On Banging Head Against Keyboard. Repeatedly.

t would be one thing if the people charged with writing the insta-book knock-off publishing projects about the collapse of the Brad and Jennifer marriage were Sydney Carton types, aging boozers with rotted hearts heroically turning one last disgusting buck with a foot already in the grave. But the authors of this year’s Brad and Jen: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Golden Couple ($7, Wenner) are a pair of brainless little girls of a type to make one pray for the speedy return of Stalin to power. The two US Weekly “senior writers” wrote their Brad-and-Jen book in a single week and in interviews afterward expressed surprise at how long a book is compared to an article. “Bob Wallace, the head of Wenner Books, said it had to be 40,000 words, which I didn’t really understand,” said Reinstein. “All I knew was that an Us Weekly cover story is, like, 1,300 words, so I knew it would be a lot.” Bartolomeo said Wallace gave helpful advice: “The advice we got was, ‘Hit the return key more often,'” she said. “My paragraphs were too long. That was what turned my magazine writing into book writing.”