Photo of author Ann Garvin with a weathered red background.
Ann Garvin
Before Ann Garvin wrote There’s No Coming Back from This (Lake Union Books) — her new novel about a single mom from Madison who goes to work on a Los Angeles movie set — the Madison author had completed another entire manuscript she wound up shelving.
“It just wasn’t working, and I didn’t like it,” Garvin says, noting that her ex-husband (with whom she’s still close) was battling a near-fatal staph infection at the time. “It was during the pandemic, we weren’t sure if he was going to make it, my kids were stressed and I just couldn't write that book.”
But before she scrapped the story, she snagged a throwaway line from it in which one of the characters bragged about earning a small fortune as a costumer on movie sets for Nora Ephron films that were remade with dogs. And from that bizarre nugget burst forth There’s No Coming Back from This, a charming, laugh-out-loud story that was named an Amazon First Reads selection for July ahead of its Aug. 8 publication.
Garvin’s fifth novel is told in the first-person voice of Poppy Lively, an amenable single mother who inherited her father’s coupon mailer business only to have her accountant steal away with her life savings, a secret Poppy keeps from her daughter — who is taking a gap year as a nanny in New York City before starting nursing school. Desperate, Poppy accepts a job offer from an old flame turned big-shot film producer and finds herself in the costumes department at the Universal Studios lot working on a “doggie rom-com” titled When Hairy Met Sweetie. In way over her head with colleagues who can’t even locate Wisconsin on a map, she soon uncovers corruption on the set and must decide whether to maintain her “Midwestern nice” demeanor or kick some Hollywood ass.
Book jacket Of There's No Coming Back from This is mostly the title words with a drawing of a woman in a director's chair.
To get the plot’s details just right, Garvin connected with several costuming experts — including Valerie Zielonka, the Emmy-winning costume supervisor for Watchmen, Hidden Figures and King Richard — as well as conducted extensive in-person research at California’s Universal Studios and Sony Pictures Studios.
“I didn't want to know gossip about the stars,” she says. “And I think that's one of the reasons [Zielonka and others] were willing to talk to me. I clearly wanted to know things like, ‘What do the wardrobe trailer’s door knobs look like?’ I didn’t want to know who was difficult to work with.”
One of the most surprising takeaways from Garvin’s research was the fact that costumes worn by famous actors in iconic films are stored with other less-important costumes, not in a special vault. “That seems like such a shame,” she says.
Garvin will launch There’s No Coming Back from This at Mystery To Me on Monroe Street Aug. 4 at 6 p.m.; the event is free but there are advance tickets; a livestream is also available.
Madison and Wisconsin figure prominently in much of Garvin’s work. “Madison is such a perfect example of the best of the Midwest,” she says.
Her next book will be based on her time working as a camp nurse at the Wisconsin Lions Camp in Rosholt decades ago. It focuses on a failed life coach who converts a northern Wisconsin theater camp for kids into a camp for anxious and depressed adults. Low on funds, he staffs it with anxious and depressed college students. Bummer Camp will be published next year and comes with a much shorter title than There’s No Coming Back from This and Garvin’s previous two novels, 2021’s I Thought You Said This Would Work and 2016’s I Like You Just Fine When You’re Not Around.
With all of her books, Garvin’s goal is to make life a little easier for her readers.
“I really want people to feel better about being a weirdo or having difficulties in their life,” she says. “If you can like a complicated, flawed character, then that means you can kind of see [yourself]. And then maybe you can like yourself a little bit better. Because the more compassion people have for themselves, the less anger there will be. And everybody will get along better.”
