You know the story. A Las Vegas local with stars in his eyes dreams of a more glamorous life in Los Angeles. He packs up the car and heads 280 miles west.
Ben is no different. And it’s Hollywood stars he’s got his sights -- and camera -- on. He wants to join the paparazzi. But a career pivot quickly turns into an obsession that threatens to rip everything from him -- including his sanity.
Close Relationships with Strangers, out June 23 on large publishing house Simon & Schuster, is a book that's set in — and connects — Las Vegas and Los Angeles. It’s the debut novel by Las Vegas-based writer Krista Diamond, a contributor to KNPR's Desert Companion magazine, as well as The New York Times and other outlets.
Diamond began writing another novel while attending UNLV, but her obsessions with famous people and the outdoors soon compelled her to write a whole other book. Her mentor, novelist and UNLV associate professor Maile Chapman, encouraged her to harness that enthusiasm and finish the latter story. With those two themes, it became clear to her where the book needed to be set.
"It's incredibly personal to me because of those two interests," Diamond told KNPR's "State of Nevada." "I spent a lot of my 20s working in the national parks, so wilderness and nature [are] a big part of my life. And I've always been really fascinated with celebrity culture, so that's personal to me as well. And then the book is very much about the relationship between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, which is something that's really personal to me. Unlike Ben, the narrator of the novel, I'm kind of an evangelist for Las Vegas. He's a little more ambivalent towards it, but there is a lot of my love for Las Vegas and a lot of my love for Los Angeles in the novel."
To better develop both the book's theme of celebrity culture and Ben's drive, Diamond hung out with and interviewed members of the paparazzi in Los Angeles. She generally found them to be "not great people," but one photographer said something insightful that helped her connect celebrities to animals in the wild.
"I asked him, what is it like actually doing this work?" Diamond said. "And he said kind of offhandedly, 'Oh, it's kind of like wildlife photography. You're on the run, you're chasing a subject that is trying to get away from you [and] is often hostile. You don't get to choose the light or the angle. If the photo doesn't come out the way you want it to, it's not like you can get the animal to come back and redo it. [It's the] same thing with people who don't want to be photographed.' So, when I heard that, it sort of just really, really clicked."
For Diamond, getting the Las Vegas parts of the novel right was important, especially given that she lives there and knows locals can be sensitive to misrepresentation or negative portrayals of the city. She prioritized depicting both Los Angeles and Las Vegas authentically, as if she were writing the book for their residents.
"I think you can still show like how cool and interesting [Las Vegas] is without like sounding like you're writing ad copy for it, which is how I sound probably in person when I talk about it," Diamond said. "But it was important for me to hopefully show somebody who feels like they would actually live here. Which is also why it was important that [Ben] works in the service industry and specifically as a busser at a restaurant, and that he's making a good living doing that, because one thing that I think is really great about Las Vegas is this is a place where the service industry is taken seriously."
Diamond will talk more about Close Relationships With Strangers on September 25 at the Writer's Block with local writer and author Tajja Isen.
Guests: Krista Diamond, author and writer
