Review of Lucky Dogs by Helen Schulman

*Lucky Dogs* by Helen Schulman (2023). Published by Knopf.

When the Harvey Weinstein case broke, it opened the floodgates for women to come out and tell their stories. Recently, I was on a flight watching She Said when I began to unravel the actual facts behind the case that was so influential.

I had no idea the extent of what Weinstein did in order to get these women to remain silent, whether it was forcing them to sign NDAs when they signed their settlements, threatening people in order to get what he wanted, or hired people to intimate them and investigate their personal dealings t create smear campaigns, effectively ending their careers.

As someone who studies women in academic settings for research in graduate school, it’s these narratives that make me very interested in their presentation.

I am very thankful to have been given an advanced reading copy of Helen Schulman’s Lucky Dogs from Knopf via NetGalley, especially considering how interested I am in these cases. I read the synopsis of the book awhile ago and was immediately struck in how it presented the subject matter and plot, which made me want to read it. Did I think this book was effective in its approach? Definitely. But there are parts that might make the reader lose steam pretty quickly.

Onwards with the review!

Meredith, while trying to become an actress, is taken advantage of by a hotshot producer.

Our protagonist of Lucky Dogs is Meredith, a B-list actress who’s appeared in some hot television shows, done movies here and there. One day when trying to find more work, she accepts an invitation from a hotshot film producer to come back to his hotel room, and finds out a horrific incident is about to ensue there.

She is forced to settle the incident for only $150,000, she continued to see the producer in public, and effectively finds her career shut out when she tries to speak up about the incident. Meredith had a plethora of issues to begin with, ranging from family ones to personal struggles, and her agent Marietta kind of gaslights her into thinking none of this really mattered before quitting.

So Meredith does what she does best: she runs away to Paris in search of finding herself away from her Los Angeles home. There, she meets a girl named Nina who ends up befriending her with one of Nina’s friends.

Nina says she works for a women’s nonprofit and that by the sound of it (Meredith mentions she’s writing a memoir about the assault), Meredith is a good writer. She should send Nina the manuscript. So Meredith does and ends up becoming obsessed with Nina in the meantime, but then is ghosted by both Nina and her friend.

(Spoilers are ahead. Read at your own caution.)

When her journalist friend Matt rings Meredith up, he reveals that Nina isn’t who she says she is. The producer ended up hiring a private investigator firm of sorts to spy on Meredith because she hasn’t quite kept her mouth shut.

She has a tendency to blast whatever she’s thinking all of Twitter, fanning the flames of the Internet and the mass media machine at the same exact time. No one takes her seriously because everyone thinks she’s kind of a hot mess-and she is, but that doesn’t excuse the horrific violence inflicted against her.

Anyways, Nina was paid to spy on her, find out all of Meredith’s dirty laundry, and put it out on the Internet to discredit her before the big man could ever be discredited himself.

Marietta also is now on this guy’s payroll, so she’s not helping when it comes to the fact she was personally attached to Meredith before and could discredit her with very specific anecdotes—again, Meredith isn’t the traditional clean girl image one would expect from a Hollywood actor.

Together with Matt, her manager, and what’s left of her sanity, she has to comb through the fallout of what’s happened while trying to keep herself intact. This is one of the biggest betrayals one could do in the eyes of the book, and it’s shocking to our narrator to discover the extent of what’s happened here.

Overall Thoughts

I found Lucky Dogs to be an interesting book because of how it teases out the notions of selective empathy. Meredith isn’t well liked for the general public because of how she presents herself online and in person, and I found certain passages to be telling that this girl is really struggling even though she won’t admit it most of the time.

However, what ends up dragging the book down for me is the fact that it keeps bouncing from Meredith’s story to Nina’s actual background and what made her the person she is today.

I think that could’ve been a separate companion novel in itself, as the lore behind it is fascinating, but it doesn’t fit completely in the context of this novel for me. I could see how someone loves this, but I thought it cheated each girl’s story to interweave them in a way that doesn’t feel seamlessly or as neat as it could have been. It’s still a book everyone should read, but I think it might not be appealing to a broad range of readers because of this.

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