Shattered by Her Dad’s Death, Brit Pens a First Novel

Young women’s fiction is booming--thanks to Helen Fielding and her scatty heroine, Bridget Jones. And the latest Brit wit to arrive on the literary scene is 31-year-old author Anna Maxted, whose take on the genre is “comedy with a serious twist.” The characters in her debut novel deal with death and domestic violence, among delicious bouts of shopping, male bashing and cocktails with the girls.

“Getting Over It” (Regan Books, $25) follows the adventures of Helen Bradshaw, a 20-something assistant at GirlTime magazine who drives a beat-up Toyota. She shares a flat with a shaggy guy who smokes a lot and a cat named Fatboy, and has girlfriends who are a little too perfect. But when she gets the call she least expects, that her father has died of a heart attack, her life is thrown into a tailspin.

“My father died about three years ago and it was an experience that shattered me,” said Maxted over (what else?) cocktails in Los Angeles on Monday night. “I was working for Cosmo UK at the time, and I’d been in the office discussing lipstick and thinking, my father is dead.”

Maxted wrote an article about coping with her father’s death and, after getting a lot of feedback from readers, decided to write a book.

It took her two years to get to the point where she could tackle it. “If I’d written it at the beginning, right after it happened, it would have been vicious,” said Maxted, who lives in London. “I was at the stage where, if I saw an old man on the street, I would think, why aren’t you dead?”

She wanted the book to be funny “because people say such bizarre things when someone’s died,” she said. “There’s a lot of laughter.”

There’s a lot of guilt too. “I was very close to my father, but I didn’t make his last birthday dinner because I was editing a piece about sumptuous skin,” Maxted remembered. “That makes me sick.”

In the beginning of “Getting Over It,” Helen is the type who can’t be bothered to meet an American journalist held hostage by Iranian revolutionaries, because he’s visiting during the magazine’s annual sale of samples sent by cosmetic companies.

But her perspective changes after her father dies. A friend tries unsuccessfully to cheer her up with a hot pink top from the magazine’s sample closet-- “The one I was drooling over,” Helen says, “back when these things mattered.”

“Death makes you reassess every aspect of your life,” the author said. “It’s therapeutic in that way.”

Maxted will be signing copies of her book at Dutton’s Brentwood at 7 tonight.

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Many local bookstores--including Book Soup in West Hollywood and Chevalier’s in Hancock Park--will be open past midnight Friday when the newest Harry Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” goes on sale.

The expected stampede is sure to put “Goblet” right at the top of the New York Times’ Best Sellers list, joining the three previous Potters. But the prospect of yet another children’s book taking yet another spot on the precious list had the publishing world in a tizzy until the Times announced it’ll launch a new list, children’s books only, on July 23.

The moral? . . . Beware of things that go ka-ching in the night.

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We knew it would happen sooner or later . . . O.J. Simpson is going online.

Entertainment Network Inc. plans to launch https://www.askoj.com in a week to 10 days, giving Internet users a chance to ask the football Hall of Famer and former double-murder defendant questions, according to the Associated Press. “I’ve always wanted to talk directly to the public,” Simpson said during a recent Tampa, Fla., radio interview.

The site is still under construction. So far it includes a few flattering factoids about Simpson’s football career, links for users to purchase Simpson memorabilia and to register for free e-mail notification of upcoming Simpson events. There’s also a link to something called the “Juice Bar” (recipes for disaster, perhaps?). The AP reports that proceeds from the site will go to charity.

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Booth Moore can be reached at booth.moore@latimes.com.