Audio By Carbonatix
Gwen Cooper’s reading from her controversial Diary Two years before the book even hit store shelves, Gwen Cooper’s Diary of a South Beach Party Girl was already getting press in local media. Thanks to a steamy galley seen by the cognoscenti, Cooper quickly earned her own little category on the ever-popular Jossip.com, and local ears have been burning ever since. Anyone who was anyone in SoBe’s heyday is wondering if they got a mention. And they can all find out tonight at Cooper’s sure-to-be-packed reading at Books & Books. We had to ask Cooper, why protect some people with a pseudonym, yet reveal the coke-fueled debauchery of others by using their real names?
“It is a work of fiction, but I wanted to capture the reality of the time and the place I was writing about,” she explains. “And these aren’t really characters, they just kind of make incidental appearances, and that was partly to add to the air of overall believability and verisimilitude. And partially they’re people you just want to give credit to, who were the movers and shakers who made South Beach what it was at that time.” Truthiness aside, Cooper has an answer for the pissed-off peeps who think they see a bit too much of their own wacky antics in her characters. “They are composites,” she offers. “Where there’s not a real name used, there’s pretty much, at least in my mind, not a one-to-one correlation between the character and a real-life person.” Meet Cooper and ask her questions yourself tonight.
Wed., April 25, 8 p.m.
