How does an ordinary-colored-girl get her own talk show in 1973 covering Southern New England? Not by being a good girl. She wasn't always bad, she'd tell you. It wasn't until she met "him".

The him was one of TV's most powerful behind-the-scenes star makers.

If I Make You a Star: A Trailblazing Black TV Journalist’s Me Too Story by Theresa Brown is about love and hate, power and compromise, colorism, betrayal, mental illness, and moral injury. It's an insider's story of grooming, success, and the consequences of complicity taking place in the late '60s when Jessica Savitch, Andrea Mitchell, Charlie Rose, and Maria Shriver were just beginning their careers. Brown knew them all; but you don't know her because the hand she was dealt, she could not play.

In a story that comes across like a life-threatening roller-coaster ride, Brown takes us from the '50s to the COVID-19 lockdown of today: from drinking Champagne at George V in Paris to four points in the psychotic ward under the LA jail. From boozy, drugged-out days on Long Island Sound, sable-wrapped jaunts on Central Park West to furtive 5:00 a.m. mornings in front of a crack house on Crenshaw. It's the guts of one woman's Me Too story, told with raw candor, humor, and insight.