Shear, Leanne

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Shear, Leanne

PERSONAL: Female.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Elisabeth Weed, Citigroup Center, 52nd Fl., 153 E. 53rd St., New York, NY 10022-4611.

CAREER: Onieals, New York, NY, bartender; writer.

WRITINGS:

(With Tracey Toomey) The Perfect Manhattan (novel), Broadway Books (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, including In Touch, U.S. Weekly, and New York.

SIDELIGHTS: Leanne Shear and Tracey Toomey met when they were both working as bartenders at Onieal's in the SoHo district of New York City, and became collaborators on the novel The Perfect Manhattan. The friends realized that together they had enough experiences and material to write a novel based on their lives. One of their customers encouraged them to begin the project, and also introduced Shear and Toomey to an agent.

"Shear and Toomey know the world of which they write," noted Kristine Huntley in a Booklist review of The Perfect Manhattan. The story follows Cassie, a Columbia University graduate who yearns to be a screenwriter but for now will settle on getting a job. She fails her class at Martini Mike's Bartending School but finds a position at Finton's, an Irish pub in Manhattan. There she becomes friends with Annie, a Brazilian cocktail waitress and graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts. A patron named Martin Pritchard invites Cassie to the Hamptons and promises to help her find a job there. She tends bar at Sparks, and, although the clientele is out of her league, she experiences a temporary romance with a vice president at Goldman Sachs. Cassie soon learns that she will not be accepted by this class of people whom she ultimately decides are too shallow and self-involved to allow into her life anyway; the novel is filled with details about the excesses of wealth, from designer clothing to exclusive social functions.