Film Courage: Why did you write Party Girl?
Anna David, Publisher, author, speaker, podcast host, and television personality: I wrote Party Girl [a novel] when I was four years sober and I realized the PR about recovery was so bad and that if I had h any idea how fun and funny and joyful recovery would be, I wouldn’t have had to go as low as I did. I thought what if I could tell a story if I can help one person see that recovery is not the end of life but the beginning? I will have done something good.
Film Courage: How long did it take you to write it?
Anna: I wrote Party Girl very quickly. I had no idea how to write a book. I just was very brazen and was like Well, I’ve read novels, I will just write this. I started writing it and I actually had one friend who was a novelist and I was with her one day and she was saying to me Oh God, when I started off I didn’t have a clue. I mean, I didn’t even know novels had a three-act structure. I remember going You didn’t? Then I race home and I look and I have like 400 pages of one act. I had no idea there was supposed to be a structure, I didn’t know anything. That was the process of what Stephen King calls killing your darlings and I just got rid of 350 pages that day.
Film Courage: This was in the mid-90’s?
Anna: I got sober in 2000 and I wrote Party Girl in 2004, sold it to HarperCollins in 2005 and it came out in 2007.
Film Courage: Where did you actually write the book?
Anna: Physically, where was I? I was in my apartment on Sweetzer Avenue in West Hollywood and anybody who’s lived in LA, everyone’s either lived on Sweetzer or Sycamore or has dated somebody who’s lived on Sweetzer and Sycamore. It’s just an LA thing.
Film Courage: Tell me about the bidding war for the book?…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Anna David is the New York Times bestselling author of two novels and six non-fiction books. She has appeared repeatedly on Today, The Talk, Good Morning America and had a running segment on G4’s Attack of the Show that she co-hosted with Olivia Munn for three years. Her company, Legacy Launch Pad, writes and publishes books for thought leaders and her podcast has featured interviews with authors such as Robert Greene and Chris Voss. Her first book, Party Girl, is in development as a film tentatively scheduled to be shot in 2023.
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