In her debut novel, Close Relationships with Strangers, Krista Diamond examines the strange intimacies we form with people we’ll never meet. Blending celebrity culture, wildlife photography, and questions of loneliness and commodification, her debut novel asks what it means to watch, to be watched, and to mistake proximity for connection.
I caught up with Diamond via email to discuss parasocial relationships, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, empathy, and writing a character whose greatest obstacle is his inability to truly connect with others.
Al-Lateef Farmer: I’d love to start with the title, Close Relationships with Strangers. Can you tell readers a little bit about it?
Krista Diamond: The title is a reference to parasocial relationships, these one-sided relationships that we form with public figures. I think it’s the third title, and the one I landed on and am really happy with.
I think it’s important that it’s not just relationships with strangers. It’s close relationships with strangers because there is such an intimacy to the relationships we form with people who are on our screens and are such a big part of our lives, but not actually physically in our lives.
ALF: The one-sidedness speaks to the psyche being built up, particularly with social media. We have always had this obsession with celebrities, but now there’s this feigned intimacy because sometimes people actually respond to you. Once that happens, it’s over.
KD: Absolutely. I’ve done a lot of academic research about parasocial relationships. I’m doing a PhD right now, and I read a study about how the presence of micro-celebrities or influencers has affected parasocial relationships. It’s exactly what you said: that reciprocity.
If you DM Britney Spears, she’s not necessarily going to respond. But if you DM an influencer with only a few thousand followers, you might actually get a response, and it might actually be from that person and not just their team. That has made parasocial relationships stronger and has changed them.
I also write nonfiction, so I tend to use the tools of a journalist when approaching fiction. Research is important to me.
ALF: In the letter to the reader, you write about having two obsessions: wilderness and celebrity. On the surface, those worlds seem like they have nothing to do with each other, but this novel connects them. What did bringing those two obsessions together help you understand about attention, danger, beauty, and pursuit?
KD: I think it helped me understand the way different things are commodified. I worked in the national parks before, and I’ve lived in Las Vegas for ten years. Before this, I spent most of my twenties working in national parks.
People don’t necessarily think of wild spaces as places where beauty is commodified the way it is in Hollywood, but it really is. People go to Yellowstone and try to get the same photos of bison, or hopefully wolves, or a geyser going off at the exact time it goes off. Those experiences are commodified in the same way that pictures of famous people are. The presence of the camera can create a sense of isolation from the experience.
ALF: Vegas and Los Angeles play huge parts in this book, and they almost feel like siblings. What did those two cities give you that a more neutral setting could not have given this story?
KD: I like that you said siblings because that is exactly how I see them. Siblings don’t always get along. They have a connection but often live parallel lives. They’re not necessarily identical or close, but they have a connection to each other. That’s how Las Vegas and Los Angeles are.
Living in Las Vegas, the majority of our tourists come from Southern California. When you go to Los Angeles, you’re constantly seeing billboards for nightclubs in Las Vegas. But it doesn’t really go the other way. We don’t see billboards for Disneyland in Las Vegas. No one is really trying to get us to go to Los Angeles.
People in Las Vegas don’t always like going to Los Angeles because it’s huge, the traffic is intense, parking is hard, and it’s expensive. Las Vegas is such a small town by comparison. There are almost three million people in the metropolitan area here, but Los Angeles is so much bigger and has so many different neighborhoods.
Even the names are fun: Las Vegas as Sin City and Los Angeles as the City of Angels. Vegas feels like a place where people come to get drunk, gamble, make bad choices, and behave poorly, but they don’t necessarily consider it as a place where people live. Locals are always being asked what casino they live in.
There’s a whole world here outside of the Strip, with people living ordinary and very suburban lives. I wanted to show that in the book. Los Angeles is this place where people go to live their dreams. When it doesn’t work out, Las Vegas is happy to take the rejects. I love Las Vegas, so I don’t mean that disrespectfully. But we do have a lot of C-list and D-list celebrities here who are treated like royalty. It’s often where somebody might do their last act or reinvent themselves.
Going back to that sibling analogy, Las Vegas is the underdog sibling. Los Angeles is the golden child, and Las Vegas is the sibling that feels like it’s not getting the attention or respect it deserves.
ALF: Ben goes from wildlife photographer to paparazzo. There’s a comparison between photographing animals and celebrities, both often unwilling subjects. What interested you about that overlap, and where does that comparison start to fray for you?
KD: When I was originally writing the book, it was really exclusively set in Los Angeles in the world of celebrity and paparazzi. I had done a lot of writing before this book about my time in national parks and wilderness. I felt like I was getting pigeonholed as the person who was only writing about that experience. I thought I had to either completely do that or do something else.
Then, as part of the research process, I interviewed a paparazzi photographer, and he told me the work was just like wildlife photography because you’re chasing a person, you don’t get to control anything, and there’s often hostility there. That connected things for me.
I thought about experiences I’d had working in national parks and seeing wildlife photographers. One time in Grand Teton National Park, I got stuck in a bear jam, a traffic jam caused by people seeing a bear. There were photographers running by the car, yelling, just like paparazzi. There was a famous grizzly bear named Grizzly 399, and it was a huge deal to see her. In that moment, I realized it was identical to that experience.
But it was also troubling to hear a photographer compare photographing people to photographing animals because it dehumanizes people to think of them as animals. It also commodifies animals to think of them as subjects rather than wild creatures. It creates distance, whether it’s wildlife photography or paparazzi photography. When you’re photographing any subject that doesn’t really consent to being photographed, there’s a distance and an entitlement there, even if it’s well-intentioned.
ALF: Ben is many things, and he’s a character readers will judge, but you write him with care. How did you find your way into writing him with love while still allowing the reader to see the damage he causes?
KD: I appreciate hearing that because I want people to see that care. I hope at least some people will have affection for him or empathy for him because I really wanted him to feel like a human. He is self-aware and certainly doing a lot of bad things, but he’s doing that from a place of pain, which maybe people can relate to on some small level.
That complexity formed for me when I decided to bring Las Vegas into the book. When I initially wrote it, it was mostly the present-day Los Angeles material, and he was a much flatter character. Then I started thinking about who he was before we meet him at this point. Bringing in his relationship in Las Vegas, his relationship with his family, his inability to form relationships with coworkers, the way he sees animals and cities, and the way he lives his life made him more grounded and human.
He isn’t just a cold, calculating, unfeeling person chasing people around with a camera. He is somebody who has experienced heartbreak and pain, and he is operating from desperation and loneliness rather than a genuine desire to hurt people and be selfish.
ALF: Ben says early in the book, “In an alternate reality, I might really be on this date completely present with no ulterior motive, but I don’t live in that world anymore.” When did Ben stop living in the world where real intimacy was possible?
KD: I like that you pointed out that line because I wanted to give little moments like that to show the tragedy of this character. He’s not completely detached from humanity and emotions. He still recognizes the longing for connection but has decided not to have it.
That split occurred when his relationship ended and he really committed to being a paparazzi photographer. At a certain point in the novel, he decides to see relationships as transactional. That’s a conscious decision he makes.
He often has moments where there is an opportunity for connection. You see him on dates later in the novel, and he is mostly using those dates as ways to find sources and get information about celebrities. He is deliberately not going on dates with any hope of intimacy. But he occasionally meets people, women in particular, with whom he has these moments of connection. He knows he is choosing not to be himself or to make that connection.
That is something self-destructive in him. He could have connections with actual people instead of parasocial and transactional relationships, but he has chosen not to do that. It’s sad.
ALF: The novel is interested in looking at who gets watched, who gets paid to watch, who pretends not to watch. Paparazzi are condemned, but people still click on the photos and read the headlines. How much did you want the reader to feel uncomfortable about their own appetite for spectacle?
KD: I hope it makes people think about their role in all of this because paparazzi, celebrity media, and larger media wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a public appetite for it.
It’s a fine line because paparazzi often say, “I’m just doing what the public wants.” For example, the public really likes photos of Jennifer Garner. I’ve heard paparazzi complain that they hate photographing Jennifer Garner because their complaint is that she’s boring, but they seek her out because they’re acting as an avatar for what the public wants
They will say that whether it’s something harmless, like getting a photo of Jennifer Garner at the grocery store, or something destructive, like the paparazzi chasing Britney Spears in 2007 and helping drive her mental deterioration. They use that as an excuse: I wouldn’t be doing this if there wasn’t a market for it.
That is valid, but nobody is really blameless. I don’t want to condemn people who are interested in celebrity because I am very interested in celebrity and celebrity gossip, and I don’t think it makes you a bad person. But there are moments where it crosses a line.
We’ve come a long way since the early aughts, but things like celebrity sex tapes are really a nicer way of saying revenge porn. There are times when looking at photos or videos taken of people without their consent is an evil thing to do. Then there are times where maybe it is a gray area. I don’t know if it’s the worst thing to see a photo of someone at a restaurant, but it is something I hope readers think about, especially as media has changed.
With accounts like DeuxMoi, it has become citizen paparazzi. People send in tips and photographs of celebrities they see, becoming paparazzi themselves and kind of replacing paparazzi. The public now has a much more active role in something that used to be done by people actually doing that work.
ALF: Ben has this connection to Jack Whitlock, though Jack has no idea he exists. What were you exploring about the comfort and danger of loving and obsessing over someone who could never reject you because they don’t know you exist?
KD: It’s exactly that: never being able to be rejected. There is a safety in that. People find safety in parasocial relationships because they can’t be rejected.
People like Ben, who have a difficult time forming relationships with other people and understanding how to interact with the world, find safety in a relationship with someone who can never reject or hurt them. That’s a place where I hope people will see him as human because I think we’ve all experienced that on some level.
The danger in relying on those relationships is that it degrades your ability to have actual relationships. Part of being human, and part of what’s great about being human, is the messy complexity of our relationships with each other. Whether it is a romantic, familial, or platonic relationship, part of what makes a relationship stronger is having conflict and working through it. You never do that in a one-sided relationship with someone you can’t have conflict with. It serves as a temporary balm on loneliness, but it is not a long-term solution
ALF: This book is about photography, and photographers often talk about framing: what gets shown, what gets cropped out. How did you think about framing Ben’s story so we are intimate enough to understand him, but not so close that we feed into his delusions?
KD: First-person point of view was a deliberate choice for that reason because you are sitting with him and seeing how he thinks, but you are also seeing the way people react to him. I don’t see him as an unreliable narrator because I think he is representing the way the world interacts with him accurately.
When you see people being mean to him, which happens pretty often, that’s an accurate representation of how his transactional nature and delusions are bumping up against the real world. It’s seeing his increased detachment from reality while also knowing that it is not the reader’s reality and not the reality of the world.
ALF: How are you feeling as you get ready to put this book out into the world?
KD: I’m excited. It’s such a dream. I have always wanted to write a book, and I’m so happy it’s this book because of the combination of wilderness and celebrity.
I’ve heard the advice, “Write the book that only you can write.” What that means to me is that unique combination of wilderness and celebrity. I could have written a book about working in the national parks, and maybe it would have been good. A lot of people can write that book and do it well. I could have written a book just about celebrity. But my experience working in the national parks and my interest in celebrity allowed me to write a book that is really unique to me. I’m really proud that it’s this book
I’m also grateful to my agent, everyone at Simon & Schuster, and Matt Roeser, who designed the amazing cover
ALF: How much input did you have in the cover?
KD: I put together an exhaustive PowerPoint that no one asked for. They said they were starting cover design and that if I had any thoughts about things I liked or disliked, I could send them. I think people often send a few links or a Pinterest board, but I put together a very long Google Slides presentation showing covers I liked, fonts I liked, and things I didn’t want.
I really didn’t want something obviously Vegas-y. I didn’t want the Welcome to Las Vegas sign, and I didn’t want the Hollywood sign either. I also didn’t want something obviously paparazzi, like a camera. I wanted something subtler.
I think this cover nails it because it’s voyeuristic, but it’s not just somebody with a camera. The subtlety is incredible, and I’m so happy with it. When people see the real book, they pinch to zoom in on it.
Everything was handled with such care. My input was taken seriously. There were other covers considered, and this was the one people were excited about, but ultimately it felt up to me. My editor at Simon & Schuster, Olivia, checked in with me and asked if I really wanted a butt on the cover. That kind of checking in made me feel valued in the process. I also trusted their expertise. I feel really good about it and hope people respond to it.
ALF: What’s next for you?
KD: There is a tour. I’ll have events in Los Angeles, New York, Missoula, Telluride, Concord, and Las Vegas, with exciting conversation partners.
In Los Angeles, on June 29, I’ll be in conversation with Ruth Madievsky, who is such a great L.A. writer. In New York, I’ll be in conversation with MJ Corey, who wrote Deconstructing the Kardashians, which is a smart work of nonfiction, academic but accessible.
I’m also working on another novel and some nonfiction. There are lots of good things, but I’m also just enjoying this. The book comes out Tuesday, and I’m going to spend some time this weekend reading it and having a little moment with it before it’s out in the world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Krista Diamond’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Cosmopolitan, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Nevada Las Vegas and her work has been supported by Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Nevada Arts Council. She lives in Las Vegas. Close Relationships with Strangers is her debut novel.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Al-Lateef Farmer is a writer and educator from New Jersey. He is the co-founder of Fellowship of the Griots, a literary community rooted in deep, honest storytelling for writers of color. He is currently working on Avery Heights, a linked collection of stories set in a fictional New Jersey city, where place carries history and every life leaves a mark.