I’m reluctant to criticise a celebrity author who has actually written their novel themselves, instead of using a ghost-writer à la Millie Bobby Brown (last year the Stranger Things actress was lambasted on social media after she thanked Kathleen McGurl, the writer behind her bestselling novel Nineteen Steps). Writing fiction is hard, and being famous (arguably) doesn’t make putting pen to paper yourself any easier.
But Fearne Cotton’s debut novel Scripted is not a book ready for publication. It is a decent enough high concept premise: Jade, a 32-year-old set designer is out for a run one day when she discovers a stack of papers that, it turns out on closer inspection, is a script detailing an imminent moment in her life, an argument with her boyfriend. There on the page, her hapless lover Adam is insisting on jetting off to America for a jolly even though his clothing line business isn’t making any money. When this exact argument happens in real life later that night, Jade is spooked.
Soon Jade starts finding these scripts everywhere – at work, in the recycling – and beyond the weirdness of their appearance, Jade is horrified to see written down a truth she has long suspected on some level already: that she is a doormat who never gets what she wants out of life because she never speaks up for herself.
She lets Adam laze around her flat, swan off abroad and generally ignore her needs because it’s just easier that way. She says yes to everything her drama queen sister Lily wants, including long weekends babysitting Lily’s kids, because, well, ditto. She even buys racy underwear when instructed to by her totally inappropriate boss, Colin, as gifts for his wife. Maybe, her friend Sophie suggests, if she Tipp-Exes out the lacklustre response in the scripts she finds and writes herself some new, feistier dialogue, she will manifest the backbone she needs in real life. And maybe even, ahem, go off-script…
But the premise doesn’t yield enough drama; the book moves at a glacial pace towards its theatrical finale where someone helpfully points out that a more outspoken Jade is “coming into [her] power”. And the writing is awash with cliché. This is a world in which things are always appearing with “bright lucidity”, where women are all too frequently asking for “champs, babe”, a world in which siblings really do call each other “sis”. Where there is anticipation there are always goosebumps. When Jade starts to speak her mind, she feels “a tingle of fun course through her”. Can a tingle course? I’m not sure.
Everything is overexplained – “this script was a terrifyingly accurate look into a world that felt very much like Jade’s” – except for the bits that aren’t but really should be, such as where or whom the scripts are actually coming from. An incidental high concept is all well and good but given that the provenance of the scripts occupies a good deal of the plot (“Who wrote this? How did they know such intimate details about her flat and relationship?” Jade asks early on), and given that they aren’t just a neat jumping off point, an ultimate lack of clarity feels like a cop-out.
There are some tender moments here where the family dynamics feel a little more nuanced, particularly the evolving relationship between Jade and her booze-hound mum. But for a book about words, this just doesn’t have enough of the right ones.
Published by Penguin Michael Joseph on 6 June, £18.99
