Who Goes to Palm Springs in August?
How to beat the heat in the off-season! Plus: An interview with 'Big Fan' author Alexandra Romanoff, a Chappell Roan sighting and a theory about Meryl and Marty.
Raises hand.
I go to Palm Springs in August, when the temperature climbs past 100 on most days. I love Palm Springs. I got married in Palm Springs. My husband’s Uncle Jeff and his husband live there, and last week we visited them in their serene retirement community, which half-empties over the summer as heat-avoidant snowbirds flock to Canada and Michigan and the cooler coasts.
Jeff formerly worked for Continental Airlines, where he planned the in-flight meals. In those days, passengers were served food-food, not two Biscoff cookies after paying $150 extra for an aisle seat in row whatever! As a result of his hospitality background, he cannot help but bring a touch of old-school elegance to everything he does. He baked us a cheesecake from scratch and poured homemade strawberry sauce on the cut slices using a silver gravy boat. In between dinner and dessert, he distributed cloth napkins dampened with cold water and almond essence. That’s five-star service right there! Very demure. Very mindful. Very Uncle Jeff. (Everyone should have an Uncle Jeff.)
We’ve stayed at several fun hotels in Palm Springs, including the Avalon Hotel and Bungalows, the Ace Hotel and Swim Club, and the Saguaro. This time, we wanted to try the Parker, a boutique property with quite a storied history. It passed through several owners through the decades, from country music mogul Gene Autry to talk-show host Merv Griffin to hotelier Jack Parker, who recruited designer Jonathan Adler in 2003 to transform the resort into a retro bohemian oasis. Two years later, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie booked separate rooms (sure, Jan) at the Parker while in town to stage their infamous W Magazine photoshoot, the ink barely dry on Pitt’s divorce from Jennifer Aniston.
“It’s avant-garde,” cautioned Uncle Jeff, who advised us to check out the Omni Rancho Las Palmas Resort in nearby Rancho Mirage in part because of its kid-friendly amenities.
We went with the Parker, and because Jeff is rarely, if ever, wrong, I braced myself for a desert nightmare: Chaotic Coachella types blasting ear-splitting electronica at all hours; micro-celebrities filming TikToks; vacationers claiming every lounge chair in the vicinity.
Instead, we entered a delightful, whimsical world seemingly locked in time. And because it’s the off-season, we had it almost entirely to ourselves. Well, that’s not true: We met a bunch of friendly people, mostly from the L.A. area, and cooled off in the pool and underneath misters at the lemonade stand, with its Instagrammy yellow-and-white color palette. Parents and non-parents coexisted in harmony. We meandered through the maze of hedgerows and played ping-pong and lawn games. On the bocce court, I got an urgent call from Lisa Bonos, our very own Twisters correspondent, relaying how she had randomly encountered pop star Chappell Roan dining with a friend at a brunch hotspot in Santa Rosa, Lisa’s hometown. Lisa approached her to say hello.
“You’re not Chappell Roan, are you?” she asked.
“Please don’t tell anyone,” Roan replied, wanting to fly under the radar.
Lisa phoned me immediately. I could hear her mom in the background, saying, “She told you not to tell anyone!”
Two days later, Roan released a video asking fans to respect her boundaries. Lisa, the world’s friendliest person, was not among the privacy-invaders. She’d sensed that Roan wanted to be left alone, respected her personal space and did not ask for a selfie. (She did, however, offer the “HOT TO GO!” songstress her tips for visiting Santa Rosa.) (As for me, Lisa wanted to know what I was doing in Palm Springs! In August!)
We left the Parker bubble to see Uncle Jeff, order deli sandwiches at Sherman’s and dine at Melvyn’s, a favorite hangout of Frank Sinatra and Cher back in the day. There, I ordered the Cherries Jubilee like I was Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers (but unlike him, did not torch the confection in the parking lot). I got someone to take our picture and thought, Palm Springs is the place to be.
THE PERFECT LONG WEEKEND READ
Poolside, I gobbled up Big Fan by the novelist Alexandra Romanoff. It’s the first book from Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur’s buzzy new romantic fiction company, 831 Stories, and Romanoff hooked me from the jump. She anchors her lighthearted meet-cute with real-world stakes and adds plenty of steam. Her protagonist, Maya McPherson, is a famous political strategist whose ex-husband, a senator, cheated on her with an underling. The tabloid scandal has scared away Maya’s clientele, but not gubernatorial candidate Teresa Powell, who hires Maya under the condition that she keep a low profile — and not distract from Powell’s campaign.
Enter Charlie Blake, the biggest distraction of them all. As a girl, Maya was the No. 1 fan of Mischief, the mega-hit boy band he fronted in the ‘90s. One night, Charlie contacts her out of the blue and solicits her help in re-launching his music career. Their electric connection catches Maya off guard: Should she give into her desires, or risk becoming a D.C. pariah?
Last week, I spoke with Alexandra, who goes by “Zan,” about writing Big Fan and how Taylor Hanson helped inspire the character of Charlie. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
You’ve published three acclaimed young-adult novels. How did you make the leap from writing YA to adult contemporary romance?
I kind of just grew out of it. And that's not to say anything bad about YA, it's just to say that I got older. When I wrote my first young adult novel, I was 25 years old. Eighteen was not that far in my rear-view mirror. As I say now, I'm 37. The concerns of adolescents just don't resonate — I mean, some of them do, some of them are eternal — but I want to write about love and insecurity and figuring out who you are from an older perspective. It felt pretty natural. It was just that my ideas went from being about high-schoolers to being about someone in her twenties or in her thirties. It doesn’t hurt that romance is having such a moment. It was like, “OK, I’m moving in this direction. It feels like publishing is moving in this direction. Let’s just go together and see what happens.”
I loved that Maya has her own thing going on — she doesn’t need a man to feel complete. Meanwhile, you give Charlie such a healthy masculinity. A tonic masculinity if you will. Was he inspired by anyone in particular? I’m not comparing Charlie to Harry Styles, but I’m not not sensing a bit of Harry in Charlie.
I was thinking more about someone like Taylor Hanson. And not quite Lance Bass, but I had just read his memoir for a different project that I was working on. It was interesting to read [Bass] writing from the perspective of someone who had really early fame and then had some time to digest it and move away from it and figure out what it meant to him. I was definitely thinking about these celebrities who I had seen go through the wringer of childhood fame and then outgrow it. And what are they like and how have they survived that?
You write about that world so well. And I must say, you also have a flair for writing sex scenes. What’s your secret?
This is actually a funny story. I grew up reading fan fiction. A lot of people who are writing romance came up reading romance. I didn't. There just weren't romance novels in my house. But I had the internet, and so I wrote a ton of fan fiction, and I think that matters. It’s like any literary tradition — the more you read in it, the more you understand how it works and what makes it compelling. I'm like, “I have been reading explicit sex scenes since I was a little too young to be reading explicit sex scenes.”
I got started writing romance in the first place during the pandemic. I was ghostwriting erotic novellas on Amazon. They're not under my name. You cannot find them. But it was kind of, not desperation, but a lot of the work that I had been doing, the freelance work, was shut down because of Covid. Everyone just cut their freelance budgets. And I was like, “Oh, crap, I got to pay rent.” And a friend put me in touch with some women who published these books. So I was like, “Sure, I can write romance having never done it before.” But I wrote for them, and they were like, “Your sex scenes are really good.” And I was thrilled. And I really do think it's down to having read and written all this fan fiction in my life. I was like, “Oh, actually, this is not unfamiliar to me. This is not the first time I've had to describe these actions or these body parts. It doesn't feel scary or cringe.”
I think the trick to writing good sex scenes is understanding them as character moments. People get very scared about writing a sex scene. They imagine it as this sort of different thing that you're doing that's separate from the rest of the book. But to me, it's all the things I've been doing in this book so far [that] have carried me to this moment of intimacy. And all those things are going to carry through into the scene. So how is he going to touch her? Well, what's their relationship right now? What is he feeling? What is he trying to communicate with his body? All the things that apply in the rest of the book — dialogue, pacing, descriptive language — apply in a sex scene. It’s just different body parts are being revealed.
What’s your writing process? Do you have a routine?
I wish I had a sexier answer to this. … My only real trick is that if I need to bribe myself into working, I will just go to a coffee shop because A) I'm like, OK, I'll buy myself a little pastry. A little treat. Also, I just am embarrassed to be sitting in public, not working, just staring at my laptop. It sort of shapes me into getting stuff done.
I've been a full-time freelance writer for eight years now, and I'm just like, Get up, open the laptop, butt-in-chair. And that was yesterday, actually. I was working on the second book [with 831 Stories] and kind of struggling. And at one point I [told myself], Pretend your butt is physically stuck to this chair. You cannot get up. You can't get up. I don't care. You can't get up. And you know what? I finished my word count, so it worked.
Maya and Charlie make their official debut on September 10. You can pre-order Big Fan and shop products referencing the book right here. (I’ve got my eye on that Celebrity/Normal Person hat!) Zan will be making appearances at Botanica Restaurant in L.A. on September 13 and Brooklyn’s Ripped Bodice on September 16.
END CREDITS
Meryl Streep and Martin Short seemingly soft-launched a romantic relationship at a premiere party for Only Murders in the Building. They held hands like nobody was watching! However, they’re reportedly “just friends.” (Womp womp.) I texted a fabulously jaded media friend, the sort of person who’s got the real scoop, and here’s what she thinks: “My opinion: they know what they’re doing which is 100% generating extra buzz for their show and themselves! I do not believe they are dating. They’re acting up and out for the fun of it.”
Glen Powell, a seasoned pro at fake-dating Sydney Sweeney, defended Ryan Gosling after “an unnamed producer” told TheWrap, “Unlike an actor like [Gosling] whose appeal is mostly limited to female audiences, Glen appeals to both females and males.” Powell’s humble-king response: “Gosling is a legend. I’m just Glen.”
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong brilliantly analyzed how Kamala Harris became Brat and Mother.
Amy Odell devoted a fantastic issue of Back Row to Emily in Paris’ “good-bad era.”
The Paralympics commence today! I can’t wait to watch these games. Check out NBC’s viewing schedule here.
Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!
Yours in “Palm Springs is always a good idea,”
Erin
Informative
"Big Fan" sounds so good! I feel like I'd seen it on a list of buzzy fall books but didn't know the details. Thanks to this interview, count me in now for it being a must-read!