Author(s): Nick Bhasin

Fiction

A funny, biting, satirical, madcap and moving rollercoaster ride through the crap side of Hollywood showbiz as seen through one man's descent into grief and madness.

It's 2002. Hector Singh is an eccentric, moderately talented yet extremely confident aspiring TV writer hell bent on 'making it' in LA. He's Puerto Rican and Indian but also post-race (or so he thinks) and spends most of his time at the gym or watching TV and movies with his college friend/roommate Laura, a somewhat successful Black screenwriter, and smoking marijuana with his writing classmate Gabriela, a Guatemalan-American MBA/dope dealer whose writing is, well, not great.

When his mother dies, Hector's grief turns into depression, triggering dark thoughts and a binge eating disorder that threatens to undo his 54-kilo weight loss. Laura helps him get a potentially career-launching job as a writers' assistant on a TV drama, but Hector remains emotionally unstable. He goes on anti-depressants that erase his ability to perceive social cues. He can no longer mask his objections to the casual racism of the white writers he works with, his resentment for the career he's chosen and his hatred for his own body.

Hector unravels. He dates a white woman with questionable views on race, he considers becoming a born again Christian, he gains weight from binge eating and chases down celebrities to hand them his script, all while alienating himself from the people closest to him.

Can Hector navigate Hollywood racism, diet culture oppression and crippling grief to survive this emotional crisis? Does he pull himself together in time to sell his TV show in a meeting with big producers? Will he catch an extremely fit Tom Cruise and give him a script? Seems unlikely.