Proof of ProgressProof of Progress

"From the author of Good Morning America pick, Save What's Left, comes a witty and sharp-tongued novel about an actress who has owed her publisher a memoir for thirty-eight years - this memoir within the novel outlines the life that led to that delay. Maria Astorini, once popular character actress and late-night TV darling, is having a moment. She has survived deaths, divorces, a famous mother, a Hollywood blacklist, a string of public embarrassments, an aging face, financial ruin, an empty nest, a difficult best friend, and a worldwide pandemic. Now, she's back. A small, unexpected role has heightened her celebrity status and tossed her, at age sixty-five, back into the limelight. Along with the award show accolades and magazine interviews and A-list parties, comes a call from an intern at a publishing house asking the one question Maria has spent decades avoiding: "Where is that book?" The world doesn't need another celebrity memoir. But here's one. Maria Astorini has written, or attempted to write, or, at the very least, handed in a pile of pages meant to vaguely resemble the book she promised to deliver thirty-eight years ago. Through a series of bite-sized memories, reluctantly written and submitted to the publisher as Proof of Progress, Maria candidly retraces her steps, chronicling the significant, and more often insignificant moments of her full, funny, and extraordinarily unpredictable life"-- Provided by publisher.