Pretty Little Press
MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE
Date: 10/16/05 Section: ENTERTAINMENT
MAKE MISTAKES,
LAND A BOOK DEAL
by Sarah T. Williams; Staff Writer
What woman hasn't lain awake at night
weighted by "what ifs"? What if I had
taken that job? What if I hadn't broken
up with that guy? What if I had quit school and taken a trip around the
world?
"I got sick of talking to mine," said Heather McElhatton, 35, of
Minneapolis, who has been offered a six-figure book deal with
HarperCollins to "chase all my demons and nail their feet to the floor."
McElhatton has written "Pretty Little Mistakes," a sprawling,
600-page "Choose Your Own Adventure" book for grownups (styled
after the children's series) to be published in March. It all
begins on the last day of high school, when the reader must choose
whether to go to college or travel.
From that choice come other choices, and from those choices
again many more choices. From one beginning, there are hundreds
of possible endings.
"You can go for your master's in biotechnology at Berkeley or
join an erotic circus," said McElhatton. "You can work for a
pharmaceutical company or become an international art thief. You
can marry, divorce, have kids or vow never to have them at all. You
may end up in an opulent mansion or be homeless down by the river.
What evolves is an addictive game. Each time you read through the
book, you take a different path, follow a different `thread' and
see where you end up. You try to do better each time, or if you're
like me - worse."
To keep track of these threads, McElhatton said she filled more
than 12 spiral notebooks and maintained an elaborate schematic
diagram on a 10-by-10-foot slab of discarded linoleum. "It looks
like a crazy person attempting calculus," she said.
It's a huge breakthrough for McElhatton, who tried unsuccessfully
to sell more literary work after completing her master's in fine
arts in 2002 at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. "I'm as
happy as Wedding Day Barbie," she said.
Books Press Events Blog Links Bio
FICTION
Arts Section 4/29/07
By Andrea Hoag, Special to the Star Tribune
MULTIPLE CHOICE
Imagine you are graduating from high school. Do you go to college
with your boyfriend or pack your bags for parts unknown?
Don't you wish life could be full of do-overs?
Here's the good news: Even if you can't take back any of your life's own
speeding tickets or marital disasters, at least Heather McElhatton's witty
debut, "Pretty Little Mistakes," will allow you the vicarious thrill of second
and third chances. Here -- finally! -- is a choose-your-own-adventure
book for grown-ups that's just as fun as the ones that saved you from
family vacations as a kid.
Born of McElhatton's frustration over not being able to sell a book she
spent six years writing, "Pretty Little Mistakes" is the author's way of
exploring all the choices she might have made if she had lived her life
differently. Most fun, this "interactive hyperfiction" is framed in the
second person, allowing "you" to go on a series of escapist adventures
that begin at high-school graduation and end up who-knows-where; only
you can decide.
Maybe you'll choose art school, along with the "guy with wooden spoons
thrust through his earlobes, a woman with Maori tattoos and genitalia
piercing, and another girl who heats paper clips and sears her arms with
raised earthworm-shaped hieroglyphics." Better yet, maybe you'll head off
to bum around Europe.
One wrong turn, however, and you can be marrying some snooze-fest of
a man in a wedding that's a "baffling ordeal. A six-figure Town and
Country affair with willowy peach bridesmaids carrying bouquets of
Peruvian white lilies and organic kale." It's just as easy, however, to wind
up pregnant in Italy ("you refuse to marry Filippo and Jesus Mother Mary,
let the drama begin") or in northern Minnesota with a man whose pockets
are fat from "some long-ago insurance settlement with a taconite mine."
It's so disappointing to be booted out early. But sometimes McElhatton
lets you go with grace:
"You do not die until you are very, very old. Ninety-two. You just go to
sleep one night in your bed, next to your husband, and you have a
pleasant dream that you never wake up from. It turns out heaven is a junk
shop, a vast sweet-smelling place where God keeps all his broken things."
There is a high quotient of bawdiness throughout "Pretty Little Mistakes,"
and if the career choices you make (shoe designer in Florence, Prince's
new Paisley Park protégé, meth manufacturer) don't work out, at least
you know you can count on some very above-average sexcapades.
Hidden away in all this high-concept fun are deeper philosophical
currents. The beauty of this book is the potent reminder it offers: Any
small decision -- as simple as taking out the garbage after dinner -- can
alter the course of one's life.
If there's anything unsatisfying about the book, it's that each and every
mini story doesn't get its due. Surely, however, with a voice this zappy
and commanding, it's only a matter of time before McElhatton is back
with a conventional novel. Unless, of course, she chooses another path
altogether.
Andrea Hoag is a book critic in Lawrence, Kan., who wishes she could
have a few do-overs.
Arts Section 4/29/07
By Andrea Hoag, Special to the Star Tribune
MULTIPLE CHOICE
Imagine you are graduating from high school. Do you go to college
with your boyfriend or pack your bags for parts unknown?
Don't you wish life could be full of do-overs?
Here's the good news: Even if you can't take back any of your life's own
speeding tickets or marital disasters, at least Heather McElhatton's witty
debut, "Pretty Little Mistakes," will allow you the vicarious thrill of second
and third chances. Here -- finally! -- is a choose-your-own-adventure
book for grown-ups that's just as fun as the ones that saved you from
family vacations as a kid.
Born of McElhatton's frustration over not being able to sell a book she
spent six years writing, "Pretty Little Mistakes" is the author's way of
exploring all the choices she might have made if she had lived her life
differently. Most fun, this "interactive hyperfiction" is framed in the
second person, allowing "you" to go on a series of escapist adventures
that begin at high-school graduation and end up who-knows-where; only
you can decide.
Maybe you'll choose art school, along with the "guy with wooden spoons
thrust through his earlobes, a woman with Maori tattoos and genitalia
piercing, and another girl who heats paper clips and sears her arms with
raised earthworm-shaped hieroglyphics." Better yet, maybe you'll head off
to bum around Europe.
One wrong turn, however, and you can be marrying some snooze-fest of
a man in a wedding that's a "baffling ordeal. A six-figure Town and
Country affair with willowy peach bridesmaids carrying bouquets of
Peruvian white lilies and organic kale." It's just as easy, however, to wind
up pregnant in Italy ("you refuse to marry Filippo and Jesus Mother Mary,
let the drama begin") or in northern Minnesota with a man whose pockets
are fat from "some long-ago insurance settlement with a taconite mine."
It's so disappointing to be booted out early. But sometimes McElhatton
lets you go with grace:
"You do not die until you are very, very old. Ninety-two. You just go to
sleep one night in your bed, next to your husband, and you have a
pleasant dream that you never wake up from. It turns out heaven is a junk
shop, a vast sweet-smelling place where God keeps all his broken things."
There is a high quotient of bawdiness throughout "Pretty Little Mistakes,"
and if the career choices you make (shoe designer in Florence, Prince's
new Paisley Park protégé, meth manufacturer) don't work out, at least
you know you can count on some very above-average sexcapades.
Hidden away in all this high-concept fun are deeper philosophical
currents. The beauty of this book is the potent reminder it offers: Any
small decision -- as simple as taking out the garbage after dinner -- can
alter the course of one's life.
If there's anything unsatisfying about the book, it's that each and every
mini story doesn't get its due. Surely, however, with a voice this zappy
and commanding, it's only a matter of time before McElhatton is back
with a conventional novel. Unless, of course, she chooses another path
altogether.
Andrea Hoag is a book critic in Lawrence, Kan., who wishes she could
have a few do-overs.
