Genre Fiction
![Janelle Brown - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B001JS3432.jpg)
I'll Be You: A Novel
Two identical twin sisters and former child actors have grown apart-until one disappears, and the other is forced to confront the secrets they've kept from each other in this twisty suspense novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Things.
"You won't be able to put this novel down, and you won't want to."-Laura Dave, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022-PopSugar, CrimeReads
"You be me, and I'll be you," I whispered.
As children, Sam and Elli were two halves of a perfect whole: gorgeous identical twins whose parents sometimes couldn't even tell them apart. They fell asleep to the sound of each other's breath at night, holding hands in the dark. And once Hollywood discovered them, they became B-list child TV stars, often inhabiting the same role.
But as adults, their lives have splintered. After leaving acting, Elli reinvented herself as the perfect homemaker: married to a real estate lawyer, living in a house just blocks from the beach. Meanwhile, Sam has never recovered from her failed Hollywood career, or from her addiction to the pills and booze that have propped her up for the last fifteen years.
Sam hasn't spoken to her sister since her destructive behavior finally drove a wedge between them. So when her father calls out of the blue, Sam is shocked to learn that Elli's life has been in turmoil: her husband moved out, and Elli just adopted a two-year-old girl. Now she's stopped answering her phone and checked in to a mysterious spa in Ojai. Is her sister just decompressing, or is she in trouble? Could she have possibly joined a cult? As Sam works to connect the dots left by Elli's baffling disappearance, she realizes that the bond between her and her sister is more complicated than she ever knew.
I'll Be You shows Janelle Brown at the top of her game: a story packed with surprising revelations and sharp insights about the choices that define our families and our lives-and could just as easily destroy them.
"You won't be able to put this novel down, and you won't want to."-Laura Dave, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022-PopSugar, CrimeReads
"You be me, and I'll be you," I whispered.
As children, Sam and Elli were two halves of a perfect whole: gorgeous identical twins whose parents sometimes couldn't even tell them apart. They fell asleep to the sound of each other's breath at night, holding hands in the dark. And once Hollywood discovered them, they became B-list child TV stars, often inhabiting the same role.
But as adults, their lives have splintered. After leaving acting, Elli reinvented herself as the perfect homemaker: married to a real estate lawyer, living in a house just blocks from the beach. Meanwhile, Sam has never recovered from her failed Hollywood career, or from her addiction to the pills and booze that have propped her up for the last fifteen years.
Sam hasn't spoken to her sister since her destructive behavior finally drove a wedge between them. So when her father calls out of the blue, Sam is shocked to learn that Elli's life has been in turmoil: her husband moved out, and Elli just adopted a two-year-old girl. Now she's stopped answering her phone and checked in to a mysterious spa in Ojai. Is her sister just decompressing, or is she in trouble? Could she have possibly joined a cult? As Sam works to connect the dots left by Elli's baffling disappearance, she realizes that the bond between her and her sister is more complicated than she ever knew.
I'll Be You shows Janelle Brown at the top of her game: a story packed with surprising revelations and sharp insights about the choices that define our families and our lives-and could just as easily destroy them.
Editorial Reviews
"Janelle Brown is a terrific storyteller and stylist, and I'll Be You is one of those books you'll devour. It has a hot mess of a narrator-actually two hot messes, twins-both of whom you will root for, even as you are screaming at them to get a grip. Also? The novel has more twists and turns than the canyon roads that snake up and around Los Angeles."-Chris Bohjalian, New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant and Hour of the Witch
"In Janelle Brown's latest twisty, propulsive mystery, estranged twin sisters must confront shocking pieces of their past when one of them goes missing. From the first sentence, these women will have you in their grips. You won't be able to put this novel down, and you won't want to."-Laura Dave, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me
"Janelle Brown has done it again, creating a deliciously twisty page-turner you won't be able to put down. But I'll Be You is much more than a riveting thriller; it's a powerful and moving portrait of the fiercely tenacious bonds of familial love. With her trademark beautiful writing, depth of emotion, and sharp insights, Brown explores the dangers that lurk behind the seductive worlds of Hollywood child stardom and self-help culture. I loved this novel."-Angie Kim, Edgar Award–winning author of Miracle Creek
"Absolutely delicious . . . Janelle Brown is a surgeon of the complex relationships between women. I gobbled this up."-Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of All Adults Here
"Bestseller Brown (Pretty Things) infuses this twist-packed mystery with an intense story of creating one's identity, rife with deep family trauma and a low-key, creepy depiction of the dark side of twin intimacy. . . . The perfectly paced emotional reveals of the twins' shared history pull the reader toward fierce investment in Elli's safety and the sisters' reconnection. Brown has upped her game with this on...
"In Janelle Brown's latest twisty, propulsive mystery, estranged twin sisters must confront shocking pieces of their past when one of them goes missing. From the first sentence, these women will have you in their grips. You won't be able to put this novel down, and you won't want to."-Laura Dave, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me
"Janelle Brown has done it again, creating a deliciously twisty page-turner you won't be able to put down. But I'll Be You is much more than a riveting thriller; it's a powerful and moving portrait of the fiercely tenacious bonds of familial love. With her trademark beautiful writing, depth of emotion, and sharp insights, Brown explores the dangers that lurk behind the seductive worlds of Hollywood child stardom and self-help culture. I loved this novel."-Angie Kim, Edgar Award–winning author of Miracle Creek
"Absolutely delicious . . . Janelle Brown is a surgeon of the complex relationships between women. I gobbled this up."-Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of All Adults Here
"Bestseller Brown (Pretty Things) infuses this twist-packed mystery with an intense story of creating one's identity, rife with deep family trauma and a low-key, creepy depiction of the dark side of twin intimacy. . . . The perfectly paced emotional reveals of the twins' shared history pull the reader toward fierce investment in Elli's safety and the sisters' reconnection. Brown has upped her game with this on...
Short Excerpt Teaser
1
On a Thursday night in July, 378 days into my latest bout of sobriety, my father called to tell me that my twin sister had gone AWOL. My sister and I hadn't spoken in 379 days, so this came as news to me.
"She told us that she was going to a spa of some kind," my father explained. "But she's been gone almost a week already, and she's not answering her phone. It all seems very strange."
I found this unlikely. My sister had never done anything strange in her life. Elli-married to a real estate lawyer, owner of a two-story Spanish Revival just blocks away from the Santa Barbara beach where we played as children, a woman who coordinated her purse with her heels-was the very definition of conventionality. Last time I was at her house I opened a drawer in the kitchen and found a banana slicer.
As for me: I was living in a near-empty studio apartment in Hollywood, so close to the boulevard that I woke up most nights to the sounds of people vomiting in the bushes underneath my window. I was thirty-two years old and slept on a futon, still crawling my way back from losing most everything I owned or loved in the years before. Fortunately, I still had my looks, some interesting tattoos, and a generous AA sponsor; and with these I'd found employment at a trendy café popular on social media for its latte art.
From semi-famous child actress to milk-foam Instagram model. That had been my life trajectory in a nutshell, a downward parabola precipitously accelerated by the excessive use of intoxicants.
When my father called, I was watching cooking show reruns and eating day-old green curry straight out of the takeout container. It was nine o'clock and eighty degrees out, the air in my apartment still flaccid from the day's heat. I stood by the air-conditioning unit and ducked my head to let the whisper of coolant dry the sweat on the back of my neck.
"Let's be real, Dad. This is Elli. She probably just got a bad facial peel and is hiding out until her skin heals. Nothing strange about it."
"That's what your mom said, too, but I can't help worrying." I heard a familiar note of concern and disdain in my father's voice, a tone that was usually reserved for me. I'll confess, I derived some perverse delight in drawing that out of my father: that I-I-might be the functional twin for once.
"What about Chuck? What does he think about all this?"
"Ah, well. He moved out a while back. They're getting divorced."
"Divorced?" I stood up abruptly, slamming my head against the edge of the air conditioner. Something squeezed tight in my chest, compressing my lungs.
"You still haven't spoken, then, I take it." Something had shifted in his voice, the pendulum of judgment swinging back toward me.
"No," I said, squirming. "Not in a while." Why was my father calling me anyway? My mother was usually the one who rang me up when something was amiss. Typically, I got a tentative quarterly voicemail, left at a time when I was most likely to be at work, though I noticed that she followed the café on Instagram and "liked" every photo of me.
A moment of hesitation. "And you-you're still . . . OK?"
"You mean, am I still sober? Yes. More than a year now." The silence on the other end of the phone was stiff with disbelief. "Look, do you want me to text you a photo of my latest recovery medallion to prove it?"
"No, no, I trust you. We're proud of you, honey."
Was he? I didn't quite believe it, and I couldn't blame him for that, either, given the number of times that I had betrayed their pride in the past. We lapsed into silence, the bitter failures of the last two decades-parenting and childing, alike-leaking into the crack in our conversation.
It dawned on me then that there was a reason for my father's phone call. "Wait, are you asking for my help with something?"
My father coughed lightly. "I don't want to inconvenience you," he said.
I had to stifle my laugh. I looked around the minuscule apartment that I called a home, barren of personal effects. My possessions these days consisted primarily of emotional baggage. My social life consisted of AA meetings, with an occasional foray into NA meetings. I had been treading water for so long that I relished the idea of having something-anything-to swim toward. It didn't occur to me to legitimately worry about my sister; not yet.
"Not at all," I offered graciously. "So what do you want me to do about Elli?"<...
On a Thursday night in July, 378 days into my latest bout of sobriety, my father called to tell me that my twin sister had gone AWOL. My sister and I hadn't spoken in 379 days, so this came as news to me.
"She told us that she was going to a spa of some kind," my father explained. "But she's been gone almost a week already, and she's not answering her phone. It all seems very strange."
I found this unlikely. My sister had never done anything strange in her life. Elli-married to a real estate lawyer, owner of a two-story Spanish Revival just blocks away from the Santa Barbara beach where we played as children, a woman who coordinated her purse with her heels-was the very definition of conventionality. Last time I was at her house I opened a drawer in the kitchen and found a banana slicer.
As for me: I was living in a near-empty studio apartment in Hollywood, so close to the boulevard that I woke up most nights to the sounds of people vomiting in the bushes underneath my window. I was thirty-two years old and slept on a futon, still crawling my way back from losing most everything I owned or loved in the years before. Fortunately, I still had my looks, some interesting tattoos, and a generous AA sponsor; and with these I'd found employment at a trendy café popular on social media for its latte art.
From semi-famous child actress to milk-foam Instagram model. That had been my life trajectory in a nutshell, a downward parabola precipitously accelerated by the excessive use of intoxicants.
When my father called, I was watching cooking show reruns and eating day-old green curry straight out of the takeout container. It was nine o'clock and eighty degrees out, the air in my apartment still flaccid from the day's heat. I stood by the air-conditioning unit and ducked my head to let the whisper of coolant dry the sweat on the back of my neck.
"Let's be real, Dad. This is Elli. She probably just got a bad facial peel and is hiding out until her skin heals. Nothing strange about it."
"That's what your mom said, too, but I can't help worrying." I heard a familiar note of concern and disdain in my father's voice, a tone that was usually reserved for me. I'll confess, I derived some perverse delight in drawing that out of my father: that I-I-might be the functional twin for once.
"What about Chuck? What does he think about all this?"
"Ah, well. He moved out a while back. They're getting divorced."
"Divorced?" I stood up abruptly, slamming my head against the edge of the air conditioner. Something squeezed tight in my chest, compressing my lungs.
"You still haven't spoken, then, I take it." Something had shifted in his voice, the pendulum of judgment swinging back toward me.
"No," I said, squirming. "Not in a while." Why was my father calling me anyway? My mother was usually the one who rang me up when something was amiss. Typically, I got a tentative quarterly voicemail, left at a time when I was most likely to be at work, though I noticed that she followed the café on Instagram and "liked" every photo of me.
A moment of hesitation. "And you-you're still . . . OK?"
"You mean, am I still sober? Yes. More than a year now." The silence on the other end of the phone was stiff with disbelief. "Look, do you want me to text you a photo of my latest recovery medallion to prove it?"
"No, no, I trust you. We're proud of you, honey."
Was he? I didn't quite believe it, and I couldn't blame him for that, either, given the number of times that I had betrayed their pride in the past. We lapsed into silence, the bitter failures of the last two decades-parenting and childing, alike-leaking into the crack in our conversation.
It dawned on me then that there was a reason for my father's phone call. "Wait, are you asking for my help with something?"
My father coughed lightly. "I don't want to inconvenience you," he said.
I had to stifle my laugh. I looked around the minuscule apartment that I called a home, barren of personal effects. My possessions these days consisted primarily of emotional baggage. My social life consisted of AA meetings, with an occasional foray into NA meetings. I had been treading water for so long that I relished the idea of having something-anything-to swim toward. It didn't occur to me to legitimately worry about my sister; not yet.
"Not at all," I offered graciously. "So what do you want me to do about Elli?"<...
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