A bit of postmodern playfulness in Beautiful Ruins

Jessica Walters's Beautiful Ruins is a pastiche of styles and genres, and just as we think she's about to bring the strands of the plot together she throws us another curveball, so to speak, with an interpolated chapter billed as the rejected first chapter of Michael Deane's memoirs. We know from earlier passages that famous but washed-up director Deane has revived his career, to an extent, by publishing a memoir that's essentially The Art of the Pitch, and has become a Bible for aspiring screenwriters, such as Shane, so misguided as to give a great pitch for an absurd movie about the Donner Party ("But we won't show the cannibalism!") to Deane himself, and then makes the mistake of crediting Deane's book for teaching him how to sell the story -mistake?, because Deane notes that they completely rejected his draft and sent him to "rewrite" where some hack freelance turned the choppy memoir into a how to book and a best seller at that. So it's funny to read the first chapter - in which Deane recounts how he got his first break and essentially "saved" Cleopatra by turning movie PR on its head: he was assigned to keep the Burton-Taylor onscreen romance from the press, as the studio didn't want word out about two more broken marriages, etc.; he got the idea that he should publicize their romance, that scandal would build interest in this turgid piece. I have no idea if this account is based on any bit of truth, but it seems like a plausible and even a compelling story - that memoir probably would have sold, too - but Walters is sharp enough to include the readers notes, in which the reader worries about the libel potential (maybe, but not if the stuff is true) and about the unresolved plot elements: What happened to the girl whom Burton got pregnant? That's funny because the answer to that question is not in Deane's memoir but in the very novel we're reading - a bit of postmodern playfulness on Walters's part.