Pip Drysdale’s global upbringing (she grew up in Africa, Canada, and Australia and became an adult in New York and London) gives an international flair to her novels of psychological suspense. Her previous books—The Sunday Girl, The Strangers We Know, The Paris Affair, and The Next Girl—have all been international bestsellers, propelling Australia’s Stellar magazineto crown her the next Liane Moriarty.
Now, the popular writer of books that critics around the world have praised as “electric,” “unexpected,” “tension-soaked,” and “seriously addictive,” makes her American breakout with The Close-Up. The novel delivers an unflinching and absorbing look at the burden of public expectations, the dark side of fame and the consequences of celebrity and was inspired by experiences in Drysdale’s own life as an author, actress and musical artist. Here, the author talks about making the world of her new novel come alive through on-the-ground research and personal experience.
How far would you go to fulfill your biggest dream? How much would you sacrifice to hold onto it? How much danger would you put yourself in? And how far is too far? These are some of the questions my new book The Close-Up interrogates. It’s a Gatsby-esque critique of the modern American dream: fame. Of what it takes, what it costs and whether it is worth it.
When we first meet Zoe Ann Weiss, the protagonist, she is a struggling author, living in LA with a failed debut (a thriller about a stalker) under her belt and working in a dead-end job in a flower shop. She also has a terrible case of writer’s block and knows that if she doesn’t produce something soon, she’s going to have to pay back her publishing house a 250k advance that she simply doesn’t have.
Now,I would consider myself a method-writer—I fully immerse myself in the character I am writing. So, for Zoe Ann Weiss, that meant finding her apartment’s location in West Hollywood and driving her route to work, walking to her grocery store, seeing Chateau Marmont right there and feeling what she might feel when looking upon that icon of dreams; knowing it is so close and yet so far. It meant choosing a perfume for her (Kilian Paris Good Girl Gone Bad) and unintentionally developing a temporary state of writer’s block myself (not my favorite part of the research, I assure you), together with thinking back to my own failures and life experiences and how broken they had left me. It meant hanging out on Abbot Kinney and figuring out exactly where the flower shop Zoe works in might be; it meant taking photographs of the alley behind that shop, looking into floristry and reading all the books Zoe loves. And it also meant reminding myself of what struck me most about LA when I first went there.
Because as I got off the plane for the first time in LA, I was hit by this feeling of possibility in the air. I could see in an instant why people came to this town believing their dreams would come true. The next thing that hit me was the light—the magic hour light. That too felt like hope to me. So my first impressions were entirely in line with the version of LA I’d seen on screen. But I realized quite quickly that there was another side to LA too. A darker underbelly to counteract that initial sense of hope, if you just scratched the surface. And there were other things too: it was filled with regular people just going about their lives, or people living hybrid lives: barista and sometime-actress by day, socialite by night. It was filled with complicated dating situations and ambition and brokens dreams and desperation and smog; it was more run-down than I had expected; there were far more sweatpants being worn. And as one of the themes of The Close-Up is appearance and reality, the juxtaposition of these two sides of LA—the light and the dark—was extremely alluring to me.
It had me thinking about hope and how it can take us to both the best places, and the worst. It had me wondering about how far people might go for their dreams, how far I might go. And that had me thinking about another one of the themes: about how as creatives, we make ourselves vulnerable every time we put work out into the world. About how the creative drive is stronger than the fear of those crosshairs.
And so, in The Close-Up, the crosshairs Zoe finds herself in are both emotional and physical. She is trying to get past a failure, and through managing to finally find something to write about, she puts herself in another set of crosshairs. An arguably far more dangerous set. She becomes the victim of a stalker. And that stalker uses her own novel against her; starts re-enacting all the creepy plot twists with Zoe as the victim. So the sensible thing for her to do would be get on a plane and go back to London where she’s from. But if she just walks away now, she risks never getting another book idea like this ever again. And so Zoe has to make the choice every creative has to make eventually: how far is she willing to go for her art? I won’t ruin the story for you, but the only truthful answer to that is always: pretty damned far. And honestly: Same.
Find out more: Website: www.pipdrysdale.com
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