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Overview
From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs,comes the absurd and tender story of a hard-living movie producer and a former child beauty pageant contender who only find each other by losing themselves.Waking up in an L.A. hospital, John Johnson is amazed that it was the flu and not an overdose of five different drugs mixed with cognac that nearly killed him. As a producer of high-adrenaline action flicks, he's led a decadent and dangerous life, purchasing his way through every conceivable variant of sex. But each variation seems to take him one notch away from a capacity for love, and while movie-making was once a way for him to create worlds of sensation, it now bores him. After his near-death experience, John decides to walk away from his life.
Susan Colgate is an unbankable former tv star and child beauty pageant contender. Forced to marry a heavy metal singer in need of a Green Card after her parents squander her sitcom earnings, she becomes the alpha road rat. But when the band's popularity dwindles, the marriage dissolves. Flying back to Los Angeles in Economy, Susan's plane crashes and only she survives. As she walks away from the disaster virtually unscathed, Susan, too, decides to disappear.
John and Susan are two souls searching for love across the bizarre, celebrity-obsessed landscape of LA, and are driven, almost fatefully, toward each other. Hilarious, fast-paced and ultimately heart-wrenching, Miss Wyoming is about people who, after throwing off their self-made identities, begin the fearful search for a love that exposes all vulnerabilities.
Synopsis
From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs, comes the absurd and tender story of a hard-living movie producer and a former child beauty pageant contender who only find each other by losing themselves.
Waking up in an L.A.
Miami Herald - Ellen Kanner
Though couched as a classic boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl story, Miss Wyoming is really about seeking meaning and identity in a society courting the vacuous. Coupland made this the subtext of his previous novel, Girlfriend in a Coma, but handles it more confidently and playfully here. He lades on the hip cultural references, of course, but beneath the brand names, there's a warning: Generation X is getting older but not necessarily smarter.
Editorials
Ellen Kanner
Though couched as a classic boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl story, Miss Wyoming is really about seeking meaning and identity in a society courting the vacuous. Coupland made this the subtext of his previous novel, Girlfriend in a Coma, but handles it more confidently and playfully here. He lades on the hip cultural references, of course, but beneath the brand names, there's a warning: Generation X is getting older but not necessarily smarter.— Miami Herald
Mike Snider
Miss Wyoming at heart, is a novel about identity. Overall, Coupland's latest is a pagean of his skills that's deserving of a wider audience.— USA Today
James Poniewozik
Miss Wyoming is a brilliant American romantic novel.— Time
Paul Quinn
In his recent work Douglas Coupland has increasingly plunged his characters headlong into the kind of major life-changes that occur beyond the mere ebb and flow of consumer predilection, as we pass inexorable from one marketing age range to another. Coupland's characters have negotiated - or are about to negotiate - the new areas of experience that lie beyond the lucrative 18-35 category, and a tremulous, "what's it all for?' hankering for depth and transcendence has descended on them.—The Literary Supplement