Author, Laurie Devore talks through her utterly bingeable reality TV novel.
If you see it, it must be true, right? Unless what you see has been manipulated, prompted, or just straight-up edited to look like something it’s not. What if there was a camera on you right now, and the producers behind them chose to give you the villain edit?
What if no one saw you help the lady across the street? What if they saw her trip and then a shot of your face from two hours earlier when a friend told you about the terrible date she just had? You’ve just laughed at an old lady falling into the road. Now you’re getting death threats. Now you can’t go outside. Now you’re nationally hated. There’s a hashtag trending to hunt down your cat.
In 2015, a TV show called Unreal aired. Co-produced by Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, who worked as a producer on The Bachelor for six seasons, it showed a (fictional) behind-the-scenes look at reality TV.
Laurie Devore, author of The Villain Edit, said the show sparked her interest in looking beyond the drink-throwing and catfights and instead delving beneath the surface of reality TV for her newest novel. “I started watching a little bit more through that lens, that it’s all manipulated,” she explained.
The Villain Edit follows Jacqueline Matthis, a washed-up writer who has grown desperate to see her books back in readers’ hands. So she ditches her big city life and decides she’s going to be a contestant on The 1, the most-watched dating reality show in the world.
A Conversation with the Audience of Reality TV
Something that was really important to Laurie writing the book was the audience’s reaction to Jac. She stated, “I feel like modern reality TV is a conversation between the viewers and the producers. That wasn’t really the case ten years ago.”
Think of Love is Blind. The show shot to success when it aired just as the world went into lockdown. A bunch of singles talk to each other for weeks before getting engaged without ever seeing each other. They fall in love blind. The show then follows their engagement all the way to the altar to find out if love really is blind. After the multiple weddings, the couples come back together to talk through the season.
But there’s something unique about more recent reunion specials. They talk about everything that has come out online since the show aired, including messages they’ve had from viewers and DMs from each others’ exes. It’s so much more than just the show — “it’s also about the way the show communicates with the viewers and back,” Devore said. She continued, “I wanted to play with that idea. And the way that especially women can be villainized on these shows, the way the public turn on them.”
A Romance (Amongst Other Things)
The book straddles the lines between genres. This is something that Laurie toys with: “I do just enjoy writing romances, it’s something I like to put in all my books. But, in some ways it’s fighting with what the rest of my books are. You’ll get a romance, but not really in the way you always expect a romance.
She expressed, “I’m really interested in just the messiness of relationships. I just think people in real life are so messy that you have to leave room for that in romance too.”
Jac falls for the guy she’s meant to — the bachelor searching for his one; but she’s also painfully aware of her latest one-night stand pulling the strings behind the scenes. Devore perfectly injects the binge-ability and addictiveness of reality TV into this novel. She reflected, “The more I sat with the structure of reality television the more impressed I was with how neat it is and how good it is for storytelling. When I was writing, I was pulling from a genre that’s perfected the art of telling a story, increasing the tension and the stakes, and I could kind of just steal that.”
A Complex Set of Characters
The characters are everything you’d want in this kind of novel. They’re messy, complicated, and make terrible decisions, but there’s also a thread of sometimes uncomfortable relatability through the entire cast.
Jac is a classic overachiever. She’s been told her entire life that she’s excellent and will succeed at everything, and she has all of these expectations piled on top of her. But, now she’s a “failed” writer. She’s been made into a villain on TV. And she’s in a complicated love triangle. She’s not the smartest or most successful person in the room anymore. And that’s all she really had.
She’s fighting with herself the entire book, “grasping at straws. So she thinks, maybe I’m the girl who goes on reality TV.”
Complex characters really have nothing on Jac. She’s layered, and that’s what makes her such an interesting character to read. Over the course of the book, the show ruins her inner self.
Jac is initially quite an unlikeable character. She can come across difficult and cold, until you learn why. She’s not the traditionally feminine, sweet, kind, and demure girl — everything these shows want their women to be. She’s fierce and unflinching in what she believes, and she takes no shit. She’s also a bit selfish, lost, and trapped.
Her increased understanding of other women throughout the book is organic and real. “I’m fascinated by the idea of what it means to change as a person. You don’t just decide to be a better person overnight, it takes time and I wanted her to figure that out,” Devore said. “Rather than a sudden, ‘now I understand what the others are going through,’ it was this kind of slow peeling back.”
The Perception of Women Through the Lens of Reality TV
Mentioning how she saw women villainized on reality TV — a clear theme throughout the book — Devore also explained, “I’m very interested in this idea of how society perceives women. Particularly women that don’t really fit into the typical mold we expect of femininity and how they show their emotions.”
Something that really sticks out about Jac at the beginning of the book is how she perceives the other women; she almost doesn’t classify herself with them and believes them to be beneath her. She’s going on the show to better her career, while the rest of these girls are only doing it to find love — how stupid.
“She almost doesn’t really view the other people on the show as people,” Devore concluded. The choice to call the women on the show “girls” highlighted Jac’s opinion of them. Devore revealed, “There was a lot of intentionality with the language in the book. I think these shows have an inclination to infantilize the women on them.” This opinion seeped into Jac’s thoughts too, despite her reluctant admission that she is one of them.
On the topic of women and reality dating shows, Devore noted, “The bachelor in America, especially is kind of obsessed with this idea of virginity. It’s kind of bizarre how obsessed they are with it on the show so that was something that was just natural to weave in.” Doing so served to underscore the problem with purity culture. Women are held to such impossible standards that a man would never face in general society.
Why You Should Read The Villain Edit
Beyond enjoying the book, Devore wants the main takeaway to be that readers should “be a little bit of a more critical consumer of media, and just not taking everything that you’re handed at face value.”
Fiction is obviously about reading a good book and being entertained — and trust me, you’ll be entertained — but if you take anything from this book, let it be that. Since reading The Villain Edit, I haven’t looked at reality TV the same. I don’t trust that any words coming out of someone’s mouth on TV didn’t first leave a producer’s. If you want a book that will quite literally change your brain chemistry, read The Villain Edit.
Devore is currently working on another project — keep an eye on her socials to make sure you won’t miss it!
