Suzanne Hansen & Martha Sherrill

Today, the California experiences of two women form the basis of two new books, one fiction, the other nonfiction. Suzanne Hansen relives her years as a Hollywood nanny in her new book You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again. We'll meet her in a few minutes, but first, the novel that started as a memoir, in a kind of reverse James Frey scenario. Journalist Martha Sherrill started writing a memoir of her father, and what it was like for her growing up in California in the '70s. But when she learned something about her father's life that put everything into a wholly different perspective, she realized the story was going to be best told in fiction. Sherrill's novel, based on her story, is called The Ruins of California.