Emily Beyda Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Emily Beyda
Author Emily Beyda is a native of Los Angeles and has written the “Dear Glutton” advice column, which is a popular piece that appears in The Austin Chronicle. She divides her time between Austin, Texas and California.

She is a graduate of Texas State’s MFA program, and has a Bachelor’s Degree from NYU in Comparative Literature.

For Bluebeam, Inc., she interviews design and construction industry professionals and pick their brains about all the fascinating landscapes that operate beneath the surface of the built world.

For The Austin Chronicle, she also does regular interviews with restaurateurs, chefs, and the other food and beverage industry rockstars. Emily handles news updates, too.

She was out at a bar with a friend and said she had a great idea for an advice column. Her friend told her it would be good for the Austin Chronicle.

It is a paper she loves because it explores an entire city through words. It is a created space, she says that helps others learn about events happening in the town and creating a huge community.

Emily has also writes copy for Broken English Jewelry and GrubMarket Inc. For GrubMarket, she wrote blog posts and mailers, and did recipe development showcasing produce from GrubMarket’s weekly produce boxes.

Emily likes interviewing people, turning copy in way ahead of her deadline, and learning new things.

“The Body Double” came from a piece of flash fiction that she wrote before she moved to Austin to attend grad school.

She found having some distance, as she lived in another town, helped her write the novel, too. She found that she was able to look at the city a bit more objectively as she told her story.

While writing the novel, “The Body Double”, she was influenced by Hitchcock (particularly “Vertigo”), and David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”. She was interested in ideas of the de-constructed self, how you create a version of yourself as an avatar, and what it means to be a person.

Celebrity culture is something else she is fascinated by, particularly how it is eroding the boundaries of what is normal behavior and what isn’t. She notices that people present a curated version of themselves, especially on social media. This used to be, she notices, something that was only something celebrities did, but is now something a lot of people do.

As a writer, she strives to cultivate a strong relationship between herself and anyone who reads what she writes. That being said, she doesn’t want to know how they felt, as she is too scared about what they will say about it.

“The Body Double” is not her first novel. The first novel she wrote she spent a long time on, and it was a very personal story. It was a fictional account of her great aunt, an incredible influence on Emily. While writing and researching, her car got broken into and somebody stole her laptop the novel was stored on, and she had not backed up the novel.

A year later, she got a message from somebody in Columbia. He said that he bought the laptop, read her novel, and liked it. The man also asked her if he wanted her to send it back to her, since he realized how important it was to her. She told him no, saying that she thought she wrote the book for him.

Emily told the story later, and a friend told her that he had it, since she had sent him a copy of it.

She finds that writing for the newspaper and fiction occupies different emotional spaces for her and that they are completely different processes. Emily also believes that her time working for the paper influenced the writing of her novel a lot.

Emily’s debut novel, called “The Body Double” was released in the year 2020, which is a mystery novel. It was published by Doubleday Books, and was a highly anticipated release, having been a Most Anticipated Book by CrimeReads and the Austin Chronicle.

“The Body Double” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2020. This is the story of a young woman that is recruited by some stranger to give up her former life and her identity to impersonate a reclusive Hollywood star.

An odd man finds our nameless narrator as she is selling popcorn and diet-sodas at a decrepit small-town movie theater and offers up a lucrative yet strange position. She is going to forget this job, all of her buddies, and even her name, then move on to Los Angeles and become the body double of Rosanna Feld, who is a troubled and famous celebrity. Rosanna has grown tired of public life. Her nervous breakdown forced Rosanna to step out of the public eye, and needs a look-alike to step in and take her place in the media circus that is Hollywood.

Overseen by the guy who hired her for this job, Max, our narrator spends days locked up in a tiny apartment out in the hills. All the while, just watching the hidden camera footage of Rosanna, wearing her clothes, practicing all of her mannerisms, and eating the food she likes. Learning to be just like Rosanna in every way possible.

She makes her public debut as Rosanna, shopping in the stylish boutiques, dining at the elegant restaurants, and finally risking to have a dinner party with Rosanna’s real inner circle. The whole time, an increasing amount of alarming questions begin arising. What actually caused Rosanna’s collapse? Is she ever going to come back? Is Max really her ally, or something a lot sinister?

Fans of the novel found this to be a creepy and suspenseful read. Beyda is great at building tension and shocking the reader at the most unexpected of times. With power and fame, beauty and artifice, Emily has a bunch on her mind, and she suffuses the novels with a power that lingers with readers, that bubbles up to the surface at every breathless turn of the celebrity-obsessed culture. The ending of the novel delivers too, and some readers cannot wait to see what Beyda pens next.

Readers felt that this echoed Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and it is a fabulously plotted noir novel about beauty, fame, and Hollywood’s darkness.