Miss Wyoming is a novel by Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist. His fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as McJob and...

. It was first published by Random House

Random House

Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...

 of Canada in January 2000.

The novel follows two protagonists, Susan Colgate, a former Miss Wyoming

Miss Wyoming

Miss Wyoming is a state-level pageant which sends winners to compete for the title of Miss America. The competition, which awards scholarships, is open to women aged 17 through 24.- Winners :-External links:*...

, and John Johnson, a former action film producer. Both have experienced early success but now find themselves in terminal career decline and with a host of personal problems. When circumstances intervene to offer routes out of their lives and then to bring them together, they are afforded the opportunity to discover themselves and to brighten their futures.

The title derives from a plot point in the book in which a driven stage mother

Stage mother

In the performing arts, a stage mother is a term for the mother of a child actor. The mother will often drive her child to auditions, make sure he or she is on the set on time, etc...

 moves the family to Wyoming because it is the easiest state from which to land contestants in national competitions.

Plot

The novel is the story of John Johnson and Susan Colgate. It begins with a meeting between Susan and John after their yearlong absences from the world, and then progresses to tell the stories of their disappearances through flashbacks. The flashbacks have no temporal order. Each chapter is a different flashback, intermixed with chapters of temporally present plot.

Susan Colgate

A former child pageant star, an 1980s television family daughter, a closeted rock star's wife, and a B movie

B movie

A B movie is a low-budget commercial motion picture that is not definitively an arthouse or pornographic film. In its original usage, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the term more precisely identified a film intended for distribution as the less-publicized, bottom half of a double feature....

 actress. She was on a plane heading across the United States that crashed, but she survives without a scratch. She takes this opportunity to disappear into the night, leaving behind her identity.

John Johnson

A decadent film producer

Film producer

A film producer oversees and delivers a film project to all relevant parties while preserving the integrity, voice and vision of the film. They will also often take on some financial risk by using their own money, especially during the pre-production period, before a film is fully financed.The...

. His life is composed of drugs and women. He dies from the flu, but his death is only temporary. While dead, he has a vision of Susan Colgate. Once revived, Johnson decides to give away his decadent lifestyle and to live on the road like Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...

.

The novel tells their stories, the stories of the characters that they encounter, and the story of their lives after they meet. The novel is written in the third person.

Inspiration

The inspiration for Miss Wyoming was a 1998 article in The National Enquirer

The National Enquirer

The National Enquirer is an American supermarket tabloid now published by American Media Inc . Founded in 1926, the tabloid has gone through a variety of changes over the years....

entitled "Leathery movie producer Robert Evans marries Eighties soap star Catherine Oxenberg

Catherine Oxenberg

Catherine Oxenberg is an American actress known for her performance as Amanda Carrington on the 1980s American prime time soap opera Dynasty. The daughter of HRH Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, Oxenberg is a descendant of the Serbian Karađorđević dynasty.-Early life:Though born in New York City,...

".

Coupland also based his opinions on celebrity life on his experiences with the rich and famous. "I guess a lot of it's residue from the fact that I've met all these famous people over the years. Some of them became friends. Some of them I met in passing, but I ended up with this huge reservoir of things [about fame] that wanted to be tapped."

History

Miss Wyoming marked a radical departure from Coupland's writing style for earlier novels. Previously, he wrote his notes from a notebook filled with observations. For Miss Wyoming, Coupland internalized the note-taking process. It was also his first novel written entirely in the third person.