Krista Diamond might not seem like the type of person to be fascinated by paparazzi.
The essayist worked for years at a series of national parks: Death Valley, Yellowstone, Glacier, and Big Bend. When a photographer compared wildlife photographers to paparazzi, she was intrigued. She knows about wildlife and has long had an interest in celebrity culture. As well, she was aware of animals who became popular with the public: the bear Grizzly 399, for example, and Los Angeles’ own mountain lion, P-22.
The comparison “opened up” the novel she was writing, she says. “Close Relationships With Strangers,” published by Simon & Schuster, follows Ben, a Las Vegas restaurant worker who has moved to Los Angeles to become a paparazzo, turning his back on his previous interest in wildlife photography.
Ben has a white whale: Jack Whitlock, a movie star with whom Ben has been obsessed for years. When Jack becomes embroiled in a cheating scandal, Ben becomes even more determined to track him down. At the same time, Ben is being stalked and harassed by fans of the musician Mia Luna, who are furious with him for taking a picture of the star that exposed a secret of hers. As Ben’s obsession grows and Mia Luna’s fans get more aggressive, Ben finds himself losing his grip on reality.
Diamond discussed her novel via telephone from her home in Las Vegas. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
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Q. How did you go about tracking down paparazzi to talk to them and shadow them?
It was not super easy. I talked to photographers that I know and asked them if they, in their own work, had ever encountered paparazzi. That was how I got connected, just photographers who knew other photographers. From there, it was just a matter of reaching out to them. One paparazzi photographer whom I shadowed in Beverly Hills, I actually found on Airbnb. I don’t know if he still does, but at the time he was offering this Airbnb experience that you could book, where you could go out and shadow him for the day. Some of them are active on Instagram, and a lot of them want money. So it was a lot of trial and error.
I also listened to a podcast that is hosted by two paparazzi, and occasionally paparazzi will show up in documentaries and other things. So in addition to interviewing them, which was important to me, I also tried to consume as much media as I could about them. I also spent a lot of time in L.A., and I tried to go to places where paparazzi might be and just observe them. I was like the paparazzi for the paparazzi.
Q. Was there anything you learned that surprised you about their line of work?
Definitely. When I had originally envisioned the novel, I was applying that early 2000s celebrity lens to it, and thinking about this time when paparazzi were very successful, and there were a lot of them. You always saw them in these huge groups, and they were making a lot of money, and that’s not the situation anymore. When I was shadowing this one paparazzo, I told him what I was working on, and he said, “There’s no way that you can set this in the present day if you’re going to make this person successful because the paparazzi industry is dying. They’re just not making the money that they used to for a number of reasons.” It’s the same reason that the media in general is struggling.
Initially, when he said that, I was kind of disappointed, but then I realized that that opened up this opportunity for this conflict in the novel, which is this character moves to Los Angeles in about 2015, right when it’s kind of over. A few paparazzi told me that 2015 was the last year that it was pretty good for them. So knowing that, I wanted to put the narrator in this place where he’s arrived to do this thing that is kind of over.
Q. How did you go about getting into the mind of Ben, who is quickly revealed in the novel to be amoral and mercenary?
It sounds cheesy, but the voice just came to me. I spent a lot of time with it, and I could just hear it. And even though I don’t work in Death Valley anymore, I still spend a lot of time there, and I would just go out hiking and try to see things as he would because he’s someone that spends a lot of time in the natural world. But also, I think one thing that helped me access that character was making the decision to make him human, because a paparazzi photographer is such an archetype. I could have written a novel that was just all surface, this person who’s just doing this work. But I wanted to write about somebody who has had heartbreaks and pain in their life. Even if people don’t necessarily like him, I wanted it to feel like there’s some humanity there. There’s a soul at stake, at least at one point.
Q. Why do you think that Ben is so obsessed with Jack in particular, as opposed to any other movie star?
So many people have asked me that. Initially, my answer when I was first writing the novel is that the people that we become fixated on are often random. And it’s situational. I think parasocial relationships often form just because you are around the idea of someone. Ben says that Jack is just a part of the infrastructure: just growing up and seeing this person on TV and seeing his face on billboards, you’re aware of him in the way that we are aware of people like Brad Pitt or Taylor Swift. Even if you aren’t actively choosing to engage with their work, you are going to be around it at some point, and you’ll probably have an opinion about it.
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That passive way that people form parasocial relationships is really interesting to me. Ben’s passively exposed to him, and then chooses to take more of an active role in that obsession. I think he wrestles with why that is, too. I think that feeling of not knowing why you’re obsessed with someone is something that can drive you really crazy. And for Ben, I think it’s also tied to masculinity. He sees Jack as the idea of this real man, and he sees him as a father figure, or a brother, or this person he wants to be, or maybe this person he wants to be with. It’s very complicated and confusing for him.
Q. Ben is also dealing with Mia Luna’s fans, who have parasocial relationships with her.
I really wanted to put the idea of what we call “stan” culture into the novel because I had this classic old Hollywood idea of celebrity in Jack, but I also wanted there to be a more modern version of how we perceive celebrity now, which really is that stan culture, that idea of a fan base that gives himself a name the way that Lady Gaga’s fans call themselves Little Monsters.
Q. Fandoms aren’t a new thing, of course, but there seems to be something different and darker about stan culture. What do you think might have led to some of the modern fandoms becoming so intense? Do you think it’s just the advent of the internet and cell phones?
Technology is definitely part of it, but it’s also that the technology is what fosters that particular kind of parasocial relationship that leads a fan base to believe that they know what a celebrity wants, perhaps even better than the celebrity might know for themselves. And I think that comes with the type of celebrity that has a big online presence and has built a lot of their brand, maybe even their creative work, around making the fans feel like they know them. Then the fans do feel like they know them. That’s why you have all these fan bases who will harass people, and often the celebrity will have to step in and make a statement saying that that’s not appropriate to do, but yet the fans still have this idea of, “Well, I know better.”
There’s this psychological term, the veridical self — the real self — and then there’s the public-facing self. And it’s really interesting how when somebody becomes famous, there’s kind of this split between your public-facing self and your veridical self, which is who the celebrity really is. But the fans typically get attached to the public-facing self, so even though the celebrity is saying, “This is who I really am, and this is what I want,” the fans just deny that because they’re attached to this image that the person has constructed.