Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick: A Novel of Separation

by Rachel Resnick

Dreaming of fame as a filmmaker, hungry for love and sex, Rebecca Roth heads out to Edge City, L.A., where her dreams mutate into nightmares. Hilarious, heart-blisteringly disastrous love affairs and degrading film jobs, encounters with stars and transients, a midget stunt-woman, and a sacrificial cow. With relentlessly cinematic, jarring, and alluring prose straight out of the Hollywood wasteland, Rachel Resnick captures the bleak scene of "glamorous" L.A. with dizzying grace.

Genres: Fiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

I'm a writer and entrepreneur. My first memoir, LOVE JUNKIE, came out inn 2008 with Bloomsbury in hardcover, and this past October in paperback. It's also published by Bloomsbury in the UK, and translated into Czech by Jota. I've gotten incredible support from other writers. See the quotes below.

I have a special site devoted to this memoir: www.lovejunkiethememoir.com, a new blog to go with at www.lovejunkie-thejourney.blogspot.com. There's also my main site at www.rachelresnick.com.

http://www.amazon.com/Love-Junkie-Mem...
http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9781...

Several years ago, I published my first book, GO WEST YOUNG F*CKED-UP CHICK (St. Martin's). This was an L.A. Times bestseller. I also have an unpublished mod-noir novel, SWAY. Excerpts have been published in Black Clock magazine.

I am founder and CEO of Writers On Fire. We offer luxury writing retreats in the U.S. and abroad. We also provide private writing coaching and occasional local workshops. See http://www.writersonfire.com for more info. We also launched a new blog, www.writersonfire-unplugged.blogspot.com

I hope you choose to follow these blogs.

I look forward to hearing from you.

RR

Reviews

[Jennifer Barbee · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's been a while since I've loathed a book like I did this one. I was drawn by the title. I was suckered in by its position on my local library's "local lit" shelf. I thought it sounded interesting and like something I could relate to. Instead, I found myself continually flipping to the author's picture on the back flap and wondering what it might feel like to be stuck in her UCLA creative writing extension class only to later find out that you were being taught by someone who wrote THIS messy pile.

As I was reading, I immediately felt like Resnick desperately wanted to be Nathaniel West, or fancied herself the author of a modern-day PLAY IT AS IT LAYS. Then lo and behold, I am justified in my suspicions when she cribs not one but three character names from the latter and explicitly refers to the former. Sorry, lady, this book will never belong on the same shelf as those LA literary classics.

[Greg · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's a collection of short chapters, each describing something about life in Los Angeles mostly. And about the chick's jobs, adventures, experiences, lovers and so on. There's no overall storyline that I could see, just a long narrative. Might appeal to someone well versed in the culture of LA and the movie business.

[Jerry · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. I gave it a good shot, but it was a bit much. The author is a relative of a friend … with an interesting but pretty screwed up extended family. Some of these rather disjointed chapters were wonderful, very fun & creative. Others were tedious & others were just plain weird or hard to follow.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this from a remainder table several years ago mostly because I liked the title. The book itself is less compelling. Though it's described as a novel, it's really just a collection of brief pieces, some autobiographical, others simply descriptive, in which the author goes through a fairly ordinary life in LA, working on "Entertainment" and the occasional low-end film project, looking for boyfriends and indulging herself in a far-too-familiar "I'm too smart and too hip to be here" attitude.
Make the rating 1 and a half stars...

[Danger Kallisti · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the non-linear format of the book. It's basically just comprised of many anecdotes thrown together in any old order, but it comes together just fine. It really read more like a perzine than anything else, and I liked that. It also made me miss LA. On the other hand, the protagonist really bothered me, and I think that spoiled the book. So, writing style and format – A; character development – D.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh ... I read this book a long time ago so my memory's a bit fuzzy. I remember picking it up mostly for shock value because I liked the title and thought it sounded pretty interesting - this is a classic example of why you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover. It was OK, but I wouldn't recommend it - way too many amazing books out there to bother with this one!

[Becky · Rating 1 out of 5]

The danger of reading books because they've been blurbed by authors that you like, or worse compared to those authors in blurbs by others, is that you'll end up reading something like this. Which is supposed to be some sort of bildungsroman but ends up being just awful.

[Lani · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was good, not great. I love some of her descriptions, but was too disjointed in the storytelling...I can understand not telling things in a linear fashion, but it seemed sort of purposeless. Overall kept me intrigued though.

[Noelle Joslyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only reason this got 4 out of 5 stars is my own personal preference of being less than ecstatic with books that aren't in linear format. Other than that, I loved the raw, edgy feel and really enjoyed the fragments themselves that were brought to life within the pages!

[treva mccroskey · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was just alright

[Cheri · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book totally sucked!!! how did it get published? i don't even remember what it was about - i just finished it because it was an easy read.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is out of print. I'm on the hunt for it.