Vanity Fair

Deep down, aspiring artists know that success relies on a certain amount of self-deception: a belief in one’s gift even when opportunity fails to knock. If years go by without any big breaks, most will allow this lofty hope to yield to the heavy weight of reality. Maybe a creative pursuit is better as a hobby than as a vocation.

In She’s a Lamb!, Meredith Hambrock satirizes what happens when a pipe dream hardens into an unshakable faith in one’s talent. Despite all evidence to the contrary, a wannabe musical theatre star is sure of her destiny. What might she resort to for a role — especially if she hates the philistines who refuse to see her genius and the gatekeepers who pass over her? Actors usually mean the line “I’d kill to get that part” figuratively. Not this actor.

Jessamyn St. Germain, twenty-six, moonlights as an usher at the Franklin, a suffering mid-size theatre in Vancouver, booking the occasional commercial while she dreams about a Tony Award. Perhaps because she’s conventionally attractive and extroverted, her life is full of horrible men with “bottomless desire.” As she puts it, “I am everything most men have ever wanted, and they never let me forget it. It’s absolutely exhausting.” There’s the patron with an oxygen tank who gropes her in front of an assembling crowd. Then there are her two unfulfilling situationships: Anton, a needy and obsessive man-child with a disgusting basement apartment who has been “stuck in his Ph.D. for seven years,” and Vishal, an emotionally unavailable businessman who, despite being little more than an “after-hours transaction,” wants to make her a stay-at-home mom. In the span of a few weeks, both men ask her to move in with them. That’s when Jess comes to a realization: “Who I am doesn’t really matter at all, as long as I am hot enough.”

Then her employer decides to mount The Sound of Music as a Hail Mary in hopes of increasing attendance, and Jess auditions for the role of Maria, seeing it as her last chance at stardom. “The part should be mine,” she thinks. “It has to be mine.” When the director, Michelle, summons her for a meeting, Jess assumes the best. At this point, the reader may already be suspicious that her confidence is out of proportion. It’s no surprise then that Michelle gives the lead to Samantha Nguyen, Jess’s extremely online nemesis. To add insult to injury, Michelle asks Jess to be the “childminder,” to sit in on the rehearsals and ensure the kid actors “get through the production.” Jess agrees reluctantly but becomes convinced that if she learns the lines for Maria anyway, fate will pull her from the shadows and into the spotlight.

Hambrock gets a lot of comedic mileage and dramatic irony out of her narrator’s delusions of grandeur. During rehearsals, Jess views every interaction or production setback as her chance to seize the part. Negative thoughts bubble up from underneath her various schemes. She fantasizes about suffocating the director, throwing herself into the ocean, and thrusting a misbehaving child’s braid into a paper shredder. Her commitment to performance takes on a religious, almost messianic tone. She fancies herself “in the business of fixing the soul of this rotten country, of telling stories that reach down your throat and show you the light.” Jess’s conviction drives her to steal what she views as rightfully hers. She shoves Samantha off a pier, spraining the lead’s ankle in the process. Jess deceives herself into thinking that she didn’t intentionally hurt her. “She wasn’t pushed. She fell,” she thinks. “If I say it enough times, we’ll all believe it.”

Jess stops doing side gigs and paying her rent, focusing on her increasingly sinister effort to play Maria. As opening night nears, Hambrock continually raises the stakes. Jess’s estranged father is sure to be in attendance, the company approaches bankruptcy, and Michelle announces a terminal cancer diagnosis. How far does Jess have to go to step into the lead role and, in her eyes, save the production?

Hambrock’s background as a screenwriter comes through in She’s a Lamb! While intricately plotted, it has the pace and verve of a prestige comedy. Its characters aren’t quite types, but they’re recognizable: Samantha, the pick-me princess who knows how to play the game; Anton, the hygiene-challenged burnout who would do anything for a woman out of his league; Michelle, the babbling, stressed-out creative with “an entire city of soy sauce–stained Styrofoam towers” collecting behind her desk. Beneath Hambrock’s light touch and disturbing humour are sharp insights into the mental costs of ambition, especially for women. By the time Jess finally takes the stage, she wants to kill the part of herself that loves to perform. She opens her mouth, and we realize that her singing voice has been awful all along.

In a novel that verges into gruesome horror, the biggest jump scare comes at the end, when Jess is forced to ask herself, What if I’m as untalented as I’ve always feared?

She’s a Lamb! maps the unravelling of a failing actor, while Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard’s You Crushed It charts a performer’s meteoric rise. Translated by Neil Smith, it’s just as acerbic in its depictions of the toll of artistic striving.

Raph Massi is a struggling stand‑up comic in Quebec, the kind of guy who was a bullied “poster boy for incels” in high school and needs two beers before getting on stage. At a party, he has a meet-cute with Laurie, another young comedian, who works for an influential manager instead of pursuing her own material. Amid their flirtation, Laurie reveals that she is clairvoyant. Raph wants her to prove it. She hesitates, feeling a profound sadness, before showing that it’s true.

From then on, You Crushed It is told in the second person from Laurie’s perspective. She spends the next 200 or so pages unfurling the story of the rest of Raph’s life. She outlines the sex they’ll have that night —“I won’t cum, but you won’t realize it”— and their eventual relationship. She recounts the trips they will take together and reveals their compulsive collaborative process: “Take a Ritalin, reread with a clear head everything we wrote the day before, brainstorm, take notes, eat, fuck, joke around, rewrite, drink, chill, get a brilliant idea.” Laurie will co-write Raph’s first one-man show and kick-start his stalled career. Eventually she will fall out of love and dump him just as his star is rising. This devastating end will lead him into a years-long spiral of substance abuse, bitterness, and professional acrimony.

Initially, this choice of narrative perspective seems gimmicky and distracting, but Baril Guérard infuses the prophecy of Raph’s journey with such propulsive energy that it’s hard not to turn the pages (or inhale this satisfying book in one sitting, as I did). There’s a real thrill in the burgeoning romance and in watching Laurie spur Raph creatively, which makes the inevitable hangover all the more brutal. Early in the novel, Raph photographs Laurie the morning after a druggy trip to a nightclub in Berlin. “You’ll never delete that photo,” she predicts. “At first, you’ll look at it because you miss the girl in the picture. Later, you’ll look at it because you miss the person who took the photo.”

Baril Guérard is exacting in his dissection of Raph’s fragile ego. Through radio hits, awards, and touring, Raph still can’t get over Laurie. Whenever she appears in the periphery of his world, he lapses into self-sabotage. He drinks too much, makes scenes, ruins friendships, gets sober, starts boozing again. None of it loosens his stranglehold on Quebec’s comedy industry. Surprisingly for a novel about comedians, Raph’s jokes — and their uproarious reception — don’t always quite land, especially when his despair pushes his material into dark places. At least in English, one gets the sense that Baril Guérard is less interested in rendering the humour onstage (and making his readers laugh) than in capturing the pain that makes it possible.

Where She’s a Lamb! captures the agony of failure, You Crushed It maps the self-destruction that can underpin creative success. As Laurie tells Raph, “Your career would never end up taking off if you liked yourself.” Both books put readers in a position of exquisite discomfort as they watch what it takes for artists to put it all out there. One performer’s relentlessly oversized ego ushers her into a very public humiliation, while the other’s self-hatred leads him to stardom.

Both extreme stories feel true. So what does that say about those of us in the audience, demanding to be entertained?