A playwright who went from stage to screen, then set aside scripts to pen a novel. Its themes? Escape and reinvention

Lila Raicek likes a big swing. Just last year the New York-based playwright and screenwriter debuted My Master Builder in London’s West End – only a matter of months after the first draft landed on director Michael Grandage’s desk. Most writers wait a lifetime to catch even a whiff of a Broadway or central London staging (especially one starring Ewan McGregor and Elizabeth Debicki). But for Raicek, this warp-speed ascension is something of a pattern. “I wrote a play at Columbia,” says Raicek of her college days. “It was my senior graduate school thesis. And that play was seen by a couple of people in Hollywood.” Bang, that script gets optioned for the screen and lands Raicek in a Los Angeles writers’ room.

But in typical “racy Raicek” fashion, this is not just any writers’ room. “Darren Star had seen a play of mine,” says Raicek, citing the Sex and the City svengali – the man who knows what audiences want. Star was impressed. “I very quickly got hired to work on Younger,” explains Raicek of the high-gloss comedy skewering #girlboss culture starring Sutton Foster and Hilary Duff. And the commissions kept coming. “I started to adapt bestselling novels for various places. It was a real transformation in my own life and career.”

Translation: she had made it. “I had been a New York playwright my whole life,” explains Raicek. The reality of which was not unlike every dishwasher and waiter in Los Angeles. “I was taking and working a lot of odd jobs – tutoring and writing college essays for every New York private school kid.”

Speaking with Raicek, there is a sense that writing and words have always provided a shield. “I was a true nerd and knew my path and I knew my passion,” Raicek tells me of her early upbringing in Connecticut. Elfin, with a shock of red hair and a diabolically sharp intellect, like the plot of so many seminal American books and TV shows, for Raicek school was hell. “There was a lot of violence against me as a child, in the sense of bullying,” she continues. “And the school advised my parents it would be best for me to transfer to a private school, but my parents couldn’t afford private school. And so I found solace in this regional theater program outside of school. And that’s where I found the power and comfort of theater, of escaping oneself.”

A rapacious reader, it’s clear Raicek feels at home with the greats. “I was deeply entrenched in Ibsen and Strindberg and Chekhov as a girl.” Like her heroes, Raicek skirts the dark edges of human emotion, dangling between desire, deceit, and betrayal.

It was these big black feelings along with the sucker punch of a high-profile engagement (to Roy Price, the former Amazon.com executive who founded Amazon Video and Amazon Studios and was later suspended in 2017 over sexual harassment allegations) coming to a crashing end that triggered a major career shift and a return to Manhattan.

“I started writing this after a dark and destabilizing time in my own life. I found myself scrambling back to New York and living in a derelict maid’s room of a mentor’s apartment on the Upper East Side,” says Raicek of that period in 2017. “I think it was at that point where I was wrestling with the albatross of grief and loss and starting over again and reshaping my identity.”

But as is the case for any good writer, that pain was a crucible for ideas. Enter: The Plunge, Raicek’s debut novel. “It’s a specific sort of torture to write a novel, which I didn’t realize until the process began,” she recalls. “But I think for me, who has lived in the discomfort and comfort of theater my whole life, that’s the form where a story naturally takes shape in my brain and my body.”

There’s an immediacy to the stage – why is this happening on this day, at this hour, on this night? “It’s that Aristotelian structure – there’s a reveal and a reversal and a climactic moment. And essentially, even if there’s ambiguity to the ending, you come away from that night having experienced a full beginning, middle, end.” Something viewers of My Master Builder would have seen in high definition.

Writing The Plunge, Raicek moved away from that myopic lens. “I was exploring these really big questions.” Questions that she was contemplating in her own life, too. “Can we ever evade our past? What are the measures we go to, to escape and reshape our identity? How, as a woman, do we grapple with our own contradictory and destructive desires?” And she realized the answers she needed were on the page – not the screen or stage – and would take her protagonist jet-setting across the globe. (The book begins in New York and goes to the North Fork and then erupts in Lake Como.)

There’s a quote Raicek often references, and one gets the sense that it not only drives Liv, her protagonist in The Plunge, but the author as well. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Three on: betrayal, a literary theme faithful to no genre

“I’ve always been drawn, as a writer, to the dramatic tension of romantic betrayal,” says Raicek. “These works, all referenced in The Plunge, continue to inspire me.”

Elevator to the Gallows, Louis Malle (1958)

A moody, mesmeric noir thriller, unfolding over one night in Paris, in which Jeanne Moreau (below) and her lover plot to murder her husband. Sultry Moreau captures the weight of desire cut by despair when love is all but ill-fated, set to a Miles Davis score.

The Wild Duck, Henrik Ibsen (1884)

Ibsen loves to conjure the grip of the past and the burning desire to place a bomb under it. In this brutal play, a long-buried infidelity ruptures a family, and we are left to question our own darkest emotional truths.

The Evening of the Holiday, Shirley Hazzard (1966)

Set in Italy, an elegant novella about an affair between a young woman and a married architect that tests whether passion can outweigh circumstance… But can it? I carry this with me whenever I need a quiet escape.