Director: Marielle Heller
Writers: Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty
This has to be one of the best movies about writing that I’ve seen, one shows, in a realistic way, the difficulty of making a living as a writer, and the special cruelty of the New York publishing world. Based on Lee Israel’s memoir of the same title, it’s about a down-on-her-luck biographer (Melissa McCarthy) who turns to literary forgery as a way to pay her bills. Israel, who died in 2014, found plenty of work as a journalist and author in the 1970s and 80s, but had a dry spell after her biography of Estee Lauder was panned by critics and sold poorly. Can You Ever Forgive Me? takes place in the early 1990s, when Lee begins to forge letters by famous writers like Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward to sell to collectors. Continue reading “Review: Can You Ever Forgive Me?”
Thelma and Alice 