Inspiration for THE RECEPTIONIST

Seasoned Los Angeles TV producer Kate Myles makes her fiction debut with THE RECEPTIONIST (Thomas & Mercer; 8/1), a blazing love triangle situated in the world that churns after “Cut!” A top reality talent agent can only look past her TED-Talking business guru husband’s infidelity for so long before she has to take matters into her own hands – unfortunately, this mistress is much more volatile than she’d bargained for.

Myles, having worked both in front of the camera as the host of the Travel Channel’s Not Your Average Travel Guide and behind-the-scenes as a producer for a variety of networks, including Discovery, OWN, and the Food Network, lays bare the seedy underbelly of Hollywood’s glossy reality TV scene.

The Inspiration for THE RECEPTIONIST

by  Kate Myles

I’ve worked in reality TV for nearly two decades. And I want to let you in on a secret: sometimes what you see on TV isn’t actually real. 

Shocker, right? 

I have to admit I was pretty scandalized when I first saw the making of reality TV up close. I was working as a logger, an entry level position that required me to comb through raw footage, transcribe interviews, and provide detailed descriptions of the action. Often the producers would come to us, asking us to locate a shot of a character looking wistful or sad or pouring a drink – whatever was needed to fill in the story they were telling.

They’d also ask us to go through the interview transcripts and find incidences of a character saying specific words like “in” or “the” or “did” or “not,” which they’d insert into the character’s existing sentences. Sometimes this was meant to make a sentence more clear. Other times the point was to change the meaning entirely. I was stunned. I’d understood that producers took liberties, selected certain footage to make a character seem a certain way. But I didn’t know they could just make stuff up! 

Cut to several years later. Close-up on me, a harried producer on location, filming a story about a young singer in a coffee shop. As the singer’s performance ended, the audience in the restaurant, mostly teenagers, offered a smattering of tepid, distracted applause. That wasn’t going to work. The moment needed to play as a triumph. 

I stood in front of the crowd and asked them to clap again – harder this time with cheers and whistles and over-the-top enthusiasm. The teenagers played along. It was sort of fun for them. But between takes I could see them staring at each other, and at me, mouths open in shock. They were appalled.

“This is so fake!” one cried. 

Get over it, kiddos, I wanted to retort. I felt like channeling some grizzled mix of Mae West and Marge Simpson’s sisters to bark at them, The sooner you figure out how this world works, the better!

So what happened to me? How did I transform so completely from naïf into cynic? The answer is simple: I wanted to be good at my job. 

The question of how our livelihoods, our environments, can shift our moral framework is a big one for me. It’s a subject I explore in depth in my debut novel, The Receptionist.

Set in the upper echelons of the entertainment and digital marketing industries in Los Angeles, the world that my main characters inhabit is an amoral one. For a lot of Angelinos, ambition is front and center. People often make tremendous personal sacrifices for their careers. When your life becomes all about your work, the transactional nature of your profession can affect everything else.  

When we meet Emily, the protagonist of THE RECEPTIONIST, she’s spent months tending to her fatally ill mother, her moral tether. When Emily returns to her work as a Hollywood agent after her mom’s death, she finds a changed landscape. She’s been marginalized. Her career is high-pressure.

Taking time for bereavement has weakened her standing to the point where her boss thinks it’s okay to publicly humiliate her, screaming at her in front of her coworkers over a client’s wandering eye. Some might cower in response to a huge dressing down. Some might quit their jobs. Emily chooses to get even. In a decision kicking off a long arc of moral decline, Emily hardens. She becomes a child of the brutal world in which she lives.

Her husband Doug is no better, although he occasionally makes feeble attempts at addressing his feelings of remorse. His main issue is his need to stay relevant in the changing landscape of digital marketing. Unfortunately, his ambition outstrips his abilities, and his newest venture turns out to be a failure. As he attempts to cover his mistake, he digs himself deeper into a hole of his own making, eventually dragging Emily down with him. 

And Chloe, the title character of THE RECEPTIONIST – she’s young and has the seeds of a better person inside her: a sense of empathy, an innate understanding of right and wrong. But she’s also ill-equipped to navigate the predator infested waters of the big city. She allows herself to be taken in, first by Doug, then Emily, finding herself in the clutches of master operators. She’s manipulated by them, twisted into someone she doesn’t want to be. 

None of these characters are easy to like, but in writing THE RECEPTIONIST, I wanted to explore these noirish themes of downfall and how the environment acts upon the individual. 

The book is not autobiographical. I’m nothing like these characters, but have met versions of all them. I recognize a piece of myself in them. While asking folks to ham it up for the cameras isn’t a crime, I did reach a point in my career where it was difficult to see past this hard-won savvy I’d acquired. We all let go of some idealism in order to get by in the world. For the characters in THE RECEPTIONIST, this leads them down the path to ruin.

For the rest of us, it might mean looking the other way when we see something shady or not stepping in when someone in power punches down. In any case, the book concerns itself with the moral compass – how it can shift ever so slightly, then shift again without us noticing. If we don’t keep checking it, acknowledge the change in direction and recalibrate when necessary, we may just find ourselves completely lost. 

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Find out more about Kate on her website https://katewardmyles.com/

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/kwmyles

THE RECEPTIONIST

In this domestic thriller, sex, ambitions, and disaster burn more intensely than the Los Angeles sun.

Emily is a top talent agent who rules the land of talk shows and reality TV. Whip-smart and brutally practical, she outmaneuvers all rivals…except in her personal life. Emily willfully ignores her CEO husband Doug’s philandering in exchange for their glamorous one-percenter lifestyle, until a surprise pregnancy changes everything.

A TED-Talking business guru with a reckless streak, Doug embarks on an audacious relationship with Chloe, the stunning young receptionist at his market research firm. But Chloe has a secret: a volatile past she’s desperate to forget. Their chaotic entanglement sets off a chain of shocking scandals, plunging Emily into a scheming fight for survival.

As they each try to fight their way to the top, there’s only one question: How far will Emily go to protect her child and preserve her carefully curated life?

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing