The Kid Who Liked Dynasty and Wrote a Soap

A heart-breaking novel of growing up—wild, funny and disturbing. Motti Biton, a 13-year-old boy, lives with his dysfunctional family in Yeruham, a town in the Negev desert. It is 1989. Motti’s mother has been in deep depression for two years after losing her job at a textile plant; their father has disappeared; Motti’s unbalanced older sister lies all day on the sofa contemplating suicide; and his younger sister, now doing her army service, has to take care of the whole family and its livelihood. To escape from his unhappy life, Motti writes a soap opera like “Dynasty,” the series that he watches on TV and his only pleasure of the week. But the characters in Motti’s soap—written in school notebooks hidden under his mattress—are Sima, the owner of the textile plant that fired his mother, her relatives, and the rich, powerful figures that surround her. The guest star of the series is the famous Israeli actress Gila Almagor, who plays Sima’s mother. And in Motti’s glittering fantasy, he himself is the writer, director, producer and presenter.

But parallel to these glamorous TV lives, his own family drama closes in on him, accompanied by adolescent anxieties over looming manhood. And so, to save himself, Motti adds his own family life into his soap opera. Truth and lies, imagination and reality mingle as Motti writes the last season of his soap, his life’s work.