Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel

Carlotta Monterey lives her life like a series of roles in the sensational plays she acts in. Beginning life in 1888 as Hazel Tharsing, the daughter of a California fruit farmer, she grows up determined to matter in the world. In each part of her life, Hazel reinvents herself to pursue a new ambition. At 17, she leaves Oakland to study acting in London. Intensely shy, she learns to meet the world as the glamorous actress Carlotta Monterey, by far her greatest acting role. At 22, she marries a British aristocrat, and then divorces him three years later to go back on the stage. After a liaison with a wealthy banker and marriages to the son of her mother’s lover and to a famous artist in New York, she marries America’s greatest playwright, Eugene O’Neill, a stormy union that endures until his death. Becoming Carlotta is a biographical novel that takes us to the cities and the back country of the Old West, to Edwardian London and an English country-house life reminiscent of Downton Abbey’s, to the Broadway theater in its golden age and the tough reality of the actor’s life on the road, and to bohemian Greenwich Village and Manhattan’s arty Smart Set in the 1920s. Through it all, Carlotta is an outsized presence, inventing endless new faces to meet the challenges that life throws her way and turning from every defeat and disillusionment to look ahead with newfound energy and determination.