Fans of the now canonized Freaks and Geeks were devastated by its 2000 cancellation, but no doubt Patty Lin was even more upset: she was then a writer for the show--a job she "truly enjoyed"--and it was downhill from there. End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood is Lin's long-form answer, crafted with honesty and panache, to the question of why she "retired" from TV writing at age 38. Lin, the child of Taiwanese immigrants, grew up in the tacky-TV 1970s. After her freshman year at Cornell, she landed a summer internship at Late Night with David Letterman, which eventually led to a job that clinched her dedication to the TV business. Lin moved to Los Angeles, where, following her stint at Freaks and Geeks, she got a job writing for Friends, but her option wasn't picked up. (" 'My option didn't get picked up' was just a euphemism for 'I got fired.' ") Lin's tenure at Desperate Housewives and Breaking Bad ended the same way.
Like Nell Scovell's Just the Funny Parts and Joyce Chopra's Lady Director, End Credits is a kid-gloves-off chronicle of being female (and, in Lin's case, the rare person of color) in a male-dominated entertainment field. Some readers may wonder if the memoir's subtitle should be inverted: maybe Hollywood broke up with her? Either way, the workaholism required to succeed in the industry wasn't for Lin, and she recounts experiences that make one wonder how anyone could be cut out for the TV biz. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer