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"Everything Is Just Fine is wonderfully entertaining storytelling. There's pain at the core of the best comedy, and the yearning and falling short of these characters is put to great use in this comic epic. Maria Semple meets Almodovar, with the funniest e-mail exchanges ever. I loved it."
―Bob Odenkirk, actor and author of A Load of Hooey
Interview with Jennifer Margulis
Author of Toddler
Brett Paesel contributed one of my favorite stories to an anthology I co-wrote and edited, called Toddler: Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love.
Like her new novel, Everything is Just Fine, her story in Toddler is laugh-out-loud funny.
In real life she’s charming and kind and also hilarious.
I’m thrilled that she’s written a novel now, after acting in and producing the Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning show Transparent and developing and writing shows for HBO, ABC, FOX, and Comedy Central.
The novel is about a group of Beverly Hills Junior Soccer League parents whose lives are turned upside down by the secrets they keep.
It’s so Brett.
And so Los Angeles.
And you’ll love it.
Full disclosure: I didn’t sit down with Brett Paesel for the interview she granted me, because we live in different states, she had a nasty cold, and I wanted to get this up. So we’ve been communicating by email.
I’m saying this upfront because one of the issues this novel explores is how disconnected from face-to-face real-life contact we have all become .
Guilty as charged.
Still, I’m thrilled to share this sneak peek into Brett’s writing process and her thoughts about fiction writing, and I think you will be too.
Happy reading.
Brett Paesel
Writer - Producer - Actor
Brett Paesel is the author of the Los Angeles Time Best Seller Mommies Who Drink (Warner Books, 2006). Her first novel - Everything Is Just Fine - will be released April 9th. Her work has been published in numerous collections and national publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Salon.com.
In Hollywood, she has been a consulting producer on Amazon's televisionn series Transparent and I Love Dick. She has developed and written showes for HBO, ABC, Fox, Comedy Central, WB, Lifetime, and Nick at Nite.
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As an actor, she was a cast member of Transparent and HBO's Mr. Show with Bob and David. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons, and was, in fact, a parent with kids in the Beverly Hills AYSO soccer league.
Reviews for Everything Is Just Fine
Paesel’s book is compulsively readable, an unforgiving portrait of a spoiled generation of contemporary American parents
I have to tell you about this delightful book I just read. I’m recommending it to literally EVERYONE. It’s called Everything Is Just Fine, and it’s by Brett Paesel. She’s a writer and consulting producer and actor, and I bet she’s hilarious in person, because her book is a hoot.
Heads up soccer moms and dads... you have got to read Brett Paesel’s novel EVERYTHING IS JUST FINE because this book will have you laughing so hard with juice box juice or wine from your Swell bottle coming out of your nose thinking about all that time spent schlepping, watching games in the rain, giving your kid pep talks, and dealing with those what the what emails that make it all seem worthwhile.
I read Brett Paesel’s novel, Everything is Just Fine, about parents and their 10-year-old sons playing on a soccer league in Beverly Hills, expecting [a] kind of LOL experience. Rich, entitled parents are the worst kinds to stand on the sidelines with, as the recent college cheating scandal demonstrates. (How could you, Aunt Becky? Lynette? We thought you were one of us!) And the best kinds to laugh at. But in Everything is Just Fine, nothing is fine at all. And the book had me tear up much more often than laugh.
Distant Memories of an Ordinary Mom
