Victoria is preparing for the collapse of her company, PrevYou, which promises gullible customers a cure for cancer; an exposé is due to come out exposing the outfit as fraudulent. That’s bad news for Guy, who has become all too used to the sweet life on the gala circuit.while Guy flies out to the Quorum, a conference for the ultra-rich on a private island, turning to heroic levels of alcohol and drugs in a desperate attempt to make his troubles go away.
Chapman answered questions about “The Audacity” via telephone from his home in Kingston, New York. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.. I’d been tracking it, and then I read John Carreyrou’s excellent book, “Bad Blood.” But I’ve been really interested in scams and frauds for a long time.
I think that failure teaches you more. We learn from struggle more than we learn from coasting, and there’s just a lot of inherent friction there. And since I’m interested in the comic, there’s just so much more to mine from someone who is flailing about rather than someone who is just on the ascent.
There’s certain aspects of both Victoria and Guy that are drawn from, I’ll just say diplomatically, some of my relatives, and they’re people that I love, but their way of moving through the world is very profoundly different from how I move through the world. Victoria’s idea is that when she thinks she’s figured out enough of the world, she doesn’t need to learn anymore.
It’s very exciting. You do feel like you’re at least tuned into the world, and then there are small risks where there were aspects of the novel draft that I thought were cartoonish that would then come true in the real world, and I would have to rewrite those.