Pip Drysdale on The Close-Up, stalkers, Los Angeles and the price of fame

It’s a byword for fame and bright lights, but there’s a much darker side to Los Angeles, warns Australia’s Pip Drysdale as she unveils her new stalker thriller.

How far would you go to fulfil 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?

‘It felt like hope to me’ … but best-selling Australian author and actor Pip Drysdale soon saw another side to Los Angeles. Picture: Katie Kaars

These are some of the questions my new book The Close-Up raises, as we dive into the modern American dream: fame. 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 $250,000 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. I read their books, I watch their TV shows, I walk their route to work and get to know their job, their grocery store, the street they live in. I even choose a perfume for them (for Zoe that perfume was Killian Paris’s Good Girl Gone Bad). I mine my own wounds for them. And then I find the city that will let me tell their story best. For Zoe Anne Weiss and her story of the dark side of fame, that was the city most synonymous with fame: Los Angeles.

‘The place dreams were made’ … the famous Hollywood sign in the hills above Los Angeles.

As an Australian, I had already formed a version of LA in my mind, a montage of TV shows and movies, before I ever went there. To me, LA was the place you went to ‘make it’. It was flashy cars and stilettos and the place dreams were made; hell, every time an Australian actor made it really big, they’d gone to LA. And, as it turned out, my first impressions, as I got off the plane, were exactly in line with those expectations. I remember being hit by this feeling of possibility in the air. This sense that anything could happen here. Then came the light – the magic hour light … it felt like hope to me. But I realised quite quickly that there was another side to LA too.

To start with it wasn’t filled with movie stars, 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 there was a darker underbelly to counteract that initial sense of hope too, if you just scratched the surface (a far more nuanced underbelly than TV’s serial killers and gang shootings). 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, my expectations and reality – was extremely alluring to me. It allowed Zoe to go there for the hope, but find the danger instead.

‘We make ourselves vulnerable ’ … Pip Drysdale goes deep into her characters’ minds.

Which pretty much sums up another of the book’s themes: how as creatives, we make ourselves vulnerable every single time we put work out into the world. Yet the creative drive is often stronger than the fear of those crosshairs.

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 by 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.

The Close-Up by Pip Drysdale is out now, published by HarperCollins.

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Out now … The Close-Up by Pip Drysdale.