{"id":11468,"date":"2025-07-21T18:38:13","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T18:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/11468\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T18:38:13","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T18:38:13","slug":"meg-waite-claytons-typewriter-beach-a-mystery-about-old-hollywood-in-magical-carmel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/11468\/","title":{"rendered":"Meg Waite Clayton\u2019s \u2018Typewriter Beach\u2019 a mystery about Old Hollywood in magical Carmel\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bay Area author Meg Waite Clayton follows up her international bestsellers \u201cThe Postmistress of Paris\u201d and \u201cThe Last Train to London\u201d with a captivating page-turner, this time set in Old Hollywood and Carmel-by-the-Sea. Clayton\u2019s fans won\u2019t be surprised to learn that her latest, \u201cTypewriter Beach: A Nove<\/a>l\u201d (Harper, 320 pages, $24, July 1, 2025), has just made the instant USA Today bestseller list, and new readers won\u2019t find a better place to start with Clayton\u2019s milieu than this story about two women separated by generations\u2014a story about passion and persistence, creativity, politics and family.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"(Courtesy Harper)<\/p>\n

Clayton\u2019s latest toggles between 1957 and 2018 to explore the unlikely friendship between Leo Chazan, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter with a past, and Isabella Giori, a young actress hoping to be Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s new star.\u00a0 The current story focuses on the screenwriter\u2019s granddaughter, Gemma, a struggling writer who discovers the secret about her grandfather. Bubbling up to the surface is Hollywood\u2019s Blacklist, which banned suspected Communists from working in the U.S. entertainment industry in the 1950s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Clayton\u2019s nine books are filled with deeply atmospheric settings\u2014from London and Vienna to the South of France, but the COVID years and her inability to travel gave the author the opportunity to set this book in her current hometown of Carmel,\u00a0with its fairy tale-like town and misty coastline.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, every book has started with the setting. I think the environment that you set a book in gives you so much opportunity to have characters express their inner emotion,\u201d\u00a0says Clayton, who launched the book in the Bay Area earlier this month and appears in Sept. 10 in an event presented by the Lafayette Library and Learning Center.<\/p>\n

Since she knew she wanted to write about old Hollywood, Carmel \u201cseemed like a logical place where somebody might escape to from Hollywood,\u201d as Leo the screenwriter does. \u201cCarmel has a very strong Hollywood connection,\u201d Clayton says. \u201cClint Eastwood was our mayor, and Doris Day lived here. Bing Crosby lived in Pebble Beach, and Brad Pitt just bought a house up here.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not to mention the town\u2019s charm and intrigue. \u201cThe fog and the coastline add a lot of mystery to the place, and you can use that metaphorically when you\u2019re writing,\u201d Clayton says.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI found that so evocative,\u201d she adds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Setting the background with her magical town, Clayton explores two subjects that she cares deeply about.\u00a0 \u201cI always know when something might be a subject for a book because it strikes my heart,\u201d Clayton says. \u201cI literally could not write a book if it was not about something that moved me.\u00a0 I don\u2019t ever take on anything that I don\u2019t feel passionately about,\u201d Clayton adds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Looking back on the themes of her work so far, Clayton says she keeps coming back to \u201cthe particular challenges that women face in making our way in the world.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The author has been addressing women\u2019s roles from a nonfiction perspective \u201cin all sorts of places,\u201d Clayton says, including frequent pieces in the Los Angeles Times.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She says, \u201cBut for Hollywood in particular, I started realizing how underrepresented women are behind the scenes and what a difference that makes to how we as a society see women.\u201d Clayton adds that she hopes that when people go to the movies, they\u2019ll consider, \u201cwho\u2019s making that movie, who\u2019s writing that movie? Who\u2019s directing that movie, and what does that say about women?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Last year was the first time that the top 100 grossing films featured as many female protagonists as male protagonists, Clayton says.\u00a0 \u201cAnd that\u2019s really great, but if you look behind the scenes, most of those films are still directed by men. Most of those films are still written by men, and so most of our views of women remain what men think we should be,\u201d Clayton says. She hopes that people will choose the films they watch based on these criteria.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Clayton also used her evocative setting\u00a0to explore another subject she\u2019s found fascinating: the Hollywood Blacklist.\u00a0 \u201cThe novel is very much about the Blacklist and the silencing of creative voices, and that turns out to be more relevant than I thought it would be,\u201d Clayton says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope people focus on the fact that this is not a good thing for society,\u201d Clayton says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meg Waite Clayton appears at 7 p.m. Sept. 10 in an event presented by the Lafayette Library and Learning Center in Don Tatzin Community Hall, Lafayette Library, 3491 Mount Diablo Blvd., Lafayette. Tickets are $20-$125 at https:\/\/www.lllcf.org\/clayton<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bay Area author Meg Waite Clayton follows up her international bestsellers \u201cThe Postmistress of Paris\u201d and \u201cThe Last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11469,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134,13349,13350,13351,13352,13353],"class_list":["post-11468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-hollywood-blacklist","tag-last-train-to-london","tag-meg-waite-clayton","tag-postmistress-of-paris","tag-typewriter-beach"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11468\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}