Feeling misled by the glittering façade presented to her in the dimly-lit cinemas of her teenage years, bored with her career, fed-up with her failing love life and ashamed that at 30 she's still renting a room in a flat owned by Big Bastard, the Neanderthal flatmate-from-hell, Ellie needs some answers--and she needs them now. Gathering up a group of similarly disillusioned friends, Ellie makes her way to America, and together they set off, Thelma and Louise-style (except without the cliff-ending suicide pact) to criss-cross America in search of 80s screen idol Andrew McCarthy. In a tale which explores every avenue of the old saying "it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive", Ellie and friends on both sides of the Atlantic share in the joys and disappointments of her quest: a journey which takes her to the four corners of the States and brings her into contact with a variety of outrageous characters, ranging from hunky tanned scriptwriters to six foot tall transvestites and even Frosty II, the world's largest pig.

Does she find the real Andrew McCarthy? And will she ever come to terms with why she hasn't spent her life living in a huge apartment with billowing curtains, wearing a big pink dress and being dated by a succession of handsome men, like a modern-day Molly Ringwald? --Emily Lowson