User:GoneAFK/Wyoming

Miss Wyoming is a novel by Douglas Coupland. It was first published by Random House of Canada in January 2000.

The novel follows two protagonists, Susan Colgate, a former Miss Wyoming, and John Johnson, a former action film producer. Both have experienced early success but now find themselves in terminal career decline and with a host of personal problems. When circumstances intervene first to offer routes out of their lives, and then to bring them together, they are afforded the opportunity to discover themselves and to brighten their futures.

The title derives from a plot point in the book wherein a driven stage mother moves the  family to Wyoming because it’s the easiest state in which to land  contestants in national competitions.

Plot Synopsis
The novel is the story of John Johnson and Susan Colgate. The novel beings with a meeting between Susan and John, after their year long absences from the world. The novel then progresses to tell the stories of their disappearances through flashbacks. The flashbacks have no temporal order. Each chapter is a different flashback. Mixed in with the flashbacks are chapters of temporally present plot.

Susan Colgate is a former child pageant star, an 80’s television family daughter, a closeted rock star’s wife, and a B-Movie actress. She was on a plane heading across the United States that happens to crash, resulting in a very horrifying crash scene. However, Colgate survives without a scratch. She takes this opportunity to disappear into the night, leaving behind her identity.

John Johnson is a decadent, movie producer. His life is comprised of drugs and women. He, however, dies from the flu. But his death is only temporary. While dead, he has a vision of Susan Colgate. Once revived, Johnson decides to give away his decadent lifestyle and to live on the road like Jack Kerouac. He leaves to live on the road with no money and no connections to the world.

The novel tells their stories, the stories of the characters that they encounter, and the story of their lives after they meet. The novel is told in the third person entirely.

Inspiration
"The whole thing with beauty pageants is really mother-driven. What three-year old wants to be a beauty queen? … There's all this unhappiness and they think by making their kids a receptacle of all that unhappiness they can turn it into gold. The male version of this is Hollywood, full of hungry, unfulfilled people. I thought it would be interesting to take male and female versions of these people and put them together when they both wanted to change."

- Coupland on the roles of the characters

The inspiration for Miss Wyoming as an article in the National Enquirer in 1998. The article was about “Leathery movie producer Robert Evans marries Eighties soap star Catherine Oxenberg”.

Coupland also based his opinions on celebrity life on his experience with the rich and famous. "I guess a lot of it's residue from the fact that I've met all these famous people over the years. Some of them became friends. Some of them I met in passing, but I ended up with this huge reservoir of things [about fame] that wanted to be tapped."

History of the Novel
"Between 1989 and 1997 or so, I did not go anywhere without a notebook that could fit in my pocket. . . . Then around '97, whatever I was doing became internal. So that with 'Miss Wyoming' there's not a single note for it. . . . Now it all just comes out of my head, and because it comes out of my head I think it's a bit more emotionally driven than artifactually or environmentally driven."

- Coupland on the change in creation for Miss Wyoming.

Miss Wyoming was a radical departure from his earlier novels. Previously, Coupland wrote his notes from a notebook filled with observations. For Miss Wyoming, Coupland internalized the process of note taking. It is also his first novel written entirely in the third person.