October 2025

I spent 16 years in Catholic school, so a book about a Hollywood starlet who becomes a nun would grab my attention, the same way that trick-or-treating at the convent would as we hoped we would see what nuns wore when they didn’t have their habits on. We never found out anything about the latter. But with Sarah McCoy’s latest novel, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LORI LOVELY?, we get to learn what happened to Lucille Lorianne Hickey, who first became Lori Lovely when she hit the stage, and then was christened to be Sister Jude and later Mother Lori.

The story of Mother Lori is based partially on the life of Mother Dolores Hart, who acted alongside Elvis Presley before becoming a nun.

Lu Tibbott decides to write about her aunt Lori after she learns that she will not be able to graduate from college unless she completes a serious senior thesis. So she travels from North Carolina to Connecticut to interview Lori and ask her to finally share her story. But before we see what she tells Lu, we are plunged back in time when Lucille leaves her strict Baptist parents to help her sister, Marie, who has moved to New York with her husband and is running a photography studio. A photo of Lucille that is done by chance leads to her getting an acting job. She is then scouted by Paramount and becomes caught up in the world of Hollywood, not just the New York theater scene.

Her stage name is Lori Lovely. Along the way, her theater friend, Ginny Wilde, shows her the ropes of what it takes to survive both New York and acting. In the ’60s, the two move to London where the season of love is beginning to bloom and they enter a prestigious acting academy. Lori is cast to appear as Juliet by a hot director, Nico Cellini, opposite Lucas Wesley, a popular singer who is trying his hand at acting. (You see the parallel to Elvis here.) Stardom comes quickly, and the film has brilliant openings in Rome and Los Angeles, where all cameras are on her. The chemistry that she has with Lucas on-screen quickly moves off-screen as well. And what happens is very different from the life she knew when she was a girl from the South.

The book is dishy, but it’s also smart and well-paced. Lu gets her story, and readers get a story as well --- one that will keep them turning the pages.