Nancy Rommelmann

The Bad Mother (Dymaxicon)

Award-winning journalist Nancy Rommelmann launches her first novel here at Skylight Books! Nancy Rommelmann's first novel, The Bad Mother (Dymaxicon, 2011), is set among Hollywood's transient population of street kids. The idea for this book grew out of Rommelmann's experiences chronicling the under-told stories of Hollywood's various underground populations for the LA Weekly and the LA Times: a crew of Mexican gardeners working the Hollywood Hills; the "cop groupies" who hang out at the LAPD's favorite bar, and the dream-broke residents of Sunset Boulevard's transient hotels. 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, unseen by the tourists squatting over Marilyn Monroe's hand prints in front of Grauman's Chinese. As Rommelmann explains, "Hollywood herself is the bad mother of the title." Nancy Rommelmann's articles and profiles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Reason, and other publications. Her Op-Ed pieces and book reviews appear in the Oregonian. She is also a contributor to the media website LA Observed. Rommelmann received Best Arts Feature 2009 from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), as well as Best Entertainment Arts Feature 2009 from the Los Angeles Press Club. An LA Weekly feature about the actress Jena Malone's bid for emancipation from her mother received the identical awards in 2001. Rommelmann's food writing appears in Bon Appetit magazine. She has worked as a restaurant reviewer for the LA Weekly and Willamette Week. In 2002, she shared an AAN award, for food coverage, with Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer Jonathan Gold. Rommelmann has published three books, including The Real Real World (with Hillary Johnson), which spent fourteen weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, and Everything You Pretend to Know about Food.