It's a frequent pitfall of first-time novelists—misinterpreting "Write what you know" to mean "Write who you are"—to write insular autobiography instead of imaginative, objective, dramatically complex fiction. Not all of Rachel Resnick's biographical details match those of protagonist Rebecca Roth, but the fact remains that they share the same initials, birthplace, Ivy League background, current residence, and, it would appear, cynicism about life in L.A., love, and emotional recovery. Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick is a non-sequential narrative in which Roth leads an unsteady life as a film-production assistant, searches for love in spite of a planetary epidemic of male shallowness, recalls the scars inflicted by her emotionally abusive and alcoholic mother, and reflects on the dubious comforts of L.A. The warped chronology of the narrative makes it clear that Roth is eking out a miserable existence: Although the novel begins with her hopeful arrival and myriad possibilities for success, it flashes forward quickly to reveal her hostile reactions to psychosis, the end of several doomed love affairs, and a years-older Roth still at lousy jobs and writing fiction that embraces deformity and abuse. In the stasis that this pattern sets up, there can be no plot as such; however, there is a more interesting question at the core of all these goings-on: Roth (or Resnick?) frequently interjects short chapters that break from the stark prose style of most of the book to describe L.A., its joys, and its miseries, in language that borders on prose poetry. Does the right to live in L.A. (or work in the film industry) itself compensate for the contemptible life one must live in it? Well, maybe, but it probably helps to live there yourself to tackle that one judiciously. Go West never gets at the heart of it.