“Just don’t make it about how hard it is for women in Hollywood,” a wonderfully bitchy editor advised me years ago when assigning a story tied to an organization whose very mission was improving showbiz opportunities for that gender. Then he repeated that guideline twice more for good measure.

I laughed to myself at the time — his directive was so unprompted! — but got the message loud and clear. In any case, it was easy to lead my story with a positive development, as Kathryn Bigelow had become the first woman to receive a directing Oscar a couple months earlier. I interviewed a bunch of women about their upcoming film projects and showcased those while briskly acknowledging challenges getting some of them funded.

Less happily, I ran into major resistance when I hatched a story about Hollywood’s progress toward gender equality five years after the starry formation of the Time’s Up organization dedicated to that goal. The idea was to run the story as part of a magazine package celebrating female entertainment industry accomplishments, and while I had developed newsy companion stories like this before without an issue, a top editor didn’t want this one anywhere near his glossy Power of Women feature stories. The fact that Anita Hill and other high-profile industry leaders spoke with me on the record did not sway him. My story mutated a few times to incorporate a colleague’s reporting on #MeToo survivors. It ended up online before that year’s Women’s History Month concluded.

A producer that wants her blood

I thought of both incidents when reading “The Take” and “The Midnight Show,” two new novels that engage with women’s workplace struggles in the entertainment industry rather than glossing over them. In “The Take,” author Kelly Yang sets up a blood-transfusion scenario similar to “The Substance,” except the two main protagonists are an aging Hollywood producer and an aspiring Asian American writer short on cash, while a fictional Rolling Stone culture writer hopes to make a splash with her investigation into the mysterious disappearance of a young female late-night star four decades earlier in “The Midnight Show.” Lee Kelly and Jennifer Thorne tale is bicoastal; characters move between New York and L.A.’s creative scenes as opportunities arise, just like real life.

Don’t forget about ageism

As disparate as the book setups are, they both enable the authors to channel generation spanning attitudes about and experiences in showbiz: We feel freshly minted MFA Maggie Wang’s desperation to gain a toehold in the industry as well as 53-year-old Ingrid Parker’s simultaneous entitlement and frustration with Hollywood ageism in Yang’s novel. Notably, it’s Yang’s first for an adult audience after a series of books geared toward kids.

Madeline Cohen, meanwhile, stands in for younger equality-minded women as she interrogates principals from “The Midnight Show” about breakthrough sketch comedy talent Lilian Martin and the pressures on her as a quirky female performer in the early 1980s. As the books unfold, more complex portraits of the main characters emerge, with Maggie’s immigrant background adding texture to “The Take.”

I could quibble with some of the writing choices — the supposedly compiled interviews for “The Midnight Show” read more scripted than spoken to this longtime entertainment journo while “The Take” skews a bit young in perspective for my taste — but the workplace interactions rang truthful enough for their fictional settings.

Their struggles are real

Mostly, I appreciate the authors’ desire to depict three-dimensional women navigating challenging showbiz careers along with romantic misadventures. The protagonists all contain multitudes: Their struggles are real. And so are their foibles.

This was first published on my Lititude Substack.