Somebody's Darling has an interesting story to tell: Hollywood has chosen Jill Peel, a shy, witty, work-obsessed animator and cinematic technician, to be America's first woman film director. Her initial effort, Womanly Ways, is successful, so successful that it sends her on to the New York Film Festival, an Oscar, and the direction of a second film, this one a Western, to be shot on location in Texas. Jill's success, however, proves insistent; it places her in the confidence of a dying mogul; it ensnares her in a brutal love affair. It sets her at odds with a vengeful, female superstar and enforces a nearly disasterous distance between her and her oldest friends. At 37, Jill Peel must struggle to reclaim herself from Hollywood's entangling system of rewards and punishments, and from the contradictory demands of love, work, friendship and fame.

McMurtry has divided Somebody's Darling among first-person narrators...