Bay Area author Meg Waite Clayton follows up her international bestsellers “The Postmistress of Paris” and “The Last Train to London” with a captivating page-turner, this time set in Old Hollywood and Carmel-by-the-Sea. Clayton’s fans won’t be surprised to learn that her latest, “Typewriter Beach: A Novel” (Harper, 320 pages, $24, July 1, 2025), has just made the instant USA Today bestseller list, and new readers won’t find a better place to start with Clayton’s milieu than this story about two women separated by generations—a story about passion and persistence, creativity, politics and family.
Clayton’s latest toggles between 1957 and 2018 to explore the unlikely friendship between Leo Chazan, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter with a past, and Isabella Giori, a young actress hoping to be Alfred Hitchcock’s new star. The current story focuses on the screenwriter’s granddaughter, Gemma, a struggling writer who discovers the secret about her grandfather. Bubbling up to the surface is Hollywood’s Blacklist, which banned suspected Communists from working in the U.S. entertainment industry in the 1950s.
Clayton’s nine books are filled with deeply atmospheric settings—from London and Vienna to the South of France, but the COVID years and her inability to travel gave the author the opportunity to set this book in her current hometown of Carmel, with its fairy tale-like town and misty coastline.
“For me, every book has started with the setting. I think the environment that you set a book in gives you so much opportunity to have characters express their inner emotion,” says Clayton, who launched the book in the Bay Area earlier this month and appears on Sept. 10 in an event presented by the Lafayette Library and Learning Center.
Since she knew she wanted to write about old Hollywood, Carmel “seemed like a logical place where somebody might escape to from Hollywood,” as Leo the screenwriter does. “Carmel has a very strong Hollywood connection,” Clayton says. “Clint Eastwood was our mayor, and Doris Day lived here. Bing Crosby lived in Pebble Beach, and Brad Pitt just bought a house up here.”
Not to mention the town’s charm and intrigue. “The fog and the coastline add a lot of mystery to the place, and you can use that metaphorically when you’re writing,” Clayton says.
“I found that so evocative,” she adds.
Setting the background with her magical town, Clayton explores two subjects that she cares deeply about. “I always know when something might be a subject for a book because it strikes my heart,” Clayton says. “I literally could not write a book if it was not about something that moved me. I don’t ever take on anything that I don’t feel passionately about,” Clayton adds.
Looking back on the themes of her work so far, Clayton says she keeps coming back to “the particular challenges that women face in making our way in the world.”
The author has been addressing women’s roles from a nonfiction perspective “in all sorts of places,” Clayton says, including frequent pieces in the Los Angeles Times.
She says, “But for Hollywood in particular, I started realizing how underrepresented women are behind the scenes and what a difference that makes to how we as a society see women.” Clayton adds that she hopes that when people go to the movies, they’ll consider, “who’s making that movie, who’s writing that movie? Who’s directing that movie, and what does that say about women?”
Last year was the first time that the top 100 grossing films featured as many female protagonists as male protagonists, Clayton says. “And that’s really great, but if you look behind the scenes, most of those films are still directed by men. Most of those films are still written by men, and so most of our views of women remain what men think we should be,” Clayton says. She hopes that people will choose the films they watch based on these criteria.
Clayton also used her evocative setting to explore another subject she’s found fascinating: the Hollywood Blacklist. “The novel is very much about the Blacklist and the silencing of creative voices, and that turns out to be more relevant than I thought it would be,” Clayton says.
“I hope people focus on the fact that this is not a good thing for society,” Clayton says.
Meg Waite Clayton appears at 7 p.m. Sept. 10 in an event presented by the Lafayette Library and Learning Center in Don Tatzin Community Hall, Lafayette Library, 3491 Mount Diablo Blvd., Lafayette. Tickets are $20-$125 at https://www.lllcf.org/clayton.
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