Innocents and Others

Meadow Mori and Carrie Wexler grew up together in Los Angeles, and both became filmmakers. Meadow makes documentaries; Carrie makes successful feature films with a feminist slant. They question each other's choices; each disappoints the other. And yet their loyalty trumps their different approaches to film and to life. Until they encounter Jelly. Older, erotic, and mysterious, Jelly cold calls powerful men and seduces them, not through sex but through listening. Her downfall, and what makes her so extraordinarily moving, is that she pretends to be someone she is not. PRAISE FOR INNOCENTS AND OTHERS "A daring and beautiful meditation about selfishness and selflessness, and how to be in the world." George Saunders, author of Tenth of December "A thrillingly complex and emotionally astute novel about fame, power, and alienation steeped in a dark eroticism and a particularly American kind of loneliness" Vanity Fair "The complex relationship among three women and the film world drives this tale of technology and its discontents... A superb, spiky exploration of artistic motivation" Kirkus "Masterful, a novel as elegant and audacious as it is absorbing and complex. For the closer we move to the truth of her characters and their dilemmas, the clearer it becomes that truth is both immense and provisional, the understandings it offers startling and elusive." The Australian