Lila Raicek Will Take “Racy” As A Compliment

“This feels like fate,” says playwright and author Lila Raicek, smiling as she leans over the shady Central Park bench we just happened upon and pulls out her phone camera to snap a picture of the ever-so-slightly patinaed plaque reading: John Gregory Dunne (1932-2003)/Quintana Roo Dunne Michael (1966-2005)/In Summer Time And Winter Time. “This has to be her bench,” she tells me in a near whisper.

The proverbial “her” in question is Joan Didion, a prime source of inspiration for Raicek, who published her debut novel, The Plunge, in April. (Filmmaker Griffin Dunne, Didion’s nephew, even moderated her book’s launch at McNally Jackson in New York.)

In the tradition of Didion, The Plunge explores the liminal space of life after tragedy. The erotic thriller follows Liv, a playwright who retreats from LA to New York after the sudden death of her high-profile, recently disgraced husband. Listless, she lives out of a suitcase in the maid’s room of her mentor’s home. In free fall, she becomes ensnared in the romantic web of Damon, a mysterious jeweler, and Isabel, an older woman he’s charmed.

When I mention crying my way through Blue Nights — Didion’s memoir reflecting on her grief after the death of her daughter, currently sitting in Raicek’s TBR pile — the Connecticut native lets out a laugh and says, “Maybe too depressing for me.”

Like Liv, Raicek has a self-described “scandalous” past. When her ex-fiancé, Roy Price, was ousted from Amazon Studios after sexual harassment accusations at the height of the #MeToo movement in 2017, her name was splashed across tabloids. Soon after, her best friend suffered what Raicek calls a “catastrophic death.”

“I was in a period of grief and confusion trying to understand how to rebuild after loss,” Raicek says. “I set out to write a novel that really explored that murky and turbulent space of aftermath, which I feel like has not necessarily been addressed in literature, that isn’t linear, that isn’t ruly, that’s messy. And I found myself asking the question, how do we often have to plunge into a darker place to find ourselves again?”

While Raicek is no stranger to public scrutiny (her 2025 play My Master Builder, starring Ewan McGregor, was met with polarizing success in London), she was decidedly not “emotionally prepared for the media maelstrom” surrounding her ex-fiancé. Though now, with some reflection, she can understand it.

“To me, the book is firmly a piece of fiction,” she says. “As a writer, you have to separate your own experience from the one that your character goes on. And fiction allows you the space to play, and it gives you the freedom to detach from your own life. But it felt very tortured to write.”

Recently, a rumor has made its way around certain literary circles. When I ask if it’s true that Nicole Kidman is set to star in the film adaptation of The Plunge, Raicek gives me a tight-lipped smile and says, “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

Below, Raicek opens up about crafting sex scenes, locking herself away to write, and embracing her “racy” side.

What prompted you to tell this story as a novel instead of a play?

I have made a career for myself adapting other people’s work, and I had a burning desire to tell my own story in first-person form and claim my own narrative, as it were.

One of the themes of this book is isolation. As writers, we tend to romanticize solitude. What is your relation to it like?

I’ll go back to some of the formative books in my own life as a female writer, like The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys. Rhys says her room is like a cocoon and a prison. As women, these spaces are psychic mirrors that we find we have to make ourselves smaller in the world.

For Liv, the maid’s room is at once a sense of safety, but kind of contains her until she’s ready for the world outside.

With this book in particular, because it was so connected to this own dislocated part in my own life, I felt like I had to hide away to write it. And it was almost like a form of self-punishment. But it is that push-pull tension that we feel when you’re writing something that hopefully has emotional authenticity and that feels very internal, and then you have to step out and share it with the world.

The Wall Street Journal called you a “racy playwright.” Do you feel aligned with that label?

I will take full ownership of that. It’s really thrilling right now to be a female writer and plumb the depths of female desire in ways that are real and raw. And this space has opened up so much to tell provocative stories in a way that hopefully is expanding even more to investigate the messy and intriguing side of female desire.

Isabel is one of my favorite characters in the book; she has such a nuanced perspective on aging. Are there any older women you looked up to in order to write this character?

I’ve been very lucky to have so many wonderful female role models in my own life who have guided, shepherded, and helped me chart the messy path of being a writer and being a woman. So she is a tribute in so many ways to the women I’ve known who have lived such fearless and brazen and bold lives.

I hear you’re writing an erotic TV thriller starring Nina Dobrev! What else are you working on?

I’m commissioned to write a play that I’m calling Tulla, about Edvard Munch’s redheaded muse who shot him in the hand. And now I’m starting to get to work on my next novel. I was a tutor for a lot of private and public school girls in New York for a long period of time to pay for school. And so it’s a thriller set in that world.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.