Meet the next Liane Moriarty
Bestselling Australian author Pip Drysdale reveals how some terrible Tinder dates and bad break-ups helped lead to success as a novelist.
Stellar
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Everyone deals with break-ups differently. For Pip Drysdale, it wasn’t so much ice-cream and Netflix as it was social media. The author took to Instagram to nurse her broken heart, but she didn’t expect it would lead to two international book deals and subsequent literary stardom.
In 2015, Drysdale was an actor and musician who’d spent years in London and New York. “But writing a novel had always been in the back of my mind,” she tells Stellar.
Not long before moving back to Australia the next year, she went through a “really, really sh*tty break-up” and started writing.
Home again, she posted on social media about her plan to wake up early, write every day and turn it all into a book. A friend of a friend she’d met once, a whole decade prior, messaged her to ask what it was going to be about, if she could see a chapter or two and perhaps pass it along to a contact in the publishing industry.
It wasn’t the first time her draft was seen by someone in the business. She’d sent it to people and received “non-distressing emails back from agents and publishers, and a couple of encouraging ones that made me think maybe I’ve got something”.
She certainly did. The book became The Sunday Girl, a chilling psychological thriller that has been described as The Girl On The Train meets Before I Go To Sleep with a dash of Bridget Jones thrown in.
After it was published here last year and rights were snapped up overseas, Drysdale became a bestselling author. Her second novel, another dark thriller called The Strangers We Know, has just hit shelves, and she’s currently at work on a third.
She’s also negotiating film and television rights through the Hollywood power agency that brought Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies to screen. Fittingly, they came to Drysdale through social media.
“Social media has been so good to me,” she says with a laugh. “I have been extremely hardworking in order to get two books written so quickly, but I still look at [all this] and just feel so lucky. I can’t believe that post led to what it did, and that now I get to write full-time.”
It’s quite a tale, but nothing compared to her own life story. Born in Cape Town, Drysdale moved between South Africa and Australia with her family as a child, and then on her own to New York at 20.
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She studied acting and had parts in off-off-Broadway shows and indie films. She wrote songs, cut albums, fell wildly in love, got married, and was divorced by 22.
“It’s important to get the trial marriage out of the way,” she cracks. “I’ve always been super rebellious and spontaneous; to be honest, if I fell in love and he asked me and it felt right, I’d probably do it all again.”
Turning her life experiences into fiction has been cathartic for Drysdale, who describes herself as a former “poster girl for partying like a rock star” and now is “a poster girl for sobriety”.
“Writing lets you recast some of the things that have happened to you. If I hadn’t become a novelist, I might not be so happy about the more difficult aspects of my life.
“But don’t get me wrong,” she’s quick to add, “it hasn’t been all bad. I’ve had some huge highs as well.”
Since romance gone wrong is the basis of both her books, Drysdale jokes she’s done plenty of “on-the-ground research”.
The heartbreak, the “very bad but fascinating men”, and terrible Tinder dates have given her storylines for her novels.
She grins as she reflects on it all. “It’s almost like, ‘Thank goodness all that bad stuff happened.’”
The Strangers We Know (Simon & Schuster, $29.99) is out now.