I feel as if I’ve just watched a really good movie --- one in which myriad scenes of varying length and intensity jostle for space in my short-term memory and gradually distill into more permanent impressions. 

Yes, there’s a lot going on in that sentence, but it reflects in a nutshell what it’s like to travel through THE ORIGINAL, Priya Parmar’s kaleidoscopic novel about the iconic Hollywood star Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003). Parmar makes it abundantly clear that her work is one of fiction. Her telescopic (and occasionally magnified) view is one of a career as it might have unfolded, especially in Hepburn’s formative years, when she was just another east-coast hopeful trying to find a niche among Hollywood’s elite. 

But the book is also imagined on the strength of meticulous research, cross-referencing, interviewing, fact-checking, and some very insightful dot-connecting. It might be more accurate to call it modern historical fiction.

"What Parmar does so well here is to reveal through one major actress’s real and imagined lives how women fought to break away from the abuses of a profession in which they were commodified and intellectually infantilized for the better part of a century."

Parmar’s prose style fits the brief to a T. There are no chronological shopping lists of steps on the way to fame, no plodding past-tense reflections on paths not taken, or even much in the way of philosophical meditations on the art-of-the-art of acting. Instead, we are whisked into a present-tense immediacy that connects first page to last. 

Without ever seeming to trivialize or shortchange the elusive depth of the Katharine Hepburn she strives to reveal, Parmar glides powerfully through her life, losses, successes and relationships with an irresistible stream-of-consciousness that harmonizes amazingly well with the curated image Hepburn herself cultivated to protect her fragile privacy.

Through nine chapters covering 1921 to 1939, THE ORIGINAL plays out in numerous scenes, the contents of which (as with a typical film script) are sparsely identified by locations, names, dates or events. Sometimes they connect in sequence, other times they don’t; life does not unfold in straight lines either. This format also allows for dramatic jump-cuts and sudden changes from one scene to another, which can startle the viewer/reader into seeing things from a different angle.

In spite of her driving momentum throughout the book, Parmar provides many brief pauses to paint compelling word-pictures of Hepburn in a variety of professional and imaginary private contexts, along with some of the big-name Hollywood personalities who flowed in and out of her career (not always graciously) --- Cary Grant; his partner, Randolph Scott; director George Cukor; the Selznicks, especially producer David O. and his long under-appreciated wife, Irene; and the mercurial Howard Hughes, to mention only a few.

The total story skillfully alights on more truth than fiction, but it connects seemingly disparate events with imaginative speculation about what went on behind closed doors in Hollywood, especially as social mores and political influences changed in the years leading up to WWII. 

Like many other famed screen stars, Hepburn cycled in and out of fashion, partly due to inappropriate or blatantly incompetent casting, and her own or agents’ choices in how she was marketed. While many facts are documented, Parmar sympathetically probes behind the professional veneer to explore how both successes and failures impacted Hepburn’s relationships with friends, family and lovers (of which there were many).

Hepburn won four Academy Awards over her long career, but THE ORIGINAL gives them only passing mention; no more is needed. Similarly, her films are not dissected or commented on either, because they too belong to a well-documented and easily accessible history. 

What Parmar does so well here is to reveal through one major actress’s real and imagined lives how women fought to break away from the abuses of a profession in which they were commodified and intellectually infantilized for the better part of a century. Katharine Hepburn was among those who learned how to boldly and bravely claim agency and ownership of their talent. And that will always be true.