Beauty Pill ~ Drowning in Mother’s Lies

“This story has everything,” the narrator coos in her best Pussy Riot accent. “It has corruption, politics, faux science, and sex. It plucks at the deepest hearts of women in Southern Oregon.”


A hard-luck Oregon TV weather girl takes her last desperate shot at redemption when she joins the clinical trial for a miracle drug. The glitzy brochure is a sales pitch, but her call reaches a university grad student with a secret agenda.

Having a baby girl out of wedlock was too terrible a blow for Mother. How could the universe be so unkind? So she swiped her daughter’s lineage from a favorite single-malt scotch, and wrote the fictitious name in the ‘father’ box on the birth certificate. Macallan.

Locked in a psychological cage match with her narcissist mother, Cathy Macallan’s only solace is a shortish cameraman at the station, Ferg, who questions the “high” she gets from the trial drug.

Suspicious, Cathy lures the trial’s admin into a live TV interview where all the chips are down. She needs to know if Beauty Pill is real.

Set in small-town Southern Oregon, this ‘new adult’ novel Beauty Pill pits a woman’s lifetime dreams against a fearsome plunge into obscurity. Cathy has no choice but to face the grief she’s fought to put behind her. And now, with no one to trust, she must do it alone if she is to escape the morass of lies that is her mother’s legacy.

Beauty Pill is an inspirational coming of age story, laced with humor and a romantic, cozy thriller twist. A damaged young woman struggles to examine her failures and protect the television career that might give her a fighting chance.

Beauty Pill is a romantic drama with a brain, a heart,
and a double mystery, targeted at the cruelest fiction
perpetrated on American women: the Beauty Queen.

Anchored in achieving success by telling her viewers what is true, Cathy’s core difficulty is to balance Mother’s criticism with the self-approval she feels from her secret identity, an imaginary superheroine she invented at age 8 and calls Nova Girl. Cathy never stops seeking enlightenment… from her constant story investigations, from Nova Girl, from her struggle toward self-realization and her openness for what wisdom might arise.

Helped by her least-likely friend Ferg, Cathy recognizes that it might be Nova Girl who holds the answer; Nova Girl whispers a logical conundrum and Cathy knows she alone must solve the puzzle to learn the truth. Or invent it.

Here’s Cathy on the 6 o’clock News Hour in one of her infamous broken-teleprompter rants:

“Good people of Southern Oregon! America is a memory. We have only Google and Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and Apple. Amazon and Walmart. Those are today’s nations, created by elites to soothe the self-indulgent consumer masses, to separate us into preference bubbles which exclude everything that scares us. These corporations have morphed into information fiefdoms where all you have to sell is your next heartbeat, and it’s the one they planned for you.

“And what of simple human decency?” Cathy continues, “when many long for lives in a TV beer commercial? A world of smiling friends with boobs, butts, six-pack abs and happy endings, where there’s no thought of death and little of social justice. The control room is pulling the plug on me now, but here’s my final thought, good people of the Rogue Valley. Know thy neighbor. Help thy neighbor. Love thy neighbor.”