Miss Wyoming - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Douglas Coupland (Paperback)

About the Book

From the bestselling author of "Generation X" and "Microserfs" comes a dazzling new novel about the cult of celebrity as scathingly funny as it is raucously entertaining. Susan Colgate--beauty queen, child star, rock 'n' roll wife--has disappeared again. The only one who seems to care is Hollywood blockbuster producer John Lodge Johnson, who knows her only from a near-death vision. But he has fallen so severely in love that he will stop at nothing to track her down.

Book Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs, comes the absurd and tender story of a hard-living movie producer and a former child beauty pageant contender who only find each other by losing themselves.

Waking up in an L.A. hospital, John Johnson is amazed that it was the flu and not an overdose of five different drugs mixed with cognac that nearly killed him. As a producer of high-adrenaline action flicks, he's led a decadent and dangerous life, purchasing his way through every conceivable variant of sex. But each variation seems to take him one notch away from a capacity for love, and while movie-making was once a way for him to create worlds of sensation, it now bores him. After his near-death experience, John decides to walk away from his life.

Susan Colgate is an unbankable former tv star and child beauty pageant contender. Forced to marry a heavy metal singer in need of a Green Card after her parents squander her sitcom earnings, she becomes the alpha road rat. But when the band's popularity dwindles, the marriage dissolves. Flying back to Los Angeles in Economy, Susan's plane crashes and only she survives. As she walks away from the disaster virtually unscathed, Susan, too, decides to disappear.

John and Susan are two souls searching for love across the bizarre, celebrity-obsessed landscape of LA, and are driven, almost fatefully, toward each other. Hilarious, fast-paced and ultimately heart-wrenching, Miss Wyoming is about people who, after throwing off their self-made identities, begin the fearful search for a love that exposes all vulnerabilities.

From the Back Cover

Susan Colgate -- beauty queen, child star, "good daughter" on the long-running network series Meet the Blooms, rock 'n' roll wife -- has vanished. Again. The first time was big news: Her plane crashed over Seneca, Ohio, and she was presumed dead by her adoring public. But Susan had in fact walked away unscathed, the only survivor, and entered a new, less fabulous life.

John Johnson, Hollywood producer -- everyone admires his block-busters Bel Air PI and Mega Force -- has been careening through a mid-life crisis that included his own disappearing act from society. But a near-death experience brings him to a realization: Once he has Susan Colgate in his life, all will be right with the world. Which is why he will stop at nothing to find her.

Here is another triumph from Douglas Coupland, author of the bestselling Generation X. Part romance, part mystery, part sidesplitting satire of the maga-star mentality, Miss Wyoming is further proof that Coupland can always be depended on to give us a bitingly entertaining, deliciously unpredictable story.

Review Quotes

"Douglas Coupland continues to register the buzz of his generation with a fidelity that should shame most professional Zeitgeist chasers." -- Jay McInerney, New York Times Book Review

"Coupland has at his disposal a dazzling array of tools with which to shape the emotions of his readers: the whimsy of a latter-day Jack Kerouac, the irony of a young Kurt Vonnegut, the poignancy of early John Irving." -- Bookpage quote; The self-wrought oracle of our age." -- John Fraser, Saturday Night

About the Author

Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian NATO base in Badensollingen, Germany in 1961. He is the author of six other books, including Generation X and Life After God. He grew up and lives in Vancouver.