THE FIRST TIME I READ Krista Diamond’s work was in spring 2022. It was an essay called “On Hiking Alone,” a piece that exhorts, with a delicious full-throatedness, the joys of solitude on and off-trail. It also admits, with a confidence that gave me a transgressive little thrill, that sometimes the last thing you want is to hear is the voice of a well-intentioned stranger peeping from behind you, asking, hey, do you want to hike together?

“I like myself,” Diamond writes; “I have a rich interior life. I am independent. I am selfish. I like to make the eight-hour drive from Las Vegas to Reno all in one go, stopping to photograph an old brothel in Mina and eat a burger in Hawthorne, listening to the music I like, staying at the hotel I want to stay at, watching the TV show I want to watch when I get there.” Who is she? I thought, when I read it. It felt like stumbling on a manifesto written specially for me.

Four years later, Diamond has published her debut novel, Close Relationships with Strangers, which shares something of that essay’s passion for solitude, place, and the single-minded pursuit of desire. Ben, the narrator, is a wildlife photographer-turned-paparazzo in the grip of a parasocial relationship with movie star Jack Whitlock. Ben’s fixation on scoring the perfect photograph puts a strain on his relationship, his finances, and eventually his sanity. Set between the desert of Las Vegas and the glitter of Los Angeles, the novel is a propulsive, noirish portrait of obsession, celebrity, and the landscapes of the Southwest.

Diamond—whom I eventually met, befriended, and even hike with sometimes—sat down with me to talk about writing, the celebrity animals of national parks, and being a “Vegas evangelist.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

–Tajja Isen

Tajja Isen (TI): I’m going to start by asking you about the parks. You’ve worked in so many national parks—all my favorite ones, actually. Death Valley, Glacier, Big Bend, among others. How did that work shape you as a writer?

Krista Diamond (KD): It’s interesting, because when I started working in the national parks in 2011 in Death Valley, and then I kept working in [them] for years, I sort of felt like I was betraying myself as a writer. I had just graduated from college with an English degree, and all of a sudden I was working in the parks and I wasn’t really writing that much. People are often like, “Oh my gosh, you’re a writer and you work in the national parks, there must be so much inspiration.” But I think the truth is, when you’re working in a place like Yellowstone or Glacier, you don’t want to sit in your room and write. You want to go and hike and explore. So I really was not writing that much during those years. It’s kind of the longest period of time in my life that I wasn’t regularly writing, and I felt guilty about that.

Then I left the national parks and moved to Vegas and started writing again, and I realized that all that time in the parks was writing. It was the thinking part of writing. I was becoming a writer in my personality and becoming the kind of writer who is very interested in place, and the details of place, and the stories of people in unusual places. I was doing the work of a writer all those years, even though I wasn’t writing. In retrospect, there was nothing to feel guilty about.

TI: That’s beautiful. I love the idea of becoming a writer in your personality. It’s as much a thing one is as a thing one does. 

KD: That’s really true. I think being a writer is about how you move through the world, and how you observe things, and paying close attention to details, and constantly being receptive to ideas. It’s not something that you can ever turn off or walk away from, even if you’re in Glacier and it’s been several months since you’ve opened up a notebook.

TI: How long did you work in the parks, in the end?

KD: I was there for—2011 was my first season, and then I moved to Las Vegas in 2015. So, a few years. It feels like longer, and it also feels like I’ve never really left. Being in Las Vegas, nature is still such a big part of my life, and I also try to go back to Death Valley as much as I can, and Glacier as much as I can, in particular.

TI: The places in this book are so rich and alive. The book is set between Vegas and Los Angeles. How did you approach writing about Vegas in particular, a city that is so rich with nature and also often misapprehended in the public imagination?

KD: I think one of the things—probably the thing—that drew me to wanting to live in Las Vegas is the challenge of wanting to walk that line between the cliché version and the real version. So many people write things that are [about] tourists getting drunk on the Strip, or some people go in the extreme opposite direction and want to write something that is very suburban and doesn’t even acknowledge gambling, or showgirls, or any of those things. But I think, living in Las Vegas, we know it’s a little of both. And, to me, a good piece of Vegas writing can do that. With this novel in particular, one of the challenges with wanting to write something that’s authentically Vegas was letting go of the fact that I’m kind of a Vegas evangelist. Because Ben, the narrator, is somebody who was born and raised here, and I think, like a lot of people who have been in Vegas for a while, he’s pretty ambivalent towards it.

There are things he likes about it—he loves the wilderness in particular, which is something he and I share. But he also feels frustrated with how small it can feel—which is something that people who live in Las Vegas often say, that it feels like a small town—and he feels frustrated with its limitations. He feels frustrated with living in a place that a lot of people do see as this cliché; this place where people just go to drink and do bad things and often fail to acknowledge that there’s real humans living here. One other thing that was really important to me was to write someone who works in the service industry. Vegas is a place where the service industry is taken seriously—which it should be everywhere—but I really wanted to show that experience of somebody working as a busser at a restaurant and living a solid middle-class life, because that is most people’s situation here. They’re great union jobs [and] they provide a lot of stability.

TI: You and Ben share these two obsessions with wilderness and celebrity. What was the moment when these two interests clicked and you saw the book start to come together?

KD: It was through the research process. I originally started writing [this] as a short story, and then a novella, and it was just the LA stuff. It was just a story about a guy in Los Angeles trying to track down a photo of this elusive, classic, old-Hollywood actor. I was interested in that, but it always felt a little too much like an archetype of a paparazzi rather than a real person. So I started thinking: What could this person’s background be like? What was he doing before this? What does he do when he’s not doing this? I struggled with that a lot until I started interviewing and shadowing paparazzi.

One of them, when I was asking about the technical, day-to-day life of doing this, said, “It’s just like wildlife photography. You are always on the move, you have a subject that’s running away from you, sometimes they’re hostile, you don’t get to retake the photos, you don’t get to control the lighting”—that was the lightning bolt. It immediately made me think of working in the national parks. Particularly Yellowstone, because in Yellowstone, there are photographers that set up in this one area, the Lamar Valley, every morning waiting for wolves. They’re paparazzi. They’re waiting for these wolves that are the celebrity of Yellowstone. I thought about that a lot; I thought about animals that you hope to see in the national parks that are elusive, like a wolverine—it would be really great to see a wolverine in Glacier, or a wolf in Glacier. They’re kind of like these mythic celebrities. The one time I saw a wolf in Glacier, I was with my husband. We were in the backseat of a car that my parents were driving, because they had come to visit. We saw a wolf—it just walked out into the road—and my husband threw himself out of the car. That’s kind of what it’s like. That’s that level of celebrity where you kind of lose your mind around them.

After I left the national parks and I was living in Las Vegas, I was writing about the parks a lot, and that felt very natural to me. And then I started writing this [book] and I felt a little sad that I didn’t get to do that anymore—I [didn’t] think there [was] a way to bring the wilderness into this. When I decided to set it in Las Vegas, all of the wilderness stuff just came in naturally. Not only in [Ben’s] backstory, and getting to write these scenes in places like Red Rock Canyon, or the high desert outside of Las Vegas, but even just the things he’s referencing. When he gets up early at dawn to comb the streets of LA and look for this celebrity, he’s thinking about the experience of getting what people call getting an “alpine start” on a hike, where you get up before dawn to climb a mountain.

TI: That’s so cool. And an incredible amount of research to be doing, too, these ridealongs. I know you’ve mentioned you also did a lot of research into the psychology of parasocial relationships. How did you decide to take this journalistic approach to writing fiction?

KD: I feel lucky that I also write nonfiction, because I think it comes naturally, to take that kind of researched approach. It’s so generative with fiction, to do that kind of research and hear these stories. In addition to talking to paparazzi, and shadowing them, and doing research about the psychology of parasocial relationships, I also spent a summer in Los Angeles. It’s the only time I’ve ever lived there. I wanted to at least try to get it as correct as possible. A lot of it was just walking around with a notebook, making observations about smells, the way the light looks, even logistical things like parking. The flora, the fauna—everything. That research is important ethically, to try to get things right, and I think it’s also really generative as well.

TI: I want to ask about your aesthetic influences for the book, because you’re drawing very deliberately on noir, and I feel a lot of Bret Easton Ellis in this book, who I know you love. Can you talk a bit about your influences for Close Relationships?

KD: Definitely Bret Easton Ellis, especially his most recent novel, The Shards. I really love that just as a great LA noirish novel, but also something that feels very emotionally realized. There’s such a yearning and a sadness to that novel, and so much of that novel is about masculinity, which this novel very much is. Also In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes. The summer that I spent in LA, all I did was read LA books. All the classic LA books—Play It as It Lays, Ask the Dust, City of Quartz—and the one that really had an impact on me was In a Lonely Place. It came out in 1947 and feels like it was written a few years ago. It’s about this toxic guy in LA, it’s a noir novel about toxic masculinity, and it’s so great. And I do like Raymond Chandler. I think his writing is really beautiful and really haunting. For Vegas, I always say that my favorite Las Vegas novel is Leaving Las Vegas. I feel like people are much more familiar with the film, but the novel is so beautiful. They’re equally beautiful and equally depressing. Those were big influences on me.

And film: When I’m in LA, my favorite thing to do is go to those older movie theaters—Los Feliz Three, the Vista, the Egyptian—and see movies in 35mm. I love Tom Ford; I love the movie Nocturnal Animals, which is based on a book. When we were selling this novel, everyone compared it to Nightcrawler, which is flattering—I do like that movie a lot, especially the feel of that movie—but I was really happy when my editor compared it to Drive.

TI: I guess the last question I’ll ask you is just about literary Vegas. You’re a staple of the Las Vegas writing community, a city that’s often not known for having that reputation, but of course, as we both know, there’s so much bustling creativity. What makes Vegas a great place to write?

KD: That’s such a great question. And I love that you live here now, because you get it. I always hope, when writers come through here, they’ll get it too. It’s the most interesting city in the world. If you’re the kind of writer that finds place to be generative, which I obviously do, then it’s endlessly generative. I’m always disappointed when writers don’t want to go to the Strip, because the Strip is an incredibly generative place. You can walk around a single casino for an hour and get a million story ideas, but you can also go to neighborhoods and get ideas, and the nature is so expansive.

I think Vegas is fascinating to me as someone who grew up in the northeast, coming to a city where there’s just wilderness outside of the city. I live close to downtown Las Vegas, and I can be in the middle of nowhere in forty minutes. I always tell people, if you don’t like Las Vegas, you just haven’t found what you like about Las Vegas, and I think that’s true of writers as well. If nothing inspires you about Las Vegas, you should just keep looking, because whether it’s a strip mall with some weird or interesting bar you didn’t know was there, or Lake Mead, or the Strip, or an old hotel downtown—there’s something to inspire everybody.