Mob Wives Finale: Drita, Karen and the Chapter One Plot Device


I am a professional editor for a financial media company's online platform -- but for most of my 22-year career I have been a reporter/writer.

I am writing a novel on the side; most professional journalists -- and mobsters, it seems -- want to write a book, fiction or otherwise, sell it, make a half a million, sell the movie rights, snatch up the other half of the million, and spend the rest of our lives living comfortably and writing. I can't tell you how many times I have given a chapter or short story to a friend to read; I can't tell you how many writer friends have handed me something to read -- one friend gave me a script hundreds of pages long. I couldn't make it past the title page of that one, as I recall.

The truth is, it is a pain in the ass to read someone's work. Nine times out of 10, you have to tell them the work sucks, is nowhere near publishable.




So, bottom line, you can't base a friendship on how quickly a friend reads the chapter or story or poem you emailed them -- but, in addition, you usually don't make a ceremony out of it, like Karen did on Mob Wives when she gave Drita, of all people, a copy of Chapter One.

Drita full well know's there is some stuff in there that i going to provoke her; even more reason for her not to want to read it. Who wants to deliberately walk into a buzz saw? And Karen, that self-satisfied smirk ever on her face, knows full well that you don't fuck someone in a book and hand it to them to read. She isn't seeking suggestions or critiques; as she said sarcastically, but truthfully, on the final episode of the season tonight, and I am paraphrasing -- "I thought you guys wanted to meet here for drinks and dinner tonight so you can congratulate me on my first chapter and tell me how great it is." You'd celebrate once the book was in the publisher's hands, not after you finished an unedited version of the first chapter.

She was in fact telling Drita -- and, yes, I am taking a not-so-wild guess as I didn't read the chapter, of course, but I think my assumptions about it are reasonable and warranted: Karen was telling Drita by giving her the first chapter:  Look at how I am going to fuck you and Lee in my book -- right in the very beginning, in the first chapter -- and there is nothing you can do about it.

I wonder if the book was edited yet -- believe me, Drita, Karen needs a ghostwriter or an editor who goes deep, because there is no way she, who has never written anything in her life as far as we know, except maybe some recipes for crystal meth, can spit out a publishable first chapter in a few weeks. Writing doesn't work that way. Writing is rewriting. If Karen were really writing when she gave the impression she was, she wouldn't have had all that time to be going out for drinks and to shove more food in her face...  As wordsmiths know, writing doesn't work that way.


Two more things we just have to add:

One, either that book is already written (with the help of a ghostwriter) or it is partially written (with the help of a ghostwriter). We theorize this because she already signed a publishing agreement: a six-figure deal with St. Martin's Press about what it was like "to grow up mobbed up." We're not aware if a release date has been scheduled yet. None of the Amazon-advertised books in this story is the Karen book.
(As CNNews readers have pointed out, Karen was too young to know ANYTHING about her father's mob activities with John Gotti in the 1980s.)

From SILives.com: "Karen Gravano, 38, is slated to pen a tell-all about life on Lamberts Lane and how it changed after her hitman father testified for the feds in the 1990s and entered a short-lived stint in witness protection to keep his family safe.

"If only.

"After killing 19 people, testifying against late mob boss John Gotti and laying low for a while, Gravano was busted in 2000 for running a multimillion-dollar Ecstasy ring near his new digs in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"Karen Gravano copped to charges related to the drug operation and received three years of probation.

"But her father, now 65, got 20 years for masterminding the ring -- which raked in as much as $300,000 a week -- all while overseeing a restaurant and construction business under his new identity, 'Jimmy Moran.' "

Two, we predicted in an early post about Mob Wives that the Drita-Lee-Karen triangle could be a plot point, though we didn't know it would be the plot driver of the show. Back then, we wrote, in parentheses, as shown:

(A little nugget we dug up about one of the "mobsters," which, if true, should make for a bit more interesting show: The New York Daily News reported that Lee D’Avanzo was romantically linked to the daughter of Sammy "Bull" Gravano... )

Comments

  1. Karen is doing her best to skirt the issue of why she really left New York in the first place. As with many white girls with a weight problem, she found that black men showed a greater appreciation than white men did and began a relationship with "Dave". A bottom of the barrel drug dealer from Queens, Dave was the icing on the cake for many in the Italian community. Karen even began to take on an Afrocentric lingo " as is often shown on Mob Wives. K-Jizzel, as she refers to herself, will hopefully go into detail about her identity crisis in this tell-all book. Obviously she wasn't around for any of the high 1980's mob drama that would make a book worth reading.

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