatters at several points. (You can almost hear the snick as the cueball breaks and the colors go flying.) Some passages launch into a hearty defense of the artist's choice-making, or cultural justification for missed opportunities. Others offer far too many perspectives from which to view a certain situation, venturing in this way to patch a void. Guesswork should not be so bold, or so terribly driven, but there is no objectivity here. A fan is a fan is a fan. Does the benefit outweigh the detriment? This is for the reader to decide.

Because, at the end of the day, this is likely as good as we're ever going to get on the subject of Elaine May.

[Matthew Wilder · Rating 1 out of 5]

Without a doubt the worst biography of a major artist I’ve ever read.

If you read a biography such as Blake Bailey’s recent one of Philip Roth, you encounter novelistic pleasures: Bailey draws characters he’s never met with the indelible accuracy of John Singer Sargent because he clearly has lived life.

Carrie Courogen appears to have had one major relationship in her life: with her phone.

The crisis of millennials in media who don’t know much, who haven’t experienced much that isn’t mediated by the Internet, is on full, fierce display here.

The book is least painful assessing May’s four features, about which there is copious recorded material and so we are most spared listening to Courogen’s grating voice.

But when she is essaying May’s pre-fame days, or her pioneering improv era, or her last, theatre-centered two decades, the girl is cringe. (I am trying to use the mistress’ tools to deconstruct the mistress’ house there.)

She laments that May writing a KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS remake for Will Smith is “yet another ‘Are you the right person to be telling this story?’ moment in Elaine’s life.” She cringes over Mike and Elaine using “Alexander the Great was a fag?!” as a punchline in THE BIRDCAGE. (Just thinking about that line gives me a laugh.) She says “unhoused” and “died by suicide.”

But worst of all is Courogen’s conception of Elaine May. She views her as a victim of misogyny. Her own research shows that May’s genius only flourished briefly because all the people around her viewed her as a fragile flower in need of care, a shtik she played to the hilt. But clearly this book deal was pinned on the notion of May as a proto Greta Gerwig, brought low by toxic masculinists. Hearing this would probably make Elaine May punch Courogen in the face.

I take it back: worst of all is Courogen’s summary of May’s work. She clearly views May as a Gilmour Girl or a Magnificent Miss Maizel. Big mistake. Elaine May is more Chantal Akerman than Arthur Hiller—or, let us say, Nancy Meyers (no doubt a Courogen fave). There is nothing in her background (poverty, Yiddish theatre during the Depression, University of Chicago, raising a kid almost from teenagerdom) that would suggest that strange, inopportune kind of genius.

But Courogen doesn’t really care about out-of-fashion genius. She wants May to be a victim and for her bourgie-white-girl audience to say “Right on!” To be hideously frank, Courogen is such a lousy writer that she can’t close the deal.

[J.r. Molina · Rating 3 out of 5]

It really does pain me that I didn’t love this book. I felt the biography has too much to say without having anything substantial backing it up. The most interesting bits were already legends that couldn’t exactly be proven true in this book, because it seems like the author didn’t get anyone in May’s life on the record. I still love Elaine May and consider her one of the best directors to grace Hollywood but this biography had nothing new to say. It felt like an overly long Wikipedia page at its worst and high level blogging at its best.

[fiona · Rating 1 out of 5]

reading past the prologue, in which the author is in disguise on a park bench across from elaine's apartment, was a mistake

[Susan · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. I'm sick of crap research. I didn't get very far in this one. The author's fawning over Elaine May was already getting pretty annoying but when she spelled the name of the actress Zohra Lampert as Lambert, I was done.

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could award this book 6 stars, I would.

Carrie Courogen's biography of Elaine May is a wonderful revelation.

Considering Elaine May is elusive, if not reclusive, Courogen's Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius is informative and entertaining without wildly going off any rails of fancy or succumbing to E!-levels of entertainment fatuousness.

What a wonderful subject. What a wonderful book.

Recommended.

[Ele Woods · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book did not change my life but I don’t blame Elaine May.

Did anyone else find this biographer to be a little bit… weird?

[Carlos Valladares · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carrie has succeeded in an imposingly difficult task: looking squarely at the life and work of one of the mammoth *living* institutions of U.S. comedy and cinema, one of our true blue geniuses (the name, tagged to Albert Brooks, Toni Morrison, Brian Wilson, makes one shudder, but there it is: no two-ways about it: the G word!), taking her silence and her reticence seriously, separating her myth from her work, and synthesizing Elaine May's difficult and complicated-to-follow life, shrouded in understandable recluse, recounting it to us as if over an overpriced glass of West Village wine in a sceney summer terrace.

There's a complaint here that Carrie divulges too much in the "you". Well, what did you want? She's private, yes, but her life is of clear historical/artistic importance. The facts are all out there; all this is is the first major compiling-into-one, PLUS a well-told yarn about the lengths we go to achieve a whole work (which, in the end, isn't whole anyway! and that's ok!) To NOT use the "you", to presume total knowledge and total insight of a person (which isn't what Carrie is doing—this obviously will not be the last word on Elaine, nor is she pretending it is), is a dangerous, banal, and losing game—this is even *if* they invite you into your life. Carrie is constantly being reminded, and reminding us, that she (we) are outside Elaine's private group of friends, who have good insight on her but also can cloud her relationship with the outside world, *as any friends will do.* See Hawks's RIO BRAVO: a squad can lift, but it will also be necessarily a limited squad, hyping each other up at the expense of the outside world. Only our best friends get to see *this*. You don't know that person. For good reason. It's fresher to be on the outside, to be constantly reminded that one is not playing inside baseball. Anyway: good on Carrie for telling it loosely, casually, like a bloody *story* and not some philosophical treatise on comedy or some fact-clogged, exclusive-access exposé approved by seven different estates.

I am leery of biographies, much as I love them, because they can be so boringly written, so literal, make the life into a compilation of facts that pleases 37 people at the expense of the rest of us. This is not that. Carrie's May biography is never boring. It's very casual. It's written with no-bullshit intelligence, it's not fawning but it's not flattening or passionless, it's as dutiful and exactingly precise as May was with her legendary bits. Her life, and this I only could really see through Carrie's writing, was truly a crazy ass screwball movie!

Can't ask for anything more—it's a perfect length. Read it for sure. And watch her four films, all of them masterpieces!

Off I go to the NYPL to watch her Waverly Gallery performance, because I was too poor when I first moved to the city to see her live. Wish I had charged the card anyway. YOLO...

[Sami Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is not an exaggeration to say that I’ve been waiting for a major biography of Elaine May forever. What Carrie Courogen does with this book is so special, and as a reader I couldn’t have asked for anything more, especially considering May has worked so hard to disappear.

Miss May Does Not Exist is not just an excellent chronicle of a genius’s life, work, and struggles with an industry that constantly undervalued her singular point of view, but a complete and undeniable argument that many Elaine May fanatics have been making about the importance of her unrecognized legacy for years. It reflects how May’s career doubles as a history of comedy in America and filmmaking in the 20th century, showing up like a hostile Forrest Gump at the exact right moment to change the course of culture time and time again. Throughout the book, Courogen reckons with how May both transfixed and terrified Hollywood in equal measure, by bucking expectations of how cutting & complex she could be compared to the “nice girl” she presented as. She would not let the world flatten her into something easier to understand or perceive, something her male contemporaries were able to do without getting sent to director jail.

Last night, I was lucky enough to attend a packed screening of Mikey and Nicky and got to see the Elaine May renaissance in action. Seeing that many people, just as passionate about her work as I am, crowded into a theater to celebrate her legacy was truly beautiful. If this book does anything, I hope it continues to bring more recognition to someone who is far overdue.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

This reads more like an extended PR puff piece or a doctoral dissertation. It is a collection of every event in Elaine May’s life documented with almost 1500 footnotes. Did I read every chapter? Definitely not. After slogging through the first third, I skipped and skimmed to the last five chapters and feel confident I got the gist of May’s life and career. The irony of course is the title suggesting May wants to keep her personal life hidden while this super fan does everything she can to undermine her efforts.
I am old enough to have watched the Nichols and May routines for myself. I also watched the documentaries cited in the book. I acknowledge they were a refreshing new style at the time but frankly that was presented and discussed effectively in the first few chapters. Then came a iconstant stream of gushing interviews with peers which merely confirmed the original thesis. Sometimes there is overkill and this is a prime example.
Do yourself a favor and watch a few routines, read the Wikipedia entry and let it go at that. Your time is valuable too.

[Michelle Abramson · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting subject that somehow made for a very dull read. Elaine May pretty much invented improv, and is an all around fascinating person. At least that’s what the author of this book asserted over and over with unnecessarily salty language. Slightly more informative than a Wikipedia article.

[Grace McNealy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Elaine May deserves soooo much more than a biography describing any period of her life as a “flop era”

[Tara Cignarella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miss May Does Not Exist by Carrie Courogen
Story and Content: B
Writing: B
Narration: A-
Best Aspect: Lots of details and mentions many wonderful films from over many decades.
Worst Aspect: Very long, but I learned a lot about a person I never heard of.
Recommend: Yes.

[Kirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elaine May deserves a good biography. This is not it. Corougen's breezy style didn't bother me. I enjoyed it. The problem is the content.

After the cringeworthy introduction about the author-as-stalker, which many reviewers have panned, the chapters on May's early life, career in improv, relationship with Mike Nichols, and her later work as a script surgeon make the book worth reading.

I knocked off 2 stars mainly because it completely falls apart in the last 3 chapters. Up to that point, the author at least quotes reviews. Suddenly she replaces citations with her own freewheeling, subjective, insight-free opinions grounded in baseless assertion.

Not that her citations were brilliant before. There are footnotes galore, but they usually cherry-pick hostile critics' punchiest subjective jeers instead of quoting reviews or interviews with film critics who praise or criticize specifics. In a few cases, when I looked at footnotes, I found that they exhumed and cited "personal communications" as if they were influential public attacks.

The author also repeatedly defaults to attributing May's ability to get work as a director to misogyny. Yes, strong-willed women in Hollywood and every other business are labelled "difficult." I'd grant that default assumption for any female screenwriter, director, or producer, chosen at random, whose career was thwarted or nipped in the bud.

In *every* example that Corougen discusses, though, she has already shown in fine detail that as a director, May was 6 Sigma difficult: 1 in 500 million. Both in shooting and in editing, she burned through studios' money like a '92 Hummer burns gas. Unlike Warren Beatty's "Reds," which she says did "the same thing" as "Ishtar," her fiascos weren't a foreseeable percentage behind schedule and over budget that studios could budget for as contingency costs. They were loss leaders that didn't compensate with critical praise and stacks of award nominations that attract viewers home media sales and to later films by the same studios.

Similarly, the overriding problem with play and film scripts May wrote herself was that they were long, their theme was "gloom, despair, and agony on me," their dark humor escaped the attention of audiences, who headed for the exit before the last act. Hot, edgy stuff for amateur or small, economically marginal theaters, but sensibly shunned by theaters and film studios that didn't want to *become* economically marginal and by actors who needed an income that didn't rely on plasma sales, food stamps, and Medicaid.

Pending a better bio of Elaine May, I recommend this book, but adjust your expectations.

[Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Listen, we all definitely need an Elaine May biography to accompany the giant Mark Harris bio of Mike Nichols Mike Nichols: A Life ... but sadly, this ain't it. Written like a group text, with not nearly enough analysis and way too much brio, this was tough to get through and involved some skimming. One star for taking a big swing and one star for taking on a subject and life we all should absolutely know more about. Mostly it made me realize what a giant irretrievable LIFE MISTAKE I made by not going to see the Broadway revival of "The Waverly Gallery" in 2018.

[Greg S · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at 17%

It’s more a Tribute than biography or memoir. I didn’t learn much but heard a lot of compliments.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

As thorough an introduction to the life of May as might be produced without access to the subject herself.

One critique is that the author regularly assesses Mary's life through a contemporary feminist filter--one that she laments May did not herself share. While certainly May's professional difficulties could be partly attributed to sexism, Courogen's centering of this concern creates a distracting imbalance.

For instance, after May stole away the affections of a married man and his jilted wife committed suicide, May had to step in as a mom, which took time from her from professional and more self-aggrandizing pursuits. Courogen apparently sees this as a waste of May's talents, and blames a sexist society for the straitjacket of domesticity that May was forced to put on rather than the consequences of her own poorly chosen actions.

Another recurring theme is May's failure to deliver on contractual obligations to studios funding her projects, and how this resulted in the drying up of professional opportunities. Courogen asserts over and over again that men in Hollywood are given many opportunities to fail, but is that true? In an industry ruled by "what have up done for me lately?" it is hardly only women who are given few chances to succeed.

In short, for this author, "she was a woman in a patriarchal society" covers a multitude of sins.

None of these critiques are meant to undermine the positive qualities of the book, let alone the incredible work of Elaine May. But they do highlight the ways in which looking at reality through a warped lens can weaken the power of our analytical skills.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author spends so much time preaching about and defending Elaine May's legacy as an icon, she forgets to paint a more human portrait of who she was. I love Elaine May, don't get me wrong, but I found myself longing for more anecdotes and quotes from those around her – more insight from her daughter or her partners. I'm grateful for the info we do get, I'm sure it wasn't an easy feat to find (especially the early days stuff), but I can't help but walk away thinking this feels a bit flat. I struggled to get through it at points, even the chapters about movies I was looking forward to reading about.

It's not a bad biography – it's basically the only one and that's worth quite a bit – but I would have preferred to just read some of these Elaine May quotes in full instead of having to take it from the author's fiercely rosy interpretation.

[Mark Matheson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of Elaine May is the story of fierce creative facing sexism in Hollywood, yet this isn’t an angry book. Courogen approaches the reality of double-standards (specifically that women are labeled as “difficult”while male peers are seen as complicated geniuses) in a way that highlights how May maneuvered accordingly. Admittedly, I was unfamiliar with Elaine May before reading, but this is a great step towards her belated recognition. Its title may be “Miss May Does Not Exist”, but you can change that.

[Lane Sohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book :,) At first, I thought it was too fawning and psychological. But then, it becomes clear that Elaine May deserves all the adulation. It was interesting (if maybe I’m a little skeptical) to see her contextualized in a modern way: her failure to succeed as a director due to sexism, railing against the commodification of art in film. I love Elaine and I’m sad to not listen to her story anymore. I like having homework tho and now I am going to watch all of her and Mike Nichols’s movies <3

[Matt Carton · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️-1/2. A tremendous biography on a great and flawed artist. Courogan idolizes May, but this is not a work of idolatry. What you get, among other things, is a primer on American comedy, a history of New Hollywood, and the importance of the stage. Mostly, though, this is a portrait of the artist who just wanted to get things right. Highly recommended.

[TV’s Kevin Lanigan · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an avowed lover of difficult women, this is a new holy text

[Elise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listening to this as an audiobook was supremely great. ELAINE MAY FOREVER

[Gordon Hultberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A ton of marvelous detail especially in Chicago theater scene, 1950s.

[Howard Christie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Mike Nichols biography a couple years ago and loved it. So interesting, so many characters and the good and the bad were all readable. In that book it is clear that Ms May is the genius of the two, during their heyday and later in the movie years.
This book agrees with that assessment and in fact states it over and over again, ad nauseum. Everyone agrees, but why so many failures and not just failures but flops. Nichols resume is quite varied also but he had many more successes. May has Tootsie and Birdcage, a late in life Tony and I guess Heartbreak Kid and maybe others she doctored. She had a career in 3 fields, was praised and made a good bit of money.. but so many failures…Ishtar.
Hard to get along with, too focused, insecure, thoughtless, no thought for other opinions… it goes on and on. Certainly a very flawed lady with better than mortal skills. The author got no interview with Miss May despite stalking her, but it probably would not have enlightened the cause. It’s a well researched book , it’s well written and it tries very hard to come to grips with Ms Mays being. You keep waiting for May to come to grips with all her faults but it never happens.

[J. Fakename · Rating 4 out of 5]

One extraordinarily funny and talented woman's search for the truth. [audiobook]

[Bryce · Rating 2 out of 5]

Im a big fan of the films Elaine May made in the 70s so I was excited to read this and learn more about her but the writing style is too casual, breezy, and repetitive. Carrie Courogen paints Elaine May like an eternal underdog but thats hard to sell when she’s been an award winning, oscar-nominated, millionaire for majority of her career. The need to frame every victory of hers as “the world finally catching up to Elaine May” is tiring and not very accurate in my opinion . It’s just puzzling it was written this way and sometimes comes off more like the ramblings of an online fan-page than a proper biography.

[EVAN · Rating 4 out of 5]

To some degree, I knew what to expect, having heard the author interviewed on Jason Bailey’s “A Very Good Year.”

This is not a biography, but rather a lawyer’s brief/fan letter. Everything is viewed through the prism of fandom. It’s rife with speculative conversations and thoughts, mostly due to Ms. May’s aversion to publicity. As several other reviewers have pointed out, the author tries to pin everything on misogyny (which is partly true), comparing Ms. May to male directors. Yet, she offers no examples of male directors who engaged in the same or similar behaviors and who had lengthy careers. Of course, misogyny was rampant and significantly hindered her career but, if you’re going to compare your subject to men, give examples.

Again, this was clearly well-researched and a labor of love. I think the author would be better served by a subject with which she had less of a love affair.