Giveaway of Being Audrey Hepburn by Mitchell Kriegman

Good morning and good afternoon every one,
Let's begin this blog post with a beautiful quote:

I believe in manicures. I believe in overdressing. I believe in primping at leisure and wearing lipstick. I believe in pink. I believe happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day, and... I believe in miracles.

                         

                                                      ----Audrey Hepburn 

We don't need a special day to celebrate Audrey's grace, beauty and talent. The name Audrey and anything to with Audrey always makes my heart flutter with happiness. And with each passing day, after that era of Little Black Dress that Audrey rocked in the movie, Breakfast at Tiffany's, she has managed to become a household name, and still to this day, we compare anybody's charm and grace with that of Audrey's.



Mitchell Kriegman, a famous American filmmaker who is the creator behind the famous 90's pop-cult teen sitcom, Clarissa Explains It All, turned author, debuts as an author with his very first novel, Being Audrey Hepburn, that revolves around the life of a teenage girl who embraces the demeanor of the famous diva, Audrey Hepburn and runs across the New York city hopping from one VIP party to another and at the same time living her own crappy life as a waitress.

Synopsis:

In Being Audrey Hepburn, Clarissa Explains It All-creator, Mitchell Kriegman, tells the story of a 19-year-old girl from Jersey who finds herself thrust into the world of socialites after being seen in Audrey Hepburn’s dress from the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Lisbeth comes from a broken home in the land of tube tops, heavy eyeliner, frosted lip-gloss, juiceheads, hoop earrings and “the shore.” She has a circle of friends who have dedicated their teenage lives to relieve the world of all its alcohol one drink at a time.

Obsessed with everything Audrey Hepburn, Lisbeth is transformed when she secretly tries on Audrey’s iconic Givenchy. She becomes who she wants to be by pretending to be somebody she’s not and living among the young and privileged Manhattan elite. Soon she’s faced with choices that she would never imagine making – between who she’s become and who she once was.

In the tradition of The Nanny Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada, this is a coming of age story that all begins with that little black dress…


Review:

If you want to relive your life wearing that legendary Little Black Dress of Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany's, go ahead pick a copy of this book for sure.  Read more


Praise for Being Audrey Hepburn:

“This is a fun romp: witty writing, passion and fashion, and oodles of Audrey. A perfect cure for the mean reds.”                                                                                                                                                                          —Booklist

“Teens will love to live vicariously through Lisbeth.”
                                                                                                                             —School Library Journal 

“First-time novelist Kriegman (creator of Clarissa Explains It All) hits all the right notes for breezy escapist fiction—Manhattan glamour, glitzy parties, couture designs, and the name-dropping that goes with them.”
                                                                                                                                     —Publisher’s Weekly 

Mitchell Kriegman’s Journey of Words—Acclaimed Television Creator’s First Novel, Being Audrey Hepburn
                                                                                                                    — Santa Barbara Independent 

Excerpt:
 

It all started with that little black dress.

Yeah, I mean the little black dress—the wickedly fabulous, classic, fashion perfection Givenchy that Audrey Hepburn wore to brilliance in the opening scene of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Right in front of me was the dress dreams were made of.

“Let me try it on, please, please, please,” I begged Jess.

“No way,” she said. “I’ll get fired.”

Jess was already the special projects assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, otherwise known as the Met. It was kind of a glorified grunt and gofer position but a real foot in the door at the museum, and like me she was only nineteen. That was just one of her jobs. Jess attended fashion-design school all day, worked the Met at night, and waited tables with me at “the Hole” on weekends.

Determined to design her own line of clothing before she turned twenty-five, she’d always known what she wanted to do—like the way she “came out” in tenth grade and never looked back. 

Considering she was an absolute genius with fabric, scissors, and a sewing machine and the most responsible, goal-oriented person on the planet, let alone anywhere near where we lived in South End Montclair, New Jersey, I had no doubt she’d pull it off.

“You won’t get fired,” I pleaded and gave her my saddest, most pathetic, BFF,puh-leese let me try on the most spectacular dress in existence face.

“Nobody’s here but you and me. It’s the least you can do for dragging me out on a sweaty Friday night in July to sort a bunch of broken pottery fragments from the ancient Nile while all the Park Avenue princesses and baby moguls whoop it up downstairs.” We could hear the party from the main galleries below: popping corks and clinking champagne glasses, the opulent uppity classes murmuring obscene nothings to one another in their preppy Manhattan tones at another over-the-top celebutante gala.

Jess was the only person in the world besides my Nan who had any idea what a big deal that dress was to me. Breakfast at Tiffany’s wasn’t just my favorite movie ever, it was my jam, my mantra, my addiction, the one thing that got me through all the crap at home.
Unless you live in a cave, I know you’ve seen it. I don’t know if anything more perfect has ever existed on film. The pearls! The tiara! That dress! Really, what would you give to live for one day in a world where it would be perfectly normal to wear a little tiny tiara without looking like a runner-up in the Miss Hackensack pageant?

To think that this scrawny girl who came from nothing could become a fabulous socialite with mobsters and writers and photographers and millionaires falling all over themselves for her. New York City in 1961 was cooler and more wonderful than it is today, so full of possibilities. All the men Holly knew turned out to be rats, of course. Or super-rats. Holly was so right. There are so many super-rats out there.

“Please,” I whined. “You know how much I love that movie.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Jess. “That’s why I’m letting you see the dress.”

I gently lifted the dress out of its archival wrapping and held it up. I knew for a fact that Audrey Hepburn and I were almost exactly the same size, 34-20-35, although she always appeared elegant and gamine, where I tended to be more, well … scrawny and boyish. My boobs were smaller—I could maybe hit 32-20-33 if I held my breath and thought Katy Perry.

The black satin was rougher than I expected. It had a hip-length slit on the left side and was accompanied by a pair of elbow-length gloves in a tinted plastic bag pinned to the satin padded hanger inside the box.

Unbelievable.

This was the mystery dress that everybody swore existed, but almost nobody had ever seen or touched, Givenchy’s hand-stitched original design. I wondered if the delicate smell of the fabric was something from the preservation, though I secretly hoped it was a tiny bit of leftover Audrey Hepburn perfume.

“You’re such a stalker,” Jess whispered. “Be supercareful. That’s like a million-dollar dress.”

“Actually, 923,187 dollars. The highest auction price ever received for a dress made for a film at the time. And this one might be worth even more.” I sighed and held the dream dress up to my body.

She took a deep breath and looked me in the eye.

“Okay,” she said. “Try it on. But just for a minute.”



Book Purchase Links:

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• Indie Bound 
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• BAM 

Let's Chat with the Author:


Me: What inspired you to write Being Audrey Hepburn? Are you too a die-hard Audrey fan?

Mitchell: not as much as Lisbeth. i’m an admirer and a student.


Me: How did you research for your book, Being Audrey Hepburn?

Mitchell: feverishly! i had a lot to learn about fashion in general. i knew a fair amount about Audrey but i didn’t know much about new jersey to be honest. there were somethings though that i did know a lot about - i’ve spent many years in the art world in downtown new york when i was a performance artists and video artist. i know the music business through some of my television and music work and then i lived in the Hamptons for a long time. so some of that is very literally what i know and what i lived through.


Me: Tell us one trait of Lisbeth, your protagonist, that intrigues you the most.

Mitchell: i like that she’s shy but secretly opinionated, looking for an opening to grow and become something even though she doesn’t know what that is. she has to pretend to be someone else to find out who she really is.
 Read More



Author Info:

 I used to write what I call “sensitive male stories” for women’s magazines like Glamour and Harpers Bazaar. Stories like “The Night She Dumped Me” or “Remembering What’s Her Name.” In between I wrote at Saturday Night Live, The National Lampoon and the New Yorker.
Then I had this idea for a sitcom Clarissa Explains It All about a fourteen-year-old girl who talks to the camera and is cooler and smarter than everybody and explains everything with charts and graphs. But no one believed a girl could lead a sitcom in those days. That was way back in the 90s. Girls started dressing like Clarissa and it made Melissa Joan Hart a star and a household name. Women (and a lot of men) now in their twenties and thirties grew up with Clarissa and still love it.
Around that time I came up with the idea for a novel about a girl who gets through her crummy life by obsessively watching Audrey Hepburn movies. I’m intrigued by how people, like Lisbeth in the novel, struggle to find their passion and how Audrey Hepburn fits into it all that as an aspirational icon and guide.
One major focus in my work, including Clarissa Explains It All and this novel, Being Audrey Hepburn, is the Pygmalion Effect. The Pygmalion Effect is simply the creative transformation of self. It’s about deciding who you want to be and overcoming the naysayers.
Audrey Hepburn has always been the personification of creative personal transformation for women. It is, in fact, Audrey Hepburn’s story. As Nan, Lisbeth’s grandmother, says in the book, “Even Audrey Hepburn was pretending to be Audrey, until she was.”
As in any transformation there is conflict and in this book that conflict is built around daughters and mothers. Those conflicts are central to how Lisbeth finds herself and becomes in Nan’s words “the best Lisbeth possible.”
A plus for ardent Audrey Hepburn fans is a hidden archeology of facts and a meta level of information about Audrey Hepburn woven throughout the scenes of the novel. I hope readers will discover the mystery of the Givenchy’s little black dress. To this day no one has explained definitively why the dresses from the movie were destroyed.
Women of every age know Audrey Hepburn. They are attracted to her style, her personality and her good deeds. But more than that, I believe, they’re drawn by her ability to solve her own problems and her knack of self-invention, which is an inspiration to everyone intent upon the dangerous work of reinventing oneself despite whatever troubled origins they may have.

Connect With Mitchell On:  Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | Pinterest | Author's Blog    



Giveaway:

Now to celebrate his latest release, Being Audrey Hepburn and his upcoming novel, Things I Can’t Explain, the author, Mitchell Kriegman is giving away one audio copy of his book, Being Audrey Hepburn. 

Good Luck!





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