Boss Lady: A Novel (The Flyy Girl Trilogy, Band 3) - Softcover

Tyree, Omar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743228723 ISBN 13: 9780743228725

Verlag: Atria, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Tracy Ellison, the star of Omar Tyree’s Flyy Girl and For the Love of Money, returns in this bestselling novel, Boss Lady.

Everybody’s favorite flyy girl is a little bit older, a whole lot wiser, and just as sassy as ever. After a series of triumphs in the world of letters and acting, Tracy takes on the dazzling world of Hollywood’s A-list players to film a project close to her heart.

Told from the point of view of Tracy’s cousin and personal assistant, Vanessa, Boss Lady chronicles the trials and tribulations of adapting the story of Tracy Ellison’s life. In this novel, Flyy Girl is becoming a major motion picture and Tracy is prepared to do anything and everything to tell her story and to make sure it's done right, from screenwriting to producing to designing. In the meantime, she’s also juggling the highs and lows of her famously turbulent love life. Is it better to remain single and committed to her career? Or is she ready to take the plunge and embrace the married-with-children life?

Written with Omar Tyree’s irresistible urban style, Boss Lady finds the author’s best-loved character at the top of her game, thoroughly in charge, and taking life strictly on her own terms.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Omar Tyree is a New York Times bestselling author, NAACP Image Award winner, and professional journalist from Howard University, who has written fiction and nonfiction, hard news and op-eds, screenplays and stage plays, and many other forms of writing. He is also an excellent lecturer who has been invited to speak at more than eighty American colleges and universities. His present and ongoing goals include the continuation of developing, writing and publishing great literary content, as well as adapting and producing exceptional films, music, and educational events worldwide.

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Tyree's popular heroine, Tracy Ellison, returns in this new release. She is a little older, a whole lot wiser and just as sassy as ever.

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1. Vanessa VANESSA
Hi. My name is Vanessa Tracy Smith. I’m Tracy Ellison’s oldest second cousin on her mother’s side. Many of you first read of me in Tracy’s sequel book, For the Love of Money. But some of you are a little confused now. That’s okay. I’ll explain everything.

My big cousin Tracy became famous ten years ago after publishing the story of her life in a book called Flyy Girl, as told to author Omar Tyree. She finished undergraduate school at Hampton University in Virginia, and continued school to receive a master’s degree in English. Mission accomplished, she moved back home to Philadelphia, passed all of her teaching certificate exams, and found a job as a junior high school English teacher. However, my cousin could never be satisfied as a schoolteacher. Not the flyy girl. So after thinking it over, she decided to quit her job as a schoolteacher and move to Hollywood, California, to chase her dreams as a poet and screenwriter. She had already written two volumes of unpublished poetry.

Out in Hollywood, Tracy took a few courses in screenwriting at UCLA, made friends in the television industry, and worked herself from an assistant writer position for a science fiction show on cable, into a proven staff writer and a freelancer for some of the major networks. But my cousin didn’t stop there. In perfect flyy girl mode, she attempted to create her own sitcom, Georgia Peaches, about a southern girl trying to break into the music and entertainment industry. Failing at that, she penned her first feature-length screenplay entitled Led Astray, about an African-American woman who exacts revenge on several Hollywood players who betray her.

While continuing to make new friends in high places, my cousin not only found a producer and a studio to develop and green-light her first film, but she walked away with the starring role and an associate producer credit.

Led Astray went on to triple its budget in ticket sales at the box office, my cousin became an instant star, and she was able to sign on the dotted line for a lucrative three-film deal worth millions of dollars.

Pretty unbelievable, isn’t it? I would say. But that’s when I come in.

I had been told about my big cousin Tracy ever since I was a toddler. But what I heard of her was rarely a good thing. My mother would beat me over the head with negatives about my cousin as if it was a punishment.

“Girl, you think you’re so damn cute. You act just like your cousin Tracy. The world don’t revolve around you!”

Granted, I barely even knew who Tracy was at the time. It wasn’t as if she visited me, my mother, and my sisters while we relocated like nomads to different run-down apartments and houses in North Philadelphia, with my mother chasing her crazy ideas of love. All I knew was that Tracy was my mother’s first cousin, and that she was raised in a stable home in the better parts of Germantown. However, I had seen pictures of her, and if my mother believed that naming me Tracy and berating me with how similar I was to my namesake would somehow stop me from trying to emulate my cousin, she was wrong.

All of my mother’s name-dropping only made me think of Tracy night and day, whether she visited us in North Philly or not. My cousin soon became the focus point of my constant daydreams of a better life. Then her first book came out.

You would think my mother would have known about the book as much as she seemed to despise Tracy. But my mother was never much of a reader. So she didn’t know about the book that had her name, my aunt Marie, my grandmother Marsha, and my great aunts Patti, Joy, and Tanya in it until I had first started to read Flyy Girl at age eleven. It had been out for a few years by this time, and it had not been published nationally yet. It was still kind of underground.

I hid the book from my mother and read it day and night for three days straight until she finally caught me with it in my room. I was all the way at the end and had gotten a little careless with it.

She asked me, “What’s that you readin’?”

I didn’t even notice my mother when she walked into my room. I was just so into that book. It had me hypnotized. It was that good. But I got so nervous from being busted that I fumbled the book out of my hands and dropped it on the floor.

I mumbled, “Ummm…”

I was terrified and didn’t know what to say. My mother could read the surprise all over my face. I was sure she knew about the book. I tried to pick it up and hide it from her, like a fool.

“Gimme the damn book, girl,” she told me.

“Mom, it’s just a book,” I whined.

“Vanessa, if you don’t give me that damn book, I will break your damn hands!”

I was still hesitant until my mother reached out and snatched it from me.

“Gimme this damn book, girl!”

My little sisters looked at me as if I was nuts.

“All that over a book.”

They didn’t get books like I did. I had a lot more to dream about, I guess.

Anyway, my mother read the title out loud.

“?‘Flyy Girl. Inside the big city there’s a mad obsession for gold, sex, and money.’?” She looked at me and asked, “What are you doin’ readin’ this? And who gave this to you? Is this some kind of X-rated sex book?”

My two younger sisters began to eye me in alarm with hushed silence and wide eyes.

I was confused as I don’t know what. Didn’t my mother know about Tracy’s book? I had given her the benefit of the doubt, but maybe she didn’t know. Then she studied the artwork on the cover, with the gold earrings that read Tracy in script, and she just froze.

“What in the world…”

My mother was as shocked as I was. I was shocked that she didn’t know about it, and she was shocked that she was just finding out.

Then I got slick and tried to downplay it.

“It’s just a book about some girl growing up in Philly, Mom.”

My mother ignored me and began to flip through the pages after reading the back cover summaries.

“Where did you get this book?”

I didn’t want to tell. Tracy’s book was quite mature for an eleven-year-old girl to read. It was detailed with graphic sex and hard language. So my friends had all been hiding it from their mothers. We all realized that it was hard-boiled and secretive material.

“You better tell me, girl,” my mother warned me.

“Friends,” I answered.

“What friends?”

“Just friends, Mom.”

She was headed for the third degree, and it was beginning to look like a very long night.

“I want names, girl.”

By that time, my sisters were no longer silent.

“Uuueww, Va-nes-sa.”

“Shut up!” I screamed at them.

I was irritated by the whole thing.

My mother said, “No, you shut up, Vanessa. And you tell me what I wanna know. Right now! I want names!”

To make a long story short, my mother got me to tell on my circle of friends, who had all realized before she did that the book was about our cousin.

So...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atria
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0743228723
• ISBN 13: 9780743228725
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande