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Cover of Miss Wyoming Uk Edition

Miss Wyoming Uk Edition

Douglas Coupland

First published 2000 · 352 pages

A neon-soaked, darkly funny road trip through Hollywood burnout that unexpectedly transforms into a tender search for a real life.

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What it feels like

Reading this novel feels like wandering through a neon-lit, plastic landscape only to stumble upon a genuinely beating heart. It moves at a brisk, cinematic clip, pulling you through the absurdities of Hollywood excess, child pageants, and sudden disappearances with a wry, satirical edge. Yet beneath the pop-culture-saturated prose and cynical observations about fame lies a profound, melancholic yearning. The narrative captures the specific exhaustion of living a performative life, making the characters' desperate attempts to vanish and reinvent themselves feel both surreal and deeply relatable. It is a book for anyone who loves sharp, darkly comedic social critiques that ultimately drop their armor to reveal a tender, vulnerable core, offering a surprisingly hopeful take on finding authentic connection in an artificial world.

Mood
  • neon-lit
  • melancholic
  • surreal
  • yearning
Tone
  • wry
  • satirical
  • cynical
  • tender
  • absurdist
Pace
brisk
Themes
the emptiness of celebrity · reinvention and escape · search for authentic connection · burnout and disillusionment · the burden of identity
The writing
Sharp, pop-culture-saturated, and darkly comedic, punctuated by moments of startling, poetic sincerity.
The arc
Moves from a state of jaded, toxic exhaustion through a surreal detachment, ultimately landing on a tender, vulnerable hope for real connection.
Who it's for
Readers who enjoy biting Hollywood satire that masks a deeply beating, romantic heart.
Content notes
  • substance abuse
  • plane crash
  • child exploitation
  • depression

About the book

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.

Description from Open Library.

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