# Apartment Five C *A Biography of Adrienne Shelly* — Legendary Biographies No. 008 - **Subject:** Adrienne Levine (Adrienne Shelly) - **Written by:** Donovan Hadley - **Shelf:** Screen & Stage / Film - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 189 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 189 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-049-2) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Desmond Vale (ISBN 979-8-90623-195-6) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/008-apartment-five-c.html ## About this book November 1, 2006, Apartment 5C of an office building on Abingdon Square in Manhattan's West Village. Adrienne Shelly, forty, the actress and writer-director of Waitress, is found hanging from a shower-curtain rod. The Medical Examiner initially rules it a suicide. Two days later the police re-open the case after her husband Andrew Ostroy finds a size-eight sneaker print on a toilet seat that doesn't match anyone in the building. They arrest Diego Pillco, a nineteen-year-old construction worker, the next morning. He confesses. Waitress, the film Shelly had just finished editing, premieres at Sundance ten weeks later. Donovan Hadley's biography opens earlier — Adrienne Levine was born on June 24, 1966, in Queens, New York — and follows the arc through the Boston University acting program, the Hal Hartley breakthrough films The Unbelievable Truth (1989) and Trust (1990), the long independent-film career, the 1996 Sudden Manhattan writer-director debut, the 2003 marriage to Ostroy, the daughter Sophie's 2004 birth, the 2006 completion of Waitress, the building murder, the Adrienne Shelly Foundation founded by Ostroy in her name, and the Sara Bareilles 2015 Broadway musical adaptation that the foundation supported. What emerges is a portrait of an indie-film actress and writer-director killed in her own office at forty by a stranger she had asked to keep the construction noise down — and of a husband and a foundation that have spent twenty years finishing the work she did not get to finish. ## Contents 1. East Meadow 2. The Unbelievable Truth 3. Trust 4. The Hartley Circle 5. The Industry of No 6. Sudden Manhattan 7. I'll Take You There 8. Women in Independent Film 9. Sophie 10. Writing Waitress 11. Making the Film 12. Abingdon Square 13. November First 14. The Investigation 15. Sundance 16. The Afterlife of Waitress 17. The Foundation 18. Lulu ## Questions **Who is Apartment Five C about?** Adrienne Levine (Adrienne Shelly). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Apartment Five C — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,612 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 59,500 words, 18 chapters, 189 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Donovan Hadley is a Manchester-based culture writer for The Guardian and Sight & Sound. His biographies cover the film, theatre, and television figures whose work shaped the British and American midcentury. He spends his time researching archives to reconstruct the quiet moments behind major cultural milestones. His published work includes titles like The Nightmare Man, Frequency, and The Gap Year. He has also explored midcentury creative communities in books such as The Fifty Million Dollar Man, The USC Film School, Apartment Five C, Room 607, and The First Cast. He lives in Manchester, England, where he spends his weekends browsing local independent cinemas and collecting vintage film reels.