Caeli Wolfson Widger, author of Real Happy Family, on tour March 2014

About Real Happy Family

Hardcover: 384 pages

Publisher: Lake Union/New Harvest (March 4, 2014)

Part-time actress, full-time party girl Lorelei Branch isn’t famous yet, but she’s perfected a Hollywood lifestyle full of clubbing, fashion, and the latest juice cleanse. When Robin, her sister-in-law and agent, throws a plum job her way, Lorelei jumps at the chance and auditions to be the new girl on television’s hottest reality show, Flo’s Studio.

Enter Colleen, Lorelei’s pill-popping mother, who wants nothing more than to see her daughter win the fame and glory she never had a chance to pursue herself. But Lorelei’s dream of becoming the next reality star is dashed when she loses the spot on Flo’s Studio to a stunning African woman. In an attempt to defend her daughter against what she calls a rigged contest, Colleen goes ballistic and delivers a racist rant on live television, sparking a national media frenzy. Lorelei flees the limelight, humiliated and broke, with her slacker boyfriend Don and heads for Reno where she begins to self-destruct.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Branch family starts to come apart at the seams. Colleen and her husband, Carl, are quietly drifting apart. Darren, Lorelei’s older half-brother, is stuck in Florida working on a contentious film set while his wife, Robin, continues the tedious regimen of fertility drugs meant to help them conceive a child. Desperate to bring the family together again and make things right, Colleen hatches a plan to stage an intervention for Lorelei on the reality show Real Happy Family. Soon the entire Branch family is entangled in a mission to bring the prodigal daughter back into the fold.

Will Lorelei ever forgive Colleen? Will Real Happy Family air their most sensational intervention yet? All roads lead to a seedy Reno hotel room, where a reality TV crew is waiting.

“Cinematic in its rendering, Real Happy Family glides effortlessly between the lives of characters living the underbelly and upper crust of the Hollywood dream, and the bottom dwellers who feed off the fallout. With the precision of an expert director, Widger leads the reader gawking and cringing past the train wrecks of Colleen and Lorelei, but exposes their hearts, and somehow leaves you cheering for a real happy ending for them all.” —Chandra Hoffman, author of Chosen

“Reminiscent of The Corrections, Caeli Wolfson Widger’s Real Happy Family is everything you hope for from a first novel but rarely find: a must-keep-reading-even-though-it’s-2 am-plot packed with turbo-flawed yet loveable characters, all capped off with electric prose. I could not put it down. Had me hooked from page one. Bound to be read and talked about from coast to coast. I feel lucky to have been in on the secret before the rest of the country discovers Widger’s smart and funny debut.” —Deirdre Shaw, author of Love or Something Like It

“Real Happy Family is the twenty-first century version of Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, a report in 2013 on what has happen to West’s Hollywood—and America—during the last seventy-five years. Like West’s book, it is both an anatomy of the times and a prophecy of our continuing confusion.” —Jay Martin, author of Nathanael West: The Art of His Life

About Caeli Wolfson Widger

Caeli Wolfson Widger received her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. Her work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine and The Madison Review.

Follow Caeli on Twitter and Goodreads.