Katherine A. Sherbrooke Explores Old Hollywood in 'The Hidden Life of Aster Kelly'

In The Hidden Life of Aster Kelly, Katherine A. Sherbrooke tells the alluring tale of Aster Kelly, a runway model, who heads to Los Angeles with aspirational dreams of becoming a fashion designer. Inspired by her own mother, the story is told in dual timelines, beginning in the late 1940’s to the mid 1970’s, and set in both old Hollywood and Broadway. Like the protagonist, Sherbrooke’s mother was also a runway model who set out for Hollywood in the 40’s. Although her life was filled with glamour and excitement, her mom remained guarded and tight-lipped about that period of her life. Sherbrooke explains, “The book is not an attempt to figure out what exactly happened, but it was my creative launchpad to invent a story of how a woman might come back home to New Jersey with a child and be so burdened by secrets and it was really important to me to give Aster Kelly agency in those things that created secrets… the secrets really come from choices that Aster makes and choices that she believes in the moment are the right choices to make and in some ways they are, but then they have unintended consequences which lead to this lifetime of secrets that she feels she needs to keep.”

Similarly to Aster, Sherbrooke’s mother also left Hollywood, divorced and with a young child. As she was writing this book, Sherbrooke was intrigued by the idea of how differently her mom’s and sister’s lives might have been if her mom had continued down her own artistic path. “My mother came back from Hollywood, a divorcee with a young daughter, which was pretty scandalous at the time and then met my father… The second part of the book, the 1970’s timeline, I wanted to reimagine what might’ve become of my mother and my sister had my mother not remarried and had a whole second family… my mother… I think she could’ve had many careers in the creative world, became a full-time homemaker and so part of the creative launchpad for me was what and whom might she have become had she not remarried and also for my sister, who was quite a bit older than the rest of us and always felt like a little bit of an appendage to our family, what life might have been like for her had she and my mom just remained a duo, kind of focused on each other and supporting each other and so that was sort of my creative launchpad for the second part of the book.”