There’s a quote that says, “There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.” But what if that pursuit leads you to a multitude of crimes and prison? And what if you’re asked to ghostwrite the story of a criminal who committed such crimes and is dubbed the “Robin Hood of Roxbury Drive” by the media?
In his debut novel, In Pursuit of Beauty (Blackstone Publishing), The Hollywood Reporter senior writer Gary Baum explores that concept and more, drawing on years of reporting on compelling figures in Los Angeles, from Angelyne to Heidi Fleiss. The novel’s story was inspired in part by his 2014 feature “Plastic Surgery Suicide Puts Spotlight on Beverly Hills Patients’ Desperation, Lies and Mental States,” which detailed the tragedy of a plastic surgery patient who’d fallen to her death from a Beverly Hills medical plaza soon after a facelift.
Gary Baum
Kieumai Vo
“I ended up doing a lot of reporting where I talked to different plastic surgeons and people in this world,” Baum tells THR. “It helped me enter the world of Beverly Hills plastic surgery in a way that I never really thought about. I just realized that it was a really rich terrain to think about money, beauty and market capitalism.”
In Pursuit of Beauty centers on former cosmetic surgeon Dr. Roya Delshad, who commits medical insurance fraud to offer nips and tucks to those unable to afford it. Although she has a savior complex, the foundation of Roya’s crime stems from much more deeply rooted issues and a lonely past. Growing up “barely in the city limits” of Beverly Hills and with a beautiful mom and sister, Roya aims to find self-worth through a nose job that eventually leads to more cosmetic procedures and a pursuit of beauty to which she hopes to also give others access. Because to Roya, she had the control to “reshape” fate and offer a gift of beauty. “The doctor will see you now, truly see you, and determine how you see yourself, how you wish to see yourself,” Roya says, also noting that all should “have access to their most desired and desirable selves.”
“She does kind of consider herself as sort of a Robin Hood figure. She’s not Luigi Mangione. She’s not out there assassinating people. She’s basically running an altruistic grift that she kind of walked into. So I think she’s a pretty sympathetic character,” Baum says of his protagonist.
Initially hoping to profile the alluring con, journalist Wes Easton’s venture takes a different direction when Roya asks him to ghostwrite a memoir for her instead as a means of resurrecting her reputation. The two then end up in a dynamic that resembles that of Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, Baum says. The novel alternates between their perspectives, with their voices showcasing different L.A. genres: Wes, a noir, and Roya, a tell-all with Britney Spears songs as the title chapters. But navigating fact versus fiction results in obstacles for their fraught relationship.
Amid his novel’s release, Baum reflected on writing his debut novel, playing off of a “dishy tell-all” and examining “the lengths people go to fulfill their yearning and longing in a practical realm.”
In an excerpt you shared, you mentioned that one of your THR investigations inspired this book. What about that story really stuck with you enough to be inspired to write a book?
I was sent out to look into this tragic death of a woman who accidentally died when she fell off a building [while] in aftercare in Beverly Hills in 2014. There’s never really an answer for something like that. We found it to be this post-operative behavioral disturbance — like a psychological disturbance. I ended up doing a lot of reporting where I talked to different plastic surgeons and people in this world. It helped me enter the world of Beverly Hills plastic surgery in a way that I never really thought about. I just realized that it was a really rich terrain to think about money, beauty, market capitalism and a bunch of things that I thought were really interesting. I also thought, as we oftentimes do when we do journalism, that there’s so much you can’t get at. Fact can only get you so far, and fiction can get you further. I think that was one element.
But I also previously, years earlier, was struck by an article about a plastic surgeon that I’d read in Harper’s Magazine. It was about this guy who was a plastic surgeon — I think at Dartmouth — and he was doing all of these really radical things having to do with body modification. It made me think about the ethics involved, almost sort of a Victor Frankenstein situation. It made me think of this space as a rich area of medicine that isn’t necessarily taken as seriously in literature as it could be. There are plenty of novels in the area of emergency medicine and the area of psychology, but I thought that there was more here. My father’s a neurologist; my wife is a doctor. I feel probably more comfortable exploring these areas because of my proximity to that. And so those things just kind of put me in that realm.
Writing a book is a different arena, especially when compared to writing reported features. Can you talk about the writing process for this and how it was different and challenging? How did it make you rethink your usual writing process?
I had an outline for every chapter [with] a paragraph brief of what’s going to happen in each of these chapters. But I also allowed myself to stray if I needed to. And then what I also did is once I got to that chapter, I did a lot of brainstorming, and got into a lot more of the specifics of the outlining. Like what are the beats going to be? Because it was very overwhelming. Even though the book is not that long — it’s 250 pages — it was a lot for me to write.
Sometimes writing a shorter book can be more challenging than a longer book.
Yeah, I wanted it to be a shorter book. I like shorter books. I like books that feel fleet. I feel like one of the things that I brought from my journalism experience is definitely that feeling in every paragraph and every sentence of writing for this sort of ideal reader and [always thinking], “Are you bored right now?” Like, if you’re not moving the plot along, then you’d better be doing some character revelation and something had better be happening here. Otherwise, cut it and move it along. Because of my anxiety about writing fiction this length, I wanted to have a lot of outlining in place.
As a high-profile and award-winning writer, was it hard to get an agent or a publisher? What can you share about that process?
I went through several years of revisions with a number of early reader friends who gave me some really helpful, thoughtful reads. I adjusted the book accordingly and then eventually I sent it out. I was lucky, because the agent that I found was Shane Salerno. I chose him because he’s a West Coast, L.A. guy, and I wanted somebody who I thought might connect with it being an L.A. book and understood L.A. To me, the book is extremely about and of L.A. in its ethos, but on a superficial level, it’s about a nutso Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. It comes out of a certain history, sensibility and a certain thoughtfulness about life in this particular place that I take very seriously. I wanted somebody to be able to connect with it by having spent a lot of time here. That was why I purposely reached out to Shane, and luckily he was interested. He knew of my work, and he was interested in the pitch. He does a lot of Hollywood business. So that luckily worked out.
The two main characters whom readers meet and follow are Roya and Wes Easton. Talk to me about creating them. As a journalist, what was it like crafting a journalist in Wes?
So Wes is sort of a composite character — there’s some of me in him, but he’s definitely not me. He’s sort of a heightened figure. He’s a protagonist, but he’s not a protagonist like Roya. She’s the true protagonist of the story, and he’s our way into seeing her. In my thinking about him, what I think I share with him is sort of a neutral observer feeling, particularly when approaching big personalities like Roya. I wanted to both offer a certain kind of transparency in almost a Patrick Bateman-esque [character], how a sort of conniving journalist might act to kind of reel in their prey, so to speak. In the early chapters, he’s very calculating to try to get Roya to participate in a profile, which she eventually decides not to do, but instead makes her own offer to participate in this ghostwriting. It’s kind of a riff on Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer.
This novel, to me, is two books in one, and playing with two different classic L.A. genres. The Wes narrative is playing with noir. He’s the private investigator going after the femme fatale. The Roya narrative, her memoir, is playing off of the dishy tell-all.
The thing that was interesting to me about her is that I wanted to write about people who have a strong sense of themselves and a strong sense of their own narrative and their own story. And [who] are so strong that they’re able to push back on other people, which you can see that she does. I’ve experienced that when I did my reporting on Angelyne, Heidi Fleiss or on many males. It’s a strong sense of ego. And I think that creates an interesting tension and dynamic between the inquisitor and the subject. There’s a maverick streak to her, and I wanted her to be an avatar of that.
Something I’ve found in talking to people, particularly people who have done things that seem wrong or a lot of people can’t understand, [is that] to them it makes perfect sense and it’s drawn through their entire lived experience. And you’re either being judgmental to them or you’re not understanding them and their experience [if you disagree]. That is something that I’ve learned from my own time interacting with all sorts of people professionally through this work, and so that’s something that I wanted to showcase.
The book alternates between Wes’ and Roya’s perspectives. The chapter titles in Roya’s perspective are names of Britney Spears songs. Can you talk about the Britney connection and its purpose?
[Roya] has a particular pop sensibility. She is somebody who’s into girly pop. She’s somebody who is intellectually very fierce and she’s somebody who watches a lot of Bravo. She’s definitely somebody who loves Britney and Madonna, because they’re people who are empowered. The things that she loves, is the embodied empowerment and also the romantic yearning. I think she’s a romantic about herself. She’s somebody who has a vision for herself [from] when she’s a teenager and her adolescence, and then you follow her by the time she’s in her early 40s. She fell from grace, but she became the person she wanted to be.
You write that Roya is shaped by the values of her native Beverly Hills and haunted by this past of being what she described as socially invisible. But rather than be influenced by social media like we may be in present time, her obsession with external beauty seems to originally stem from her mom and sister and the comparison to them. Can you talk about their dynamics and what you wanted to get across there?
She’s in a situation where she considers herself either sort of like a plain Jane or an ugly duckling as a kid, compared to her mother, who’s just this classical WASP beauty, and her sister, who’s an incredibly attractive young woman. [Roya] has this jealousy and resentment that can be bred from an intimate closeness. She talks about how it’s different than if she were to see a model in a magazine. The fact that these are family members, it’s something that’s harder for her to deal with, and it’s something that’s psychologically shaping. Somebody like Roya, who’s clearly smart and savvy, she’s not growing up anywhere — she’s growing up in Beverly Hills. And that creates a really challenging landscape and an indelible one for her.
There’s a moment where Roya says that though she has many regrets, the biggest disappointment is she’s no longer able to help more women in the way that she was. She seemingly has this savior complex and believes her intent is good. But how did you view her? Is she a villain or is she just misconstruing herself as the hero of her own story?
I think that like many novelists, I probably have Stockholm syndrome with my characters. I’m largely sympathetic to her, having spent many years in her head. I do think that she believes what she says — she’s a true innocent in that way — and that she means well, that she always just wanted to help and she’s basically trying to correct market inefficiencies, so to speak. She does consider herself to be Robin Hood figure. She’s not Luigi Mangione. She’s not out there assassinating people. She’s basically running an altruistic grift that she kind of walked into. So I think she’s a pretty sympathetic character. I think that if this happened in real life and it was discovered, people would be loving her. I think it’s a little like, “I understand why you did that. I understand how it happened. [But] I don’t necessarily think that you need to be going around on a crusade about it.”
In order to hear Roya’s perspective, there has to be a level of trust there with Wes. And throughout the book we watch their dynamic evolve from being strangers to eventually even crossing the line intimately. Can you talk about the progression of their dynamic?
It’s mostly an intellectual tension between the two. I wanted there to be a physical dimension that would be resolved because the whole theme of the book is this physical thing and so it needed to go there. So much of her deal with him in this power dynamic is teasing him and pushing him, but he ostensibly has control. He can walk away. She’s the woman in prison, yet she finds different ways to exert control in the conversation. It’s a bit Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. Some of the ways that she does it is to be sexually aggressive. From the time she was much younger, she wanted to have sexual power over people. She didn’t want to just have intellectual power. She didn’t want to just have financial power. She wanted this as part of her arsenal. And so you see her deploying it in real time through the book and you see it against this other character who’s trying to deal with her. You also see it from somebody who himself seems to have his own sexual power and is not normally just bowled over. I thought that was an interesting dynamic, because he has own vibe, [which] is for the most part, relaxed, chill, languid, and her thing is just much different.
You also introduce a cast of characters who offer different perspectives on Roya and her crimes, whether it be admitting that they looked the other way and didn’t say anything, didn’t want to talk to Wes at all, knew about her crimes and went along with it or are still complimentary of her. How much of that was connected to what you experienced in your reporting? What was it like to explore Wes navigating that?
I wanted to get at some of the experience of reporting where you talk to people who want to talk to you, but don’t necessarily have much to say, or you talk to people who don’t want to talk to you, people who have you go down these rabbit holes and sometimes they lead you nowhere or lead you to new things you didn’t know and are interesting, but only to you and not to the task at hand. I wanted to get at that, because, to me, it was natural that he would go on this journey. I know that this isn’t the way that most memoirs are done. In fact, when I was talking to my editor at the publishing house, and he edits a lot of memoirs, he told me, “Gary, just a verisimilitude issue here: Wes would not be spending this much time, or really any time at all, talking to anybody. The money is not there for him to be doing that.” I was like, “I hear you. Let’s have some creative license here,” because it’s interesting to bring in these other voices. This is his first book. This is his way of understanding and testing the situation. He’s bringing his investigative reporter hat to this ghostwriting memoir process. But I also just thought that it was another structural way of bringing in voices so it wouldn’t be overly claustrophobic.
One of the things that’s been out there in the larger culture, and something I’ve dealt with a lot in my reporting, is the question of who gets to tell the story? What’s the difference between something being emotionally true and factually true, and what should be valued more? And obviously, there are certain things that she says or believes, versus him saying it, they can come at it and both be right. So I thought that this structure allowed a way to dramatize that.
In a guest column, you wrote that “fiction itself remains ever more essential to understanding humanity.” So what is it about humanity that you wanted to understand and explore in this book?
I was really interested in the lengths people go to fulfill their yearning and longing in a practical realm, and how that can be impinged upon by just born circumstance. Wes has a little passage in there where he talks about one of the reasons why he finds Roya so compelling is that she sort of dreamed beyond her born circumstance. She created her own self. And so to me, that was the key thing. Then this idea about what truth is. In the age of truthiness, how should we value truth when different people have different personal definitions of how they weigh truth, whether it’s more of a factual truth or more of an emotional truth. And how do you navigate that when you need to exist in the world with people who have different understandings and perspectives on what truth is to them and different practices of how they interpret truth. So those were two of the haunting things that I was really kind of grasping at.
Roya’s bitter former medical office employee Jackie describes Roya as a “weird, sad, broken girl” who dealt with it by becoming a “paradigm and exponent of conformist adult beauty.” And though she’s “pretty” now, she’s “still sad and broken.” Do you believe that Roya is simply sad and broken?
I think that Jackie has a legitimate critique of Roya, which is that Roya has arguably a very narrow and somewhat conservative and even regressive view of what beauty is, and it’s hemmed in by societal standards that are either pitiful or pitiable. Part of why Jackie in particular is not won over by Roya is a feminist critique. She’s saying, “Come on. You should have a wider lens than Roya has.” And I think that that’s fair. But I also think that if you think that Roya is broken or tragic or not as evolved as one should be she should still be allowed the grace of what she’s found to cope. Roya has her meaning, and I think that there is legitimacy and validity in that. I would say that Jackie has some very good points. I do think if we were sitting here with Roya, it would be nice to gently tell Roya that she still has some journeying to do; there are other things in her pursuit of beauty that she could focus on.
What larger conversation about beauty standards in both the industry and real life do you hope spark for those who read this book?
I think it would be interesting to ask oneself if you agree with Roya’s premise that looks really do have a substantial effect on how people treat you. If so, is her advocacy that outlandish?
Do you see yourself continuing to write more of Wes in future books? What kind of stories appeal to you to tell?
Never say never! But I have enough stuff to keep myself busy in my head for many, many years. I want to write stories that are big and complicated and ambiguous. But at the same time, hopefully, when you’re reading them, they’re fun reads with deep characters.
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In Pursuit of Beauty releases on July 1.
