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 TwelveSteps and Twelve Traditions, Actors Anonymous is an intense, wild ride into the dark heart of celebrity.
“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
“Hilarious, shameless, and effective...Franco’s democratic marvel of feel-good prose employs a stable of likable narrators—and diverse styles, such as letters, poetry, text messages, journal entries, pure dialogue, and footnotes—from various walks of life, and the beyond...Their meditations on existence as performance art are funny, subversive, enlightening, and philosophical.” —Lisa Shea, Elle Magazine
“Compelling...Entertaining and insightful...Genuinely funny.” —Thomas Flynn, The Daily Beast
“Part aphorism, part instruction manual, part reflection, part short story and, seemingly, part memoir, the narrative is a pastiche of forms and moods. Franco (or his alter ego) presents his ideas through anecdotes and semiplausible fictional incidents, with plenty of inside references to Hollywood actors.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Franco writes with real authority about a certain kind of workaday desperation amid the promise of glamor...Engaging.” —Slate
“As a work of experimental fiction, Franco’s book is one of the most interesting things I’ve read in a long time, and lot more compelling than many celebrated writers who don’t also happen to be actors.” —ARTINFO
“He gets you to see that life is messy, unrefined, a blending of countless media all working in a void...What [Actors Anonymous] portrays even more accurately than a troubled postmodern America is a consciousness warped and shaped by the lights of a savage Hollywood.” —The Daily Californian
“James Franco’s Actors Anonymous is a fascinating, messy creation.” —The Buffalo News
“Subversively funny and provocatively honest, Actors Anonymous is ostensibly about acting but it’s really about a society where everyone’s reduced to the roles they play. The novel’s many narrators fight back against these roles in truly original, often hilarious, and deeply affecting ways. So should we all.” —Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story
“A remarkable, visceral display of the projected voice. Blake’s assertion ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ is used, brilliantly, as justification for Franco’s life and also its misunderstood public/private undoing. The work gleams with aphoristic truths—’Maybe the search for the real is about playing the most roles and having the most sex.’ ‘It’s the snarky little fuckers that write for South Park or Family Guy and hide behind cartoons that get revered. They are honest, but honest about everyone else, not about themselves.’ Franco, by contrast, uses his own body as the staging area for a quite ambitious and seriously self-deconstructive fiction. Real art, as here, is always a performative seduction.” —David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
“Electrifying to see a writer hold nothing back! This shape-shifting narrative extends a reader’s sense of what a novel can be, can do. Franco plays with persona in ways that implicate a reader. The defiant humor is hard-won (including the best worst job interview ever), his take on irresponsible people is both eloquent and suitably scorching, the language is enviable: the seduction of a virgin is ‘like a bullet through a birthday cake.’ Franco’s novel lures you in with indelible images, provocative mind games, and characters laid bare, then successfully strands you in a frightening place.” —Amy Hempel
“James Franco puts on a James Franco mask and borrows formats from AA to create a fiction about the fiction of identity—especially as it pertains to actors and, by logical extension, writers. Is fame (the longing for it, the actuality of it) as entangled in the creative act as alcohol? Is acting (writing) an escape from reality or the only thing that’s real for an actor (writer)? The illusion of reality and the reality of fiction hold hands in this novel in much the way that actors (and writers) steal from their lives to enliven their characters. The novel does not merely explore acting, it enacts it. This is a lively, strange, engaging, often funny, sometimes brilliant, and utterly fearless novel.” —Robert Boswell, author of Tumbledown, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, and The Half-Known World
“James Franco’s addictive voice swings between the irreverently playful and the bracingly gritty in these whimsical yet haunted riffs on celebrity, the drive to work, and the surreal tangle of competing desires that make the creative life so unpredictably intense.” —Dean Bakopoulos, author of My American Unhappiness
“Franco doesn’t just don and discard the actor’s mask: he peeks out from the edges and winks through the eyeholes, rips it away to expose all the other masks below. And always with a shock of recognition: both his and ours.” —Robert Cohen, author of Inspired Sleep
