There is typically (hopefully!) a moment during a celebrity magazine interview when the profile subject comes clearly into focus for the journalist. It could be a comment the subject makes about his or herself—inadvertently revealing, or oddly biting, or self-deprecating in a manner discordant with their other statements. It could be an offhand observation they make about someone else, or some cutting or perceptive take about a topic in the discourse. Or it could be something as seemingly innocuous as the subject pausing after the journalist sits down in the restaurant and asking how their day is going. A frown at an unexpected question. Their choice in chewing gum. A song they hum between answers.

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Once, an actress I was interviewing showed me her iPhone wallpaper, as a means of explicating a point in a story, and it was as if the lede of my profile had been transferred directly into my Google Doc from up on high.

Usually what makes these moments feel notable, even revelatory, is how they somehow shine a light on the gap between what we might have assumed about the given public figure.

Over my years writing celebrity profiles for magazines, I often found myself undergoing an exercise in exploring and examining the dichotomy between the singer or actor or model’s public persona—the material comprising their social media, the way they dress or carry themselves in appearances—and their manner and energy in person, “IRL.” I try to conduct my interviews, as best I can, like conversations I might have with my friends. Even though I prepare and memorize a list of questions in advance, I ultimately try to “forget” all of them upon starting an interview. I enjoy just…following the thread of the conversation. My favorite moments—often the ah-ha moments referenced earlier—are usually the result of follow-up queries, of odd tangents or unexpected diversions in our chat. And usually what makes these moments feel notable, even revelatory, is how they somehow shine a light on the gap between what we might have assumed about the given public figure, and how they actually engage and operate as a human sitting across the table from another human in a crowded café.

When I started writing my novel a few years ago, I found myself thinking quite a bit about this difference between the public and the private, between the way all of us—“celebrities” or not—present ourselves online versus how we actually exist in our relationships and friendships. Many of the characters in my novel, to varying degrees, are struggling to understand how they are perceived by others. We have an actress, Valentina Lack, who finds herself discussed and described in the press in a way that doesn’t necessarily align with how she sees herself. We have an influencer, Maddie, who has become so accustomed to sharing her life on social media that the lines between what’s “real” and what isn’t have become blurry. And there is Victor, a magazine writer, who grapples quite a bit with how his career and life appears to others in comparison to how it feels for him to actually live it.

While most of these characters are not as high-profile in the world of the novel as some of the Deux Moi staples I’ve interviewed over my career, I approached the crafting of them in ways that occasionally felt similar to how I approached my profiles. I was thinking about how so many of us (our characters, ourselves, or something like that…) are focused on how we are going to “share” a given experience we’re having on Instagram Stories (or even just in group-text threads) as much as we are on actually feeling present. I thought about the moments in these characters’ lives that stood out as surprising or unexpected to me, the details that I would have observed as a journalist and made note of, moments I might have decided were worthy of a lede.

Thinking about my characters through the framing of how they might write a profile—or how they might present themselves when they knew they were being profiled!—helped me see them in a new way.

I also found it a quite enjoyable (and very helpful!) exercise to actually craft some online and social-media materials for my characters. I wrote about fifty tweets for Valentina’s Twitter account. I wrote a lengthy Internet screed for a minor character to help me better get in her head. For one character (who I won’t identify here, since it is a potential spoiler (!) to reveal who it is), I wrote a “How I Get It Done” New York Magazine piece from decades down the road in her career. I also wrote transcripts of a few episodes of Maddie’s podcast: her personality and humor hopefully come across in a more outsize way in the transcripts, her voice pitched slightly differently than it is in other scenes. All of this material helped me to better understand to what extent the characters were either aligned with or at odds with how they appeared in private, and enabled me to better understand what these characters actually wanted other people to think about them.

In the end, I ended up cutting many of these bits from the actual book as, for the most part, they weren’t explicitly tied to the narrative. (Though one of my friends recently suggested I release them all at some point after the novel comes out, sort of like a pop star releasing a deluxe version of her album a year later with a few new songs, or bonus features on a DVD movie release).

At one point during my writing process, I decided to write the magazine profile that Victor is described writing about Valentina in the book. (This felt like some kind of literary Inception situation, as I was in fact simultaneously in the midst of working on a celebrity profile myself at that point.) Writing Victor’s profile unlocked aspects for me of both their characters. For Victor, I understood better his approach to journalism and writing, as I thought through what details he would find particularly noticeable or interesting about his subject.

And for Valentina, I was able to consider how she would frame a quote, what she would choose to divulge or not, where she would lie or tell the truth. The goal of a profile is ostensibly to help the reader understand the subject better. Thinking about my characters through the framing of how they might write a profile—or how they might present themselves when they knew they were being profiled!—helped me see them in a new way, as well.

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Early Thirties by Josh Duboff is available from Gallery/Scout Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.