Love or Something Like It : A Novel

Shaw's emotionally honest, clear-eyed debut novel follows a thirty-something woman forced to redefine love, career, and family after her young marriage falters.

Deirdre Shaw’s nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her fiction was included in the New Short Fiction Series Emerging Voices Group Show in Los Angeles in 2005, and she was awarded a 2004 Hackney Literary Award for National Short Story. Shaw lives with her husband in Los Angeles, where she has also written for television.

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Part One

The Summertime Party

The first time we got lost on the way, winding up into the hills, crawling by mailboxes, peering at house numbers, finally spotting the gates by complete accident, the valet practically hiding in the bushes for godssakes. Inside, the host greeted us. He was Toby’s boss and the host of a late-night TV show, and after shaking my hand, he immediately spirited Toby away to an alcove and spoke to him in earnest tones about the day before’s diminished ratings. I moved away and stood awkwardly alone by the bar, trying not to look in the direction of any celebrities, who, it seemed to me, considered it an affront if a layperson so much as glanced at them.

This, I suspected, was why they had gathered in celebrity-only clumps around the house, though I had the sense that their behavior wasn’t particular to this party. There was one such clump on the patio by the pool, just outside the open French doors, where they were all huddled together on several chaise longues: the retired but still beautiful 1970s model, the formerSaturday Night Livecast member, a young movie actor whose cachet, like that of a wealthy fraternity boy, was somehow increased by his being known as an asshole. I made these identifications only after several furtive glances and soon felt I couldn’t risk another, so I spent the rest of the time reading the labels on the bottles of wine sitting on the bar.

Finally Toby reappeared, along with the host, who stuck his hand out to shake mine. “Nice to meet you,” he said slickly, barely looking at me, and when I said out of reflex, “Oh, but we’ve already—” he stopped me and said without a smile, “I’mjust kidding.”

I was twenty-nine and had only just moved to Hollywood, having met and fallen in love with Toby eight months earlier while he was visiting New York— I’d been in the audience at a comedy club where he was doing stand-up; he’d heckled me from the stage, then come up to me afterward to apologize. This was my first celebrity party. So though it annoyed me that if people spoke to me at all they did it while constantly scanning the room for someone of higher stature to talk to, being annoyed by it was a cliché; it was whateveryonehad complained about when I’d asked them what Hollywood was like. And so I moved past it and instead took in the room with a sense of gratitude. This was the kind of party that I had previously only managed to spy on via the pages of InStylemagazine. I was lucky just to be here, I told myself, and being here was enough.

Toby and I kept mainly to ourselves that night. We spoke only with a few other lowly talk-show writers; Toby was a TV writer, and outside of Hollywood his job monopolized conversations; I was a newspaper reporter with the education beat, an occupation that guaranteed my status here as a nobody. We ate alone at a candlelit table out by the pool, and then we smoked cigarettes on the front patio, eyeing the celebrities as they came and went along the steep front steps.

We left early that night, thanking the host and skittering down the granite steps, bursting with a strange feeling of relief that we were young and undiscovered. But it was Toby’s boss’s party, and this man, possessing an astonishingly mistaken sense of his own permanence in the town, had made it clear that he had a vision—his parties would become Hollywood legends, the town’s hottest tickets. A few months later, another invitation appeared in the mail. And so we went.

“Nice to meet you,”

Excerpted from Love or Something Like It: A Novel by Deirdre Shaw
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