Brentwood - Wednesday May 17th at 6:30 pm -- JJ Elliott discusses and signs "There Are No Rules For This".
Join us on Wednesday May 17th at 
6:30 pm as we welcome JJ Elliott to the store to discuss and sign There Are No Rules For This. Joining her in conversation will be Kim Getty.
This event is free to attend and will be held in the courtyard at DIESEL, A Bookstore in Brentwood. Free seating is limited. To reserve a seat, please purchase one copy of a book for one seat.
In her debut novel There Are No Rules for This, JJ Elliott draws readers into a deeply affecting story of friendship, loss, guilt, healing, and forgiveness. Told from the perspective of Ali, the story starts with Feeney’s suicide and progresses through its aftershocks, while continually flashing back to memorable incidents over the course of the women’s friendship. Why didn’t Ali, who believed she knew Feeney better than Liddy or Max did, see it coming? Did she really know her at all? Did Feeney really have to die for her closest friends to know she was suffering?
Those questions are only strengthened during the traditional, staid funeral for Josephine Simms (aka Feeney), dictated by her icy mother. After enduring a carefully orchestrated, emotionless memorial service for someone who seems to be a stranger, Ali, Liddy, and Max set out to celebrate the Feeney they loved for her heart and spirit in their own way—complete with drinking a pinch of her purloined ashes in a glass of her favorite wine. After toasting Feeney, the three survivors are seized with a wild and very Feeney-ish idea: Why not hold their own funerals, so they can say and hear how much they mean to one another while they’re still alive?
Interweaving moments of hilarity with expressions of profound grief, There Are No Rules for This offers glimpses of what drove Feeney to take her own life through comments that her friends dismissed and passages in the diary she kept, which Ali happens to find. Yet, JJ Elliott does not offer Ali, Liddy, and Max—or her readers—clear and simple answers. When the novel closes, the reasons Feeney did not seek help from her friends and felt unable to go on living remain a mystery. What shines out, however, is the value of Feeney’s life and her ongoing gift to the women she loved.
JJ Elliott is a professional copywriter with a degree in English from UCLA. She lost her mother to suicide as a teenager, and spent over two years in her 20’s manning the suicide hotlines in LA. One of the reasons she wanted to write this book is because she finds herself increasingly frustrated by the way suicide is treated in print and on-screen, as a mystery to be solved instead of a multi-layered, complex condition that can rarely be boiled down to one specific “reason.”
A native of Northern California, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two teenage children. There Are No Rules for This is her first novel.
Kim Getty is a mother, struggling surfer, and SF native turned Angeleno. Kim is also the CEO of Deutsch LA, leading a team of creative thinkers and building the company into one of the industry's most innovative agencies. She advocates for positive change in the marketing industry, speaking at conferences on gender equality and media's impact on gender bias. Kim partners with influential brands like Walmart, Nintendo, and Taco Bell, and sits on the Board of Directors for ADCOLOR, The Paley Center for Media, and The Grady College at UGA. She's recognized as one of the most powerful women in advertising and has earned the American Advertising Federation's Mosaic Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Event date:
Wednesday, May 17, 2023 - 6:30pm
Event address:
225 26th St
Suite 33
Santa Monica, CA 90402
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