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Nick Bowman Features Editor | 770-718-3426 | life@gainesvilletimes.com
She (Times
gainesvilletimes.com
Monday, November 19, 2018
Finding her voice in
Stand-up comedian
succeeds with books,
now plans for movie
BY KELLY WHITMIRE
kwhitmire@forsythnews.com
Amy Lyle is a failure, but she’s OK with
that.
The Forsyth County resident has built a
following in recent years. Her first book,
“The Amy Binegar-Kimmes-Lyle Book of
Failures,” routinely sits at the top of sev
eral categories on Amazon.com. A sequel,
Book of Failures-Friends Edition, is on
the way in November, and she recently
inked a movie deal that will start shooting
locally in a year.
The movie — titled #FakeMom, a com
edy about New York stockbroker who
marries a Southern gentleman and comes
to take care of his children after her hus
band leave town for different reasons —
was the original goal nearly a decade ago
when she began working on an early ver
sion of the script ,but the journey to make
it happen has taken her a long way.
“If you only focus on one thing, like ‘I
have to get a film deal,’ you’re going to be
really miserable,” Lyle said. “If you enjoy
the process of getting there, all this cool
stuff has happened along the way. I never
thought of being on television or getting in
a movie or whatever, so it’s been crazy.”
Before the stand-up, books and movies,
Lyle was a working mom and gone “50
percent of the time” traveling for work.
That changed when she married her sec
ond, and current, husband.
With four kids in the mixed-family,
there were lots of sports, appointments
and schoolwork to be done, and her hus
band asked if she would consider being a
stay-at-home mom.
“I had never stayed home before in my
life,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh sure, how
hard could that be?’ Disaster.”
In her free time when the kids were
at school, she began acting in plays at
Browns Bridge Church, later writing short
children’s plays.
Around that same time, the seeds for
her screenplay were planted when she
went on a lake trip with several friends,
half of whom were stay-at-home moms
and half-working moms.
“With enough alcohol, the truth started
coming out and it was just like all these
preconceived notions about what’s hap
pening in somebody’s life,” Lyle said.
The battle lines, she said, highlighted
the issues that both go through: “Well,
you’re never there for your kids because
you work all the time” and “Well, at least
if your child needs to go to the doctor,
dentist or orthodontist, you’re home.”
“Now that I’ve been on both sides, I just
wish those groups would take one step
closer to each other,” Lyle said.
Through some friends and connections,
she was able to speak with an entertain
ment lawyer who gave her some good, if
daunting, advice about getting a movie
made.
“He’s like, ‘I don’t care how funny you
are, I don’t care how funny your script is,
you can’t just roll into Hollywood and get
a movie deal,” she said.
While he said he wouldn’t represent
her, he did give some advice to “get on
the map” and pop up on search engines.
He recommended a book or blog on some
thing she knew.
“Literally, I hung up the phone and I
had this vision,” she said. “I was like, ‘I
have had a lot of failures,’ so I wrote this
book called the Book of Failures.”
That book now appears on Amazon
around the works of Amy Poehler, Tina
Fey and Kevin Hart.
To further her reach, she began doing
stand-up, making weekly failure videos
and being a regular guest on podcasts. In
time, she had enough responses from oth
ers’ failures for her second book.
“They were so funny, I started cutting
and pasting them into a Word document,”
Lyle said. “Before I knew it, I had 15,000
words of failures.”
While Writing about their own failures,
or others’, might not come easily to most,
talking about failures has been pretty suc
cessful for Lyle.
“That is kind of my style,” she said.
“I’ve done stand-up comedy and it’s kind
of self-deprecating, so that’s who I am. I
totally exploit my kids and friends all the
time.”
'Mil-
KELLY WHITMIRE I Forsyth County News
Forsyth County resident Amy Lyle is the author of “The Amy Binegar-
Kimmes-Lyle Book of Failures.”
‘That is kind of my
style. I’ve done stand-
up comedy and it’s kind
of self-deprecating, so
that’s who I am.’
Amy Lyle
