The Girls in the Picture

Hollywood, 1914. Frances Marion, a young writer desperate for a break, meets "America's Sweetheart" Mary Pickford, already making a name for herself on and off the screen. Together, the two women take the movie business by storm.

Pickford becomes the "Queen of the Movies" — the first actor to have her name on a marquee, the first to become a truly international celebrity, and the first to press her hand and footprints into the sidewalk at Grauman's. Marion becomes one of the most important screenwriters of the twentieth century and the first writer to win multiple Academy Awards. Their close personal friendship is inseparable from their professional collaboration.

This is a novel about power: the power of women during the exhilarating early years of Hollywood, the imbalance of power then and now, the sacrifices and compromises women make in order to succeed — and, at its heart, the power of female friendship.