STARRED Book Review: Bad Dreams by Jenny Noa

Reviewed by Amy Brozio-Andrews

A funny, sad, and uplifting memoir of chasing dreams, getting lost, and finding yourself in LA

Can you come of age in middle age? While that typically might be the domain of young adults, Jenny Noa makes it her own in this heartfelt and humorous memoir of loving and letting go in Los Angeles.

While she has been hoping—and honestly, expecting—to make it big in Los Angeles as an actor, it never quite worked out that way. Instead, Noa spent much of her time caring for a terminally ill husband, getting sacked from her job and searching for another, and struggling to understand why the acting roles she had envisioned for herself since childhood still seem so far away. Where had the years of auditions, acting classes, day jobs, and small stage performances gotten her?

In a series of wide-ranging essays and “Bit Parts” that bookend her time in Los Angeles, Noa bares her heart, her soul, her mental health diagnosis, and her unfailing sense of comedy in Bad Dreams: Notes on Life and Los Angeles by a Would-Be Has Been.

Early life lessons at home and school rewarded being quiet and not needing anything to the point where grown up Noa isn’t sure she knows how to speak up for herself, although she does a heroic job speaking up for her husband during his illness. Navigating young widowhood and Hollywood is grueling, and yet Jenny presses on, until she doesn’t.

Unpacking years of trying to be as small and invisible as possible while also desperately hoping to be seen and valued for being special, Noa’s accounting of life in Los Angeles includes honest reckonings of her growing-up years and how their influence has boomeranged through her life.

She is also candid in the way her husband Mark showed her how special she was to him, and her struggles to adjust to being a “newlywid.” Noa’s writing is uniquely aligned with creative life in Los Angeles, too: what does special even look like when there are thousands of others chasing the same role?

With age comes wisdom, they say, and Noa could fill the backyard of the rented home she lovingly describes with all she has learned. Hers is more than a memoir; Bad Dreams is a lifeline for those arriving at that same crossroads. What happens when it appears the life you planned for yourself isn’t panning out, and why? Noa’s conversational writing style is charming and disarming, which makes her essays hit hard and stick with you, yet she never leaves the reader there. She always offers a hand up at the end.

The tight focus of some of these pieces keeps the reader at arms length at times, but the “Bit Parts” are a nice chaser after some of the heavier essays. Noa is nothing if not tender, sincere, and genuinely funny. Her story of searching for creative accomplishment and inner calm in Los Angeles will leave you rooting for her success in her next chapter (and a sequel, I hope).

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