There’s real affection here, between Lee and the two new people in her life, but she pushes and pulls and pushes and pulls, her default aversion to human connection compounded by the lies she’s telling and the secrets she’s keeping. The other is Anna (Dolly Wells), a bookshop owner and one of Lee’s buyers they form a halting, hopeful wisp of a relationship, even managing to work their blossoming connection into a few real dates. She needs his help with her crimes, but really it’s an excuse what she needs is him. Where Lee is curmudgeonly, Jack is gregarious. Grant), another writer who’s been chewed up and spit out by the New York literary scene. She meets two people who have the potential to change her life, during her charade. She’s actually a very good writer! The words she’s putting in these other writers’ mouths are, often, even better than their own! This decision becomes both the catalyst for real connection in her life and a source of even greater discontent. She doesn’t have anymore letters, though so she writes her own. When she finds a letter from Brice in the archives at the New York Public Library, she lifts it and hawks it at an antique shop - and thats’s when she realizes there’s big money in selling the right letters penned by the right people. Lee’s most beloved cat and companion is sick, she’s months late on rent, no one wants to buy the Fannie Brice book she’s working on.

This is where Can You Ever Forgive Me? picks up. She was also a cat rescuer, and much preferred the company of furry friends to actual human beings. That was a huge problem for Lee, who was notoriously misanthropic and antisocial. By the ’90s, though, the publishing world was looking for celebrity authors, not authors who wanted to hide behind celebrities. Her biography of journalist and game show panelist Dorothy Kilgallen even made the New York Times bestseller list. By the ’80s she was writing full memoirs of the rich and famous. In the 1960s and 1970s, Lee Israel was a freelance writer who most notably profiled Katherine Hepburn for Esquire. I saw this movie two weeks ago and I still haven’t recovered.

Instead, director Marielle Heller has created one of the most tender, visceral depictions of loneliness I’ve ever experienced. I thought the film would be a caper, a heist flick, a quirky crime comedy. She estimates she crafted about 400, total, before she was busted. In the early ’90s, nearly destitute and with no new publishing prospects on the horizon, Lee began forging letters from famous historical writers to sell to collectors. On paper, Can You Ever Forgive Me? sounded like catnip to me: Melissa McCarthy plays lesbian writer Lee Israel, whose confessional memoir details her short-lived detour from struggling writer to literary criminal mastermind. The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.

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