Publication Date: August 12, 2025
Marie Kondo meets The Real Housewives in this charming and perceptive story of a professional organizer to Hollywood’s elite who learns to find love and acceptance amid the messiness of life.
To the world, Jane Brown, a Los-Angeles based professional organizer, is a model of composure and reticence. But inside, she’s fiercely judgmental and critical of herself and others. A lover of order and tidiness, she struggles to accept the world’s exasperating messiness of both her own clients—a superficial sphere of influencers and rich creatives—and her live-in boyfriend, who is becoming as aggravating as he is comforting.
When she arrives at the home of a new client, a has-been Hollywood actress—a woman opposite to her in every way—Jane finds herself unexpectedly moved. Realizing how desperately she wants to lower her defenses and open her heart, Jane decides to declutter the mess of her own mindset. Organizing her own feelings turns out to be the most daunting job she’s ever tackled, but one that promises big rewards if she succeeds, including freedom—and even love.
Set against the dazzlingly rich, beautiful, and shallow world of Hollywood money and mansions, Mess is an honest, heartfelt, and often hilarious response to the disorder of our lives today.
Professional organizer Jane Brown brings calm to the chaos of her ritzy Hollywood customers but seems stuck managing her own life through the lens of a sardonic realist.
Through a series of customers visits, author Michael Chessler shows Jane’s evolution in Mess. Part tongue-in-cheek, part homage to the practice of accumulating stuff as substitutes for handling our emotions, each chapter brings a new challenge for Jane.
Whether it is her troubled relationship with her mother or inability to accept her flaky boyfriend as he is, Jane discovers that applying the same concepts from her job to organize her emotions is quite a daunting task.
What a refreshing storyline that acknowledges the messiness in all of our lives. Whether it’s a beauty influencer with drawers overflowing with beauty products, a billionaire with a Transformers collection, or a television writer with collections of both typewriters and lunchboxes, it all boils down to emotional connections.
Mess pays homage to a journey we all experience, while delivering a main character who discovers what she sought was in front of her the whole time.
Michael Chessler has been a writer, producer, director, and show-runner of numerous television shows. He has developed pilots for all the major networks, some of which made it to air. He is a native of Los Angeles, where he still lives.
