It can be difficult for a novel to acquire attention, though some actressy buzz certainly helps. And Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s new book, Alice Sadie Celine, has gained plenty of that glow in the months before its launch.
“Thank God, Chloë loved it,” said Blakley-Cartwright. By “Chloë,” she means Sevigny, the actress who felt so connected to the material that she voiced the audiobook and declared herself “obsessed.” Busy Philipps, another friend in Blakley-Cartwright’s extended circle, felt the same way and provided another blurb: “I am literally obsessed.”
Perhaps they relate so strongly because one of Alice Sadie Celine’s protagonists is a searching young actress. The novel navigates three women and the betrayal that connects them. (Early in the novel, the actress has sex with her best friend’s mother in an elevator.) The novel is a triple-character portrait of the women involved in this scandal, but its ruminations on acting are especially poignant: Blakley-Cartwright uses the process of getting into character as a proxy for forming a sense of self.
The author, who grew up in Los Angeles, has learned many lessons from Hollywood. “Everyone in my family is in film in some way or another,” she says. Her mother is the singer-songwriter-actress Ronee Blakley, who starred as Barbara Jean in Robert Altman’s 1975 film, Nashville, and her father is screenwriter Carroll Cartwright (What Maisie Knew and Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris).
Once a child actor, Blakley-Cartwright played a terrifying renegade adolescent in the 2003 teen drama Thirteen. She wore brown lip liner and a shirt with rhinestones that spelled Bootylicious. “It’s nepotism in action,” Blakley-Cartwright said with a laugh. “That was directed by my godmother”—Catherine Hardwicke—“and she gave me a hilarious part. But I took the roles seriously, even if I had a tiny little part. And I learned a lot about character by doing that, by putting on the cloak of another person.”
The novel also explores family dynamics and how children form identities separate from their parents’, which Blakley-Cartwright drew from her own parents’ decade-long custody battle. “I was often called into the courthouse to talk about them,” she says. “I was asked really young to editorialize my relationship with each of them.”
One thing is clear: Blakley-Cartwright knows how to sell books. Her first novel, the young adult thriller Red Riding Hood, was a No. 1 New York Times best-seller and published in more than 20 languages. While there’s no veneer of fairy tale in Alice Sadie Celine, there is a little in-joke for readers to tie her work together. Referring to the wolfish stare of a lover, Blakley-Cartwright writes, “What eyes Celine had. The better to eat you with.”
Maggie Lange is a New York–based writer
