Synopses & Reviews
The remarkable life of the elusive Elaine May in a new, crackling biography.
Miss May Does Not Exist by Carrie Courogen is the riveting biography of comedian, director, actor and writer Elaine May, one of America’s greatest comic geniuses.
As part of the legendary comedy team known as Nichols and May, May revolutionized sketch comedy before striking out on her own to make history as the third woman to be admitted into the Directors Guild of America when she wrote, directed, and starred in 1971’s A New Leaf. Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, May was one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters and script doctors—on films like Heaven Can Wait, Reds, and Tootsie—and one of the only women directing within the studio system, with films like The Heartbreak Kid and Mikey and Nicky. After the legendary box office bomb Ishtar, May never directed a feature again, though she continued to write films like The Birdcage and Primary Colors. In 2018, she returned to Broadway, where she won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Play for The Waverly Gallery. Besides her considerable talent, May is well known for her reclusiveness, often working behind the scenes without credit. In the liner notes for her first comedy LP with Mike Nichols in 1958, her bio is a single terse sentence: “Miss May does not exist.” Until now.
Carrie Courogen has uncovered the Elaine May who does exist. Conducting countless interviews, she has filled in the blanks May has forcibly kept blank for years, creating a fascinating portrait of a creative powerhouse, a lost era of Hollywood, and the way women were mistreated and held back within it. Miss May Does Not Exist is a remarkable love story about a prickly genius who was never easy to work with, not always easy to love, and frequently punished for those things, despite revolutionizing the way we think about comedy, acting, and what a film or play can be.
Review
“A brilliant mix of stalker-thriller, quest-saga, and awe-inspiring biography…Spotlighting the grueling, finally triumphant trajectory of May’s inimitable career and strewn with new insights and commentaries from May’s friends and colleagues, Courogen’s well-researched book is at once hilarious and very, very important.” — Gina Barreca, PhD , Board of Trustees and Distinguished Professor of English Literature at The University of Connecticut, author of They Used to Call Me Snow White, But I Drifted and It’s Not That I’m Bitter
Review
"Carrie Courogen has achieved the impossible: she has written the first (and very likely last) full-scale biography of Elaine May, the most beguiling, infuriating, thrilling, comedy genius—and let’s not use that word casually—of the twentieth century, and she has done it splendidly, with admiration, welcome outrage, and scrupulous attention to detail.” — Sam Wasson, NYT Bestselling Author of The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood and Fosse
About the Author
Carrie Courogen is a writer, editor, and director. Her work has appeared, in print and video, in publications like Glamour, NPR, Paper Magazine, Pitchfork, Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, Vice, and more. She lives in New York City.