Books: Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper
Exclusive interview with author Hilary Liftin and a review of her new novel about the rise and fall of a Hollywood mega-star couple
Rating: Three Stars
“Celebrities with the juiciest stories don’t necessarily want to share them,” says Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper author Hilary Liftin, who was a ghostwriter for over ten years. “I was reading yet another article about a celebrity marriage imploding when it finally dawned on me, I could have the celebrity of my dreams at my disposal, dishing all, willing to risk everything, if I just invented her.”
Inspired the real-life drama of the marriage and break-up of Katie Homes and Tom Cruise, Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper is a breathless journey to the heights of Hollywood power and royalty. Life in the spotlight is at first sought, then impossible to escape. A story of Hollywood fame, romance and relationship. Full of twists and turns, if you like Hollywood drama this is for you. Told from Lizzie Pepper’s point of view, it would have been nice to have more emotional details from Lizzie along the way. A light read, perfect for the airport or beach.
An American actress whose roles are usually girl-next-door, Lizzie Pepper meets Rob Mars, mega superstar. They have a whirlwind romance and celebrity wedding. Always on the cover of some magazine, the pair dominates the spotlight. Away from the spotlight, Lizzie’s life is quite different, with lonely holidays in a sumptuous villa to her husband’s deep commitment to a repressive cult, Lizzie reveals a side of fame that her fans have never seen.
Liftin says researching the book was fun. “I focused on lifestyles of the rich and famous. If I was an A-list celebrity, where would I go on vacation? Where could I get married? How might I try to keep it a secret? The best detail I found in my research was that there is actually a trailer, one of those trailers that stars use on movie sets, that is fully tricked out with LCD screens in place of windows. The screens project what is going on outside the trailer. To me that was the most amazing, hyper-digital-spy-age idea. That you would replace your windows with a video feed of what was actually going on outside.”
Moving from ghostwriting to fiction presented some problems for Liftin. “So fiction was completely new territory, and I had the unfamiliar experience of sometimes writing myself down the wrong path. I threw out whole chapters at a time. At times it felt strange to move forward without the safety net of fact. But I did myself a service by choosing to write a fake celebrity memoir. I’d been at those reins before. My experience in shaping books helped me more than I knew it would.”
Before Liftin started her ghostwriting career, she wrote two books under her own name. Dear Exile is a collection of letters that she exchanged with a friend when they were in their twenties. “She was in the Peace Corps in Kenya, and I was finding my way as a single girl in New York City,” says Liftin. Candy and Me is a memoir of her life told through candy, with each candy triggering a memory of a specific time and place.
“After those two books, I was pretty much done talking about myself,” says Liftin. “But I love the intimacy of the memoir, and so I took to ghostwriting right away. It’s a chance to help tell the personal story of someone whose life is far more dramatic than my own. In the past ten years I’ve ghostwritten over fifteen nonfiction books.”
Before becoming a full-time writer in 2006, Hilary worked in the publishing industry for ten years, holding positions in editorial, marketing, and business development at Houghton Mifflin, BarnesAndNoble.com, and the ebook division of Time Warner Books (now Hachette).
Liftin is based in Los Angeles. She was born in New York city and raised in Washington, D.C.
Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper by Hilary Liftibn Hardcover: 352 pages, Publisher: Viking (July 21, 2015), Language: English. ISBN-13: 978-0670016419 $27.95
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