Lila Raicek on Debut Novel The Plunge, Love, Loss, and Reinvention

Lila Raicek has been busy. Her play My Master Builder debuted final 12 months at Wyndham’s Theater in London’s West End. It starred Kate Fleetwood, Elizabeth Debicki, and Ewan McGregor in his first play in over a decade. Meanwhile, Raicek has been adapting one other play of hers (Vertebrae) right into a TV sequence (Night Float) starring Nina Dobrev, whereas additionally creating a brand new play (Fire Season) for Broadway that Billy Crudup and Amanda Seyfried have been studying. But on a latest morning, the author spoke to me from her dwelling in New York about yet one more mission: her debut novel, The Plunge. 

“When you’re writing a play, or a screenplay, you have the ability to dip into other characters’ perspectives, and you’re constantly flipping those perspectives, which keeps a story alive in a certain way,” Raicek stated of why she selected to write down The Plunge as a novel. With this story, “I really wanted to get under the skin of this character and into the psychological and emotional layers of her.” Writing a novel requires staying with a singular perspective, continued Raicek, and “even if she’s an unreliable narrator, it was a challenge I wanted to give myself.”

It’s additionally a private story. Raicek started writing The Plunge in 2021, just some years after calling off her marriage ceremony to Amazon exec Roy Price following revelations of sexual harassment claims by a TV producer in opposition to him. Raicek then decamped to New York and began down the trail of rebuilding. “This book came out of a dark period in my own life when I was grappling with loss and really thinking about the process of starting over,” she defined. “I wanted to explore a character who has to almost go to an even darker place to find herself again.”

The novel’s protagonist, Liv, a Hollywood author of about Raicek’s age, flees L.A. after her problematic fiancé is fired from his job then dies in a automotive accident mere weeks earlier than their marriage ceremony. Back in Manhattan, Liv is drawn right into a sordid love triangle in opposition to a backdrop of hedonism and glamour spanning Manhattan, the Hamptons, and Lake Como. Liv’s path to reinvention is messy, unruly, and nonlinear in a means that “I think hasn’t been explored very often,” continued Raicek, however one which has consumed her latest work. “To have an authentic, raw voice, you have to go to the thing that obsesses you.”  

For anybody who has seen My Master Builder, the themes of want, betrayal, and the errors of the previous could seem acquainted. In the play — which Raicek primarily based on Ibsen’s The Master Builder — an previous affair between a well-known architect (McGregor) and his scholar (Debicki) is reignited when the architect’s spouse (Fleetwood) arranges a cocktail party the previous scholar is invited to. 

“I’ve been interested in exploring a world through an outsider perspective — somebody who’s lured into a world that they are not familiar with, and how do those very combustible elements end up playing out?” says Raicek. “As a female writer, it’s a really exciting time to mine the depth and messiness of female desire. I think it appears in my work whether I want it to or not.”

She wrote My Master Builder in a sudden inventive burst after receiving the fee, and inside six months it was going to the West End. “It was a wild dream,” recalled Raicek. “A rollercoaster of a process that I was lucky to have.” The play bought out for 13 weeks and was effectively reviewed. 

“It is so exciting to have that dialog and conversation with an audience, and sit in the theater while they were gasping and crying and yelling at the stage,” continued Raicek. With a novel, the expertise is nearly totally inside and quiet, she admits, “but I’m hoping that it will touch people and move people, and the characters will mirror the reader’s own experiences of pain and loss and incongruent desires and all the things that the novel is about.” 

So will Raicek adapt The Plunge to display or stage? “I’ve already been developing it for film with a very exciting star,” stated Raicek, although she was tight-lipped on who. “It’ll be announced in due time,” however within the meantime she’s targeted on translating her work to display. In different phrases, Raicek isn’t slowing down anytime quickly.

This story appeared within the April 8 difficulty of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click here to subscribe.