Spoiler! And I'm not apologising because that's the whole point. Straight Up includes, as a plot twist, the discovery of a transgender character's identity. I was less informed and more thoughtless back then and, these days, I wouldn't write something that trans people find depressing and flippant. However, I do want assure trans readers and your allies: the "reveal" is the worst of it. You won't find transphobia here.
Verity Drummond is not a writer — she’s a florist — but when her husband, Kim, leaves her she deals with the pain by writing Straight Up, in which a man on a mountaineering expedition dies all alone in a hole in the ice, starving, wretched and with his broken bones poking through his skin.
In LA to adapt Straight Up for the screen, and caught between the dead man up the mountain and an inability to admit that she’s just another divorcee like the rest of California, Verity becomes The Widow and the buzz around the script, now “based on a true story”, begins to grow.
