Book Review: ‘End Credits’

End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood is Patty Lin’s memoir about making it in the television business, then getting out of the industry before it devoured her soul. The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, she writes of her childhood in suburban Chicago and New Jersey, consuming vast quantities of TV, and defying her parents’ wishes to work in television.

Lin lands an internship at Late Night With David Letterman, and that turns into a full-time position working on the show’s budget. Just before she starts, Lin gives a homeless man who claims to do palm readings a dollar. “You got a shit job,” he tells her.

Lin sticks it out for a few years, but desperately wants to be on the creative end of TV. She writes a few spec scripts and gets an agent, then makes the move to Los Angeles.

She eventually lands a job on late ’90s dramedy Martial Law and later moves on to Freaks and Geeks.

“Like the show’s lead character, Lindsay, I was an honor student and dated a pothead drummer in high school, allowing me to straddle both the freak and geek worlds,” she wrote.

More prestigious jobs followed: Friends. Desperate Housewives. Breaking Bad.

But Lin grows increasingly frustrated by what she calls the “chaotic, abusive, male-dominated work culture.” She’s the rare woman in the writers’ room, and the even more rare Asian-American woman. “With each job, I had more cumulative trauma, more evidence that the business was exploitative, unsatisfying, beyond hope,” she writes.

Lin quits the business at age 38.

The book offers accounts of some big names in Hollywood, good and bad, including Paul Feig, Judd Apatow, Carlton Cuse, Vince Gilligan and Marc Cherry. Lin’s writing style goes down easy, like the person sitting next to you at the bar, on their first cocktail. There’s plenty of inside-baseball detail, but Lin’s narrative is delivered in a way that even those far removed from Hollywood can enjoy too.

Lin can craft a story on paper as well as she could on screen, in a previous life.