Actors Anonymous

Name: Actors Anonymous
Brand: Brilliance Audio
Availability: InStock
Rating: 3.2 (5 reviews)
Author: James Franco
ISBN: 9781480555662

Author: James Franco

Narrator: James Franco

Unabridged: 8 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Published: 10/15/2013

Categories: Fiction, Humorous, Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The actors in James Franco’s brilliant debut novel include a McDonald’s drive-thru operator who spends his shift trying on accents; an ex-child star recalling a massive beachside bacchanal; hospital volunteers and Midwestern transplants; a vampire flick starlet who discovers a cryptic book written by a famous actor gone AWOL; and the ghost of River Phoenix. Then there’s Franco himself, who prowls backstage, peering out between the lines—before taking the stage with fascinating meditations on his art, along with nightmarish tales of excess. “Hollywood has always been a private club,” he writes. “I open the gates. I say welcome. I say, Look inside.”Told in a dizzying array of styles—from lyric essays and disarming testimonials to hilariously rambling text messages and ghostly footnotes—and loosely modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous’s Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Actors Anonymous is an intense, wild ride into the dark heart of celebrity.

About James Franco

JAMES FRANCO is the talented, ubiquitous, popular, and provocative actor, director, author, and visual artist. His first book, the story collection Palo Alto, was published in 2010.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Just a Girl Fighting Censorship on June 25, 2015

So this was weird. Going into this I had a pretty ambivalent attitude towards James Franco and after reading this book I kind of still do. I don't really know what to make of this very odd book or the man who wrote it. Is it the ramblings of a madman? Is it a monument to narcissism? Is it a desperate......more

Goodreads review by Ryan on November 22, 2013

I finished this novel last night and figured I'd better post a review while it's still fresh in my mind. And that's because in many ways it reminds me of a graduate course I took senior year in college called Communications and Literature. I was supposed to take this lame senior seminar as a require......more

Goodreads review by J. Lynn on June 17, 2015

No. Just no.......more

Goodreads review by Nicole on March 14, 2014

I tried to avoid reading reviews before reading this book because I wanted to go into it with a blank slate, but I couldn’t help reading all the GoodRead reviews. Even after reading bad reviews I decided to give him a chance. There’s no doubt Franco has a talent writing but, like quite a few writers......more

Goodreads review by George on April 12, 2022

Parts of this mess are actually quite good. The premise is interesting, and might have been made into a decent experimental short story. But as a novel? Any novel where you can skip entire sections without losing anything is not really working. The elements which referred to real life James Franco (......more

Quotes

“Actors Anonymous is a book for anyone who enjoys delving under the surface of Hollywood…An engaging exploration of the weird and wonderful and a fascinating piece of escapism.” —The Daily Express“In Actors Anonymous, Franco performs an auto-celebrity roast that is at once mordantly funny, maddening, and provocative…a kind of intellectual companion piece to his role in This Is the End.” —Claudia Puig, USA Today“Franco deftly switches between these different characters’ voices and fearlessly experiments with form throughout the book: one section is a screenplay, while another is made up entirely of footnotes. But what makes this book so powerful is Franco’s own confessional voice. Perhaps this is finally a personal introduction to a man ready to be unmasked himself.” —Columbia Magazine