Join us as the Press Club celebrates a first novel from award-winning journalist Nancy Rommelmann. Set among Hollywood’s transient population of street kids, The Bad Mother (Dymaxicon, 2011) grew out of Rommelmann’s experiences chronicling the under-told stories of Hollywood’s various interstitial populations for the LA Weekly and the LA Times. Hollywood is hard on everyone, from aspiring actors and actresses to those on the way back down, but it is particularly indifferent to the children who ghost along the boulevard.

Author David Rensin, who will introduce Rommelmann (with, he says, the intent to make her cry and/or have her husband punch him in the nose) says, “I’ve long admired Nancy Rommelmann’s non-fiction because, with brutal compassion and emotional wallop, she unfailingly reveals that no life is really ordinary. Now, she brings the same promise and punch to her first novel, The Bad Mother. You may find it hard to look at these beautifully desperate characters, but it’s much harder to look away.”