End Credits

August 1, 2023
Patty Lin grew up as a creative child who loved television. In college, despite her Taiwanese immigrant parents' hope that she would pursue a more stable career, she interned at the Late Show with David Letterman. Later, in the 1990s, she worked an administrative job at the Late Show and dated a Saturday Night Live writer. Still hoping for a more hands-on, creative role, she wrote scripts in her spare time. She found an agent and took the leap of moving to Los Angeles. Over the next decade, Lin worked long hours in competitive writers' rooms, often as the only woman of color on staff. With stints on Freaks and Geeks, Desperate Housewives, Friends, and Breaking Bad, Lin rode the highs and lows of Hollywood. Yet the years of rejection, impostor syndrome, and abusive work environments took their toll, and Lin began to realize that her career was grinding her down. A meditation on ambition and pain from a talented, engaging writer, Lin's memoir provides an inside look at an often-glamorized career.

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August 18, 2023

Lin writes a straightforward memoir of breaking into television writing and her decision to leave the business. Her career includes working on the Friends and Freaks and Geeks television shows. Although she earned an Emmy nomination for Desperate Housewives and two Writers Guild of America nominations for Breaking Bad, she doesn't pull any punches about the unpleasant and chaotic working conditions under creators Marc Cherry ("an awful boss--demanding, unprofessional, and not very nice") and Vince Gilligan ("all he cared about was his show. Not the people who worked on it"). She writes that what drove her from the business was the grueling hours, the egotistical bosses, and the political and dysfunctional aspects. There is plenty in this book to show that writing for television is not an easy career, and the people in control can be cruel. Fans of these shows will be interested in the glimpses the book offers into their writing rooms. VERDICT This will be a good fit where celebrity and industry memoirs circulate well.--Emily Kubincanek

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2023
A former TV writer recounts her years working in the business. "Ever since I retired from television at the ripe age of thirty-eight," writes the author, "people have asked me: 'Why would you quit such a cool career?' " Lin, a former staff writer and producer for shows like Friends, Freaks and Geeks, and Desperate Housewives, shares her mostly negative experiences in "an unhealthy culture filled with damaged people who both perpetrated abuse and accepted it." With a few exceptions, notably her stint on Freaks and Geeks, the author's tenure as a TV writer was unsatisfying. "On my first day as a television writer," she writes, "my boss used me to fuck over one of the other writers." Years later, her outlook remained unchanged: "I'd been through some harrowing shit in my career," but on a specific day during her time with Breaking Bad, "I hit a new low." Lin acknowledges she was paid well while exposing the countless unsavory aspects of the entertainment industry. "We all became worker bees," she notes, "writing disembodied scenes that would get stitched together into a Frankenstein of a script." When she attained the level of producer, she had "to deal with problems I used to be sheltered from. And by problems, I mean actors." The author effectively illuminates the loneliness she experienced as the only Asian writer in the room, "buckling under the pressure to represent my entire race," as well as examples of "the culture that allows men to behave badly." The weakest parts of the narrative focus on Lin's long-term relationship, which ultimately failed, and include tepid revelations such as, "It takes two to tango." A year after leaving the industry, she began this book "as a therapeutic exercise." It's clear the author's writing process was cathartic, but her audience may be limited to fellow former TV writers and those interested in the behind-the-scenes goings-on of that world. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but the book is heartfelt and candid.

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