My novel, Absolutely True Lies, tells the sordid little tale of recently laid off journalist, Holly Gracin, who “lucks” into ghostwriting the autobiography of a sweet teen Nickelodeon star named Daisy Mae Dixson. It’s a journey through some of the most hilarious, depressing, and weirdest moments of Holly’s life so far, and a glimpse into just what it takes to be a part of the glitterati.
The book comes out of my own experiences, first working on film sets as a Script Supervisor and then a writer, before I was hired out of the blue to ghostwrite several books. It was both the most wonderful and frustrating time of my life, and for a girl from Western NY, it always seemed like a bit of a fever dream.
In the excerpt below, Holly is still new to the ghostwriting gig and trying to get a handle on what’s going on around her. She wakes up that morning in Los Angeles, expecting a noon meeting at Daisy’s house, and finds that she’s expected to fly to Miami for the sit-down — with just a couple hours notice. What ensues clues her in on just how warped her new employers are, and that the next few months of her life will be anything but ordinary.
***
WE LEFT THE HOTEL just after midnight, and despite the late hour, the paparazzi were still hanging around the entrance. I wondered if Jameson had made them aware of Daisy’s schedule, or if there was always someone from each tabloid waiting for pictures, should she happen to go out. It didn’t seem like an efficient system to me, but I also didn’t understand why people wanted pictures of her eating dinner at a restaurant in the first place.
I will say this for Axel and Sharla — I looked amazing. I was corseted so tight inside the tiny dress that I could feel my heartbeat in my liver, but seeing my nearly unrecognizable figure in the lobby’s mirrors was worth the pain. I’ve never thought of myself as particu- larly heavy, but I was a little too pleased with my unnaturally narrow waist and enormous cleavage. The instant I saw myself, I decided that this designer was someday making my wedding dress. That is, if he or she knew how to work with more than a yard of fabric.
As we took our first few steps outside, Daisy was immediately flanked by two enormous bodyguards she seemed to know quite well but whom I’d never seen before. I couldn’t even tell when and where they’d appeared, it happened so suddenly. One minute, our little group was just five, and then a moment later, we were seven.
The ridiculousness of this teenage girl’s entourage was starting to dawn on me. I spend most of every day completely alone; I suddenly realized Daisy was probably only by herself when she slept.
And if I thought the level of media attention was absurd before, once we reached the club, it was insane. There were throngs of people, packed together like sardines, as far as I could see in any direction. And since everyone seemed to have a camera, it was almost impos- sible to tell who was a fan and who was paparazzi. If any one of us spoke on the walk from the SUV to the club, I wouldn’t have heard it. It’s also unlikely that I would have seen it — or anything — with the endless flashes bursting in front of my eyes. From where I was standing, the club might as well have been pink-and-purple speckled. Three steps inside the door, so many things happened at once, I could hardly process them all. On stage, the DJ gave a loud shout- out to Daisy, prompting the crowd to go wild. At the same time, our group was herded up to a VIP level above the dance floor, and before we reached the room, all of us but Daisy were banded with red paper strips and she had a black X scrawled across the back of her hand. This relieved me somewhat, as I hadn’t been able to figure out why an underage girl was parading into a club in full view of the cameras. I figured no one would stop her from actually drinking, but I just couldn’t imagine she’d be dumb enough to do it while people were filming her.
“What is this place?” I yelled loudly to Daisy as we settled into a large red velvet couch.
“New club, just opened,” she shouted back. Jameson walked by us and handed her a large plastic cup with MOUNTAIN DEW on the side. “They paid us fifty grand to show up.”
“Fifty grand?” I asked incredulously. No wonder she could afford to hire a biographer — she could cover my salary with one night’s work. If you could call this work. “What do you have to do?”
“Nothing much,” Daisy said. “We just need to hang out for an hour or two, I’ll walk over to the balcony a couple of times and pre- tend to dance, and then we can go home.” She seemed to remember something, snapping her fingers for Jameson, who handed her a cell phone without a word. “Oh, and one more thing.”
Daisy set down her cup and turned so that her back was to the main part of the room. She raised her phone and put on a bright, fun smile. I’m sure there was a photo click during some portion of this, but I certainly wouldn’t have heard it. “Selfies!”
I hate the word selfie. It’s a tween’s word, rammed into our cultural consciousness and now spoken by everyone from the president to the Dalai Lama. I know it’s a perfectly legitimate word these days, but I refuse to utter it out loud. “Who are the pictures for?”
“My tweeties,” Daisy answered, never taking her eyes away from her phone. She tap-tapped for all of one second before passing the phone back to Jamie. It was lightning-quick.
“You already got that up on Twitter?” I asked. “You’re fast.”
At this, Daisy and Jamie turned to each other and laughed, sharing their first moment of true camaraderie in front of me. “I don’t handle my own social media. What am I, a hobo? Or a reality star? I have people who handle these things.”
Jamie crossed behind me, leaning in to my ear. Despite the level of background noise, I heard him pretty clearly. “We don’t even give her the passwords. Trust me, it’s for the best.”
Her “work” now done, Daisy picked up her cup and leaned back on the couch, yawning. I used to feel sorry for celebrities who couldn’t take two steps without a bodyguard and a camera in their faces, but my sympathy died in that Miami club. In fact, I was pretty angry. I practically lived in gangland, and she was getting paid to sit on a couch, drink soda, and fake-smile for her millions of fans on the Internet. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so obligated to waste my night keeping her company.
Axel and Sharla, already with drinks in their hands, ran over to me. “Dance?” Sharla shouted, holding out her hand to me. Axel hadn’t waited for us; he was twirling right there in the VIP section. “No, thanks,” I answered her. I thought I had refused loud enough, but Sharla grabbed my hand and yanked me up off the couch. Either I was screaming for nothing or it didn’t matter what I wanted. I looked back at Daisy. “You coming?”
“Can’t,” she said. “Security issues. No one in their right mind would put a celeb in the middle of a dance floor.”
Perhaps some tiny bit of sympathy should have returned, but it didn’t. Maybe Daisy was forced to be bored out of her mind for a couple of hours, but it was for money. And I was stuck in a smelly, sticky, hundred-degree club where I didn’t know anyone and I hadn’t eaten in twelve hours. I seriously wouldn’t have cared if cleaning the toilets was a requisite for Daisy collecting her fee.
So I made my way downstairs and out onto the dance floor, completely sober but wishing I was blackout drunk. I was tempted to grab a drink — Axel and Sharla sure seemed to be mixing business with pleasure — but I didn’t really know the rules for this sort of thing. If there were any rules. I was also afraid of getting wasted and calling Jameson a weirdo or, worse, telling Daisy I was starting to think she was a moron.
I was dancing for less than five minutes when a sweaty guy with a ponytail and a shirt open to his navel sauntered up to me and starting grinding against my leg. I resisted the urge to vomit on him, but the floor was so packed, I really had nowhere to go. It was even hotter out on the floor than upstairs, and as my body swelled a bit, I suddenly couldn’t catch my breath. People began looking wavy and out of focus, and their crazy gyrations didn’t help.
Axel spotted me trying to squirm away from Mr. South Beach and fought his way over. Without a single look to the other guy,
Axel wiggled between the two of us and began dancing with me. He had just put an arm around my waist when everything went black.
“O-M-F-G, we are already on TMZ.”
These were the first words I heard, and while I recognized it as human speech, I had no idea what it meant. I slowly opened my eyes and discovered that I was on the couch in Daisy’s hotel room, completely encircled by the group. The second I moved, all four people leaned in and stared down at me intently.
“She’s awake,” Daisy said.
“Thank you, Daise, we can all see that,” Jameson replied.
I struggled to sit up, but Jameson shoved me back down. And I don’t mean that he gently moved me back to the cushion, he literally thrust me down.
“You shouldn’t move,” Jameson told me, in what was possibly the worst bedside manner I’d ever seen. “The club’s medic said we had to keep you lying down.”
I opened my mouth to speak but didn’t get a chance.
“I can’t believe that photographer managed to get the whole thing,” Sharla said, shaking her head. “I thought they weren’t allowed into the club.”
“There’s always some vulture with a cell phone pic or hidden camera,” Axel said.
“Oh, come on.” Sharla snorted. “You’re the one who’s always trying to get pictures with those MTV kids.”
“You look so thin in this picture,” Daisy said, holding up her tablet for me to see.
I moved my head around so that I could get a good look at the screen. I did, in fact, look quite thin, but I also looked like a strung-out inebriate being carried off the dance floor. It took only a moment longer before I saw the headline: SOMETHING ROTTEN IN DAISY’S ENTOURAGE???
“I am so sorry,” I said, certain that I was about to be fired. So much for staying out of trouble.
“Why?” Daisy asked, laughing. She put the tablet back in her lap and started looking up other websites. “This is awesome. I want to see if X17 has the pictures yet.”
I struggled to sit up but only made it about halfway. I was still strapped into the tiny dress and felt breathless and dehydrated. “I don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head. “How is this a good thing?”
Before anyone could reply, Jamie’s cell phone chimed and he answered it in the middle of the first ring.
“Yeah,” he said, his tone clipped. Jamie stared off, listening to the voice in his ear. I think Bluetooth devices are ridiculous, anyway, but it’s times like these that I really hate them. If Jamie just had the phone pressed to his ear, chances are we would have been able to hear at least some of the conversation. Instead, the four of us leaned in closer, waiting for some clue as to what was being said, but pre- tending we hardly even noticed the call. “Sure. . . . Of course not.” “Perez Hilton is saying you’re my alcoholic cousin,” Daisy whispered to me. “Is this like the coolest thing that has ever happened to you?”
“Ugh, Perez is over,” Axel said. “No one reads him anymore.”
I know I lead a pretty sheltered life, but I’ve still had plenty of experiences that rate above passing out in a sweltering Miami nightclub and having the pictures plastered all over gossip websites. Call me crazy.
“Uh-huh,” Jamie continued. He rolled his eyes, but I couldn’t tell if it was for our benefit or his. “Yeah, I’m on top of it. . . . I’ll start making calls at nine A.M. . . . Talk to you tomorrow.” He hung up the phone and then sighed, throwing Daisy a look of irritation. “Your mother is a pain in the ass.”
“That’s not nice,” Daisy said, not moving her gaze from the tablet screen. “I’ve asked you not to talk about her like that.”
“The day she earns a single goddamn dollar of her own money, she can tell me what to do,” Jamie shot back, grabbing a remote control from the coffee table. “Until then, Faith can shut her mouth.”
If anyone else was shocked by this exchange, they didn’t show it. In fact, Axel yawned broadly and leaned his head on Sharla’s shoulder. When Jamie flipped on the television, I used the screen as an excuse to look somewhere else.
“B-T-dubs, we made it on to CNN,” Jamie tossed out as he reached the channel. “Faith saw the teaser about five minutes ago.” Axel snorted. “And how would your mother know what’s happening on the Communist News Network?”
Daisy shrugged. “She likes to know what lies the lefties are telling.”
I was momentarily distracted by Jamie’s idiotic text-speak, but it took me only a few seconds longer to realize what was going on. Pictures and/or video of me passing out in the club were about to be splashed all over the giant plasma screen. And watched in millions of homes in America — including my mother’s. The dizziness washed over me again and I had the urge to vomit on Daisy’s lap.
“I have to go,” I said, struggling to sit up. I attempted this a few times before I realized that the corset was too tight to allow me to bend at the waist, so I was forced to roll off the couch. “I can’t watch this.”
“Sweetheart, you shouldn’t be standing,” Sharla said, getting up and putting her arms around my shoulders.
On TV, CNN came back from commercial and a well-coiffed reporter smiled blankly at the camera.
I tried to move quickly, maneuvering out of Sharla’s grip, but I was sick, exhausted, and trussed up like a pig — and about as fast as a Christmas ham.
“As we reported before the break, a member of Daisy Dixson’s entourage passed out tonight at a club in Miami, and we have the exclusive footage.”
I felt the bile rising in my throat and just made for the door, somehow having the sense to grab my purse on the way out. “I’ll see you in the morning,” I managed to say between hyperventilating breaths.
“Do us a favor and don’t die in your sleep,” Jameson called after me. “This level of publicity helps us, but a death would really cramp Daisy’s Oscar chances.”
***
Praise for Absolutely True Lies
“An enticing glimpse into the celebrity lifestyle. . . . Stuhler’s personal experiences add an extra layer of intrigue that is sure to draw in readers.”
— Library Journal
“A truly winning debut that peels back the layers of the glamorous life of a young star as well as those in her orbit.”
— Booklist
“In what can best be described as a mash-up of Entourage and The Devil Wears Prada, Absolutely True Lies by Rachel Stuhler emerges as the kind of juicy read that is perfect to whittle away a summer day.”
— Hollywood Reporter
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Reprinted with the permission of Touchstone Books and the author. For more information, please click here.
