“Do a lot of people call you Cockring?”

So begins the relationship between Charlie Besson and movie star Kathi Kannon in Byron Lane’s hilarious debut novel, A Star Is Bored. The book follows the story of nerdy Charlie after he lands a job as personal assistant to Kathi, who just happens to be Charlie’s boyhood hero for the role she played, Priestess Talara, in a blockbuster sci-fi action adventure movie in the ’70s.

In other words, Princess Leia. “A Star Is Bored is inspired by the three years I was personal assistant to Carrie Fisher,” says Lane, now a playwright and screenwriter in Los Angeles. “My time working for her was absolutely magical — full of trips all over the world, a behind the scenes look at fame and fortune, and so much laughter.”

On Thursday, Oct. 15, Lane will read from and discuss the book in a virtual event on Zoom for East End Books Ptown.

The character of Kathi is fresh, irreverent, and funny. She takes a shine to Charlie and dubs him “Cockring.” After a rough start at the job, Charlie gets a little help from the assistants’ club, an informal network of Hollywood celebrity assistants who pitch in and help each other navigate everything from facilitating addiction recovery to finding butt-bleaching services for their bosses.

Kathi is, in fact, an addict who is jaded with life (as Fisher herself revealed in her own books and plays), but it’s her sense of humor that highlights the experience. In one scene, she checks into a hotel and tells the clerk that Charlie is her stepson. “But if you must know, yes, we are having sex,” she adds before snatching the room keys and flouncing off to her room.

Things improve drastically for Charlie in his new role — taking care of Kathi gives him a sense of purpose. The two develop a wonderful, though lopsided, friendship. In one scene, Kathi and Charlie are served live octopus in a restaurant in Japan. “We have to get rid of them!” Kathi says as she empties her Hermès purse and shoves the octopuses into it. Course after course arrives and the Hermès bag grows large, stuffed with “raw, squirming critters and beasts.” At the end of the night, she hands the purse to Charlie, who has to get rid of the contents and clean it.

At its heart, A Star Is Bored is about relationships and how they shape us. There is a mother-son dynamic between star and assistant, and this helps Charlie heal from the loss of his real mother at an early age. “All relationships are fascinating to me,” Lane says, “but that of parent and child is perhaps the most curious. I’m a big therapy and self-help guy, so I love exploring all that stuff. A parent has such an impact on the child’s worldview — sometimes forever, sometimes just until the child is old enough to break free. I think being honest about all that creates space for healing and humor, for growth and connection.”

Take, for example, the scene in which Kathi makes Charlie book a last-minute trip to see the Northern Lights. The pair make a trek to a small Arctic town where Kathi surprises Charlie with a dogsledding expedition. When their guide says he won’t be joining them on the ride, Kathi takes the reins. “We don’t need him,” she tells Charlie. Turning to the guide, she adds, “This is part of a trust exercise his psychiatrist says will help make him more comfortable coming out of the closet.” And off they go at breakneck speed.

Recalling the scene makes Lane smile. “Kathi, a woman who’s seen it all, gets to see a natural phenomenon that had escaped her until that moment,” he says. “And Charlie gets to see his friend have a genuine, beautiful connection with life. Something similar happened with me and Carrie.”

Despite the chain of comical adventures, there is a darker side to the relationship between Charlie and Kathi, and cracks begin to show when he realizes he’s being consumed by taking care of someone else. Kathi’s struggles with mania and drug addiction eventually drive a wedge between them. But by the end of the book, Charlie finds himself in a much better place.

Writing A Star Is Bored “was a blast and it was healing,” Lane says. “My experiences with [Fisher] redefined what friendship means to me and saved my life in so many ways. I tried to capture that spirit in a story I hope sings of humor and heart.”

Indeed, that is perhaps the most powerful thing about this must-read novel — its ability to elicit a laugh from the reader in one moment, and a hit home with something touching and reflective in the next. It’s a fast-paced romp through the lifestyles of the rich and famous from the perspective of their assistants, which is about as real as it gets. And in the telling, Lane has a voice that’s clear and fresh, one that readers will connect with easily.

Singin’ in the Pain

The event: Byron Lane reads from and discusses his book A Star Is Bored

The time: Thursday, Oct. 15, at 6 p.m.

The place: Virtual event presented by eastendbooksptown.com via Zoom

The cost: Free tickets at Eventbrite.com; pre-registration required

“Before I knew I was a human being and not a dog, my earliest sense of myself was male. I am just a funny sort of guy. I don’t hate my female body, I just don’t recognize it as mine,” writes Cooper Lee Bombardier, author, artist, and transgender activist, in his book, Pass With Care: Memoirs, which was published by Dottir Press in June. In a voice that meshes disarming humanity with humor, the author chronicles his journey through life as a trans man, making peace with experiences that wounded him and led him to become the human being he now is.

Bombardier, who was listed by the Huffington Post in 2014 as one of “10 Transgender Artists Who Are Changing the Landscape of Contemporary Art,” feels that accounts of trans lives are all too frequently just about their transitions. “When we reduce trans people’s lives to a transition narrative,” he tells the Independent by phone, “we shrink what we believe to be possible about all that a trans person’s life can contain. Trans writers have a whole lot more to add to our ongoing cultural conversations.”

Releasing his first book in the middle of a pandemic has, Bombardier says, “been interesting, to say the least. I won’t lie — at first, I was pretty crushed when it became clear that my tour would have to be canceled. But I quickly moved on. Staying safe in a global pandemic and fighting for black and indigenous liberation and the end to immigrant detention are things that are far more important than my little book being born.”

Bombardier adds that the “unexpected upshot of a pandemic book” has been that the virtual events that he’s been participating in are far more accessible to a wider public. “You just have no idea who might turn out, and that is really cool,” he says. He will be reading from Pass With Care this Friday in a virtual event hosted by East End Books Ptown.

Bombardier, who lives with his wife in Halifax, Nova Scotia, grew up in a small town on the South Shore of Massachusetts. “My town used to be classified as rural, and my immediate neighbors were four generations of my father’s family,” he says. “I’m Gen X, so my childhood was composed of tons of unsupervised time outside, running through the woods and overgrown farmland and each other’s yards.”

Family vacations always included an annual trip to Provincetown, and Bombardier would later return to the Outer Cape to work summers and once spent a full year. “Provincetown is one of those places that lives in my soul,” he says. “I love the feeling of being free as a queer person, but also being around so much joy and creativity. To have that kind of experience is particularly resonant for many who grew up in small towns, where we felt that there was no room for us.”

Visual art was, for a long time, Bombardier’s primary form of expression, followed in the 1990s by spoken word performance in San Francisco’s queer punk scene. Around 2001, he says, “I hit a place where I felt stuck in my visual work. I wasn’t sure how to get it to do what I wanted it to do. As I focused more on writing, that became the place where I could ask the questions I wanted to explore.” Bombardier, who was then living in Portland, Ore., completed a master’s in publishing and then an M.F.A. in creative writing at Portland State University.

He chose to render his trans experience in the medium of nonfiction memoir with an awareness of the form’s potential and its pitfalls. “In my nonfiction writing, I reveal a lot, but I also pick and choose,” he says. “I’m very private, which is always a weird conundrum. I also always try to stay focused on my own experience and make sure that I am not exposing anybody else more than myself. The work that I put out now is not a therapy session. It’s not a diary. I’m using the tools of a creative form to take material and turn it into artistic expression. More than anything, I am obsessed with polyvalence and nuance and trying to say the unsayable without truncation.”

Despite a greater awareness and wider understanding in our society of the trans experience, Bombardier feels we still have a long way to go. “Because there is more visibility, there is also more of a pushback, and visibility doesn’t always come with actual rights and acceptance,” he says, adding that violence against trans bodies has not decreased. “Trans feminine people and trans people of color are still an incredibly vulnerable population, so I feel that it is also very important to acknowledge that, for me, moving through the world in a white, masculine body comes with a lot of privilege.”

Above all, Bombardier hopes that trans people will be seen as equal human beings. “You know, I can’t stand the word ‘tolerance,’ ” he says. “The idea of tolerance sounds nice, but when you think about it, tolerating somebody just isn’t the same as saying, ‘Hey, I’m glad you’re here!’”

Beyond Transition

The event: Virtual reading by Cooper Lee Bombardier from his memoir, Pass With Care

The time: Friday, Aug. 14, at 6 p.m.

The place: East End Books Ptown via Zoom, at eastendbooksptown.com

The cost: Free; registration required for Zoom link