Rising Stars: Meet Caroline Ryder of Los Angeles

Today we’d like to introduce you to Caroline Ryder.

Hi Caroline, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
Fairy tales, really, are where it all began. I was born in Madrid, Spain, to an Irish father and a Brazilian mother. We moved to London when I was five, and I had to learn English fast. My first word was “moon,” I think. I felt my way around the world, absorbing language the way children do—by instinct, by hunger. And I loved losing myself in books.

I remember a story about a little girl who travels through different lands inside a rainbow. Each color was its own landscape, its own mood. I remember wishing I could step into those worlds one day. There was also a series of fairy tales by a very-cancelled author, Enid Blyton, whose imagination I adored: a giant tree in a forest, spinning different worlds around its top. Each world strange and dazzling—and dangerous if you got stuck, because they never stayed for long.

So yes, I’ve always disappeared into storytelling. It started there, and it’s still happening.

Even when I moved to Los Angeles from London in my twenties—I’m in my forties now—I think some part of me was still chasing that rainbow. LA felt entirely magical when I arrived in the mid-2000s. It was cheap, people lived in little Silver Lake cottages with gardens for $750 a month, everyone was an artist or a musician, and no one stared at their phone, though we were all on MySpace, I suppose. It was a fun time.

I’m still having fun here—ghostwriting books, writing my own screenplays, making things. Still climbing the magical tree to see what world is waiting at the top. That’ll never change.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Even if the road had been smooth, trust me, I would have found a way to fall flat on my a**. Which might not be such a bad thing. Since when has plain sailing made for an interesting story?

I remember doing a small editing job for Shepard Fairey once, helping him shape an interview he’d done with Malcolm McLaren. Malcolm was obsessed with the importance of mistakes—slip-ups, stumbles, the cobblestones along the yellow brick road that send you flying onto your back. Only then, he said, can you see the world from an entirely different angle. Only magnificent errors will create the conditions for original art. Is’t that a nice way to think about our eternal suffering as artists?

The hardest thing about being a working writer, though—if we’re getting real—is the absolute financial uncertainty of it all. Add to that the precarious nature of being an immigrant artist in the United States on a three-year visa that only gets renewed if I continually prove my worth and my income. Fun times. It’s a strange and beautiful position to be in: zero rights, same taxes, constant pressure. This nightmare has forced me into a bolder and more urgent state of existence, at all times. I take zero for granted. And I generally work harder than most anyone I know.

Well, that’s a lie, of course—I do find time to relax with my five dogs and travel and stare into space—and I’m sure a good many people work much harder than I. But I will say, being flat broke, many, many times over the years, has been quite the motivator. I remember picking apples off the trees in Echo Park because times were so lean and I was hungry. I learned where all the best fruit trees in LA are, that year.

People who hire you and then forget to pay you, that’s also another fun part of being a writer. One time I did see fit to involve Judge Judy in a matter of non-payment from a very fancy publisher, who insisted on paying me right away once he realized I was involving the law. I also started a protest group called WAAANKAA–Writers Against ArtInfo Are Not Kidding Around Anymore–because an art publication named Artinfo was withholding my much-needed $250. They paid me instantly once the NY Post ran a story, interviewing me about WAAANKAA. That’s the thing, it helps to have a sense of humor if you’re mad enough to choose this absurd life path of writing for a living.

Speaking of other obstacles and challenges, I’ve also had my heart broken here and there, some might say willingly. But without a little scar tissue, what business do you even have being a writer?

That’s my excuse, anyway.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Well. As I mentioned, I’m a writer.

I started out as a news reporter in London, covering petty thefts, lost cats, the occasional murder. Then I found myself in LA and began reporting on the local arts and culture scene for publications such as the *LA Weekly* (RIP), and the *LA Times.* I was even the style editor at *Variety* for a hot minute. That was fun; I’ll never forget being interviewed by Peter Bart—THE Peter Bart—OG Hollywood power player, former Paramount exec back when it mattered, a man who still knows exactly where all the bodies are buried in this town. I loved that he personally hired me. perhaps because I’ve always had a fondness and fascination for the old Hollywood, minus the toxicity. But I do love noir, Chandler, femme fatales, thumbing the pages of Joan Didion over a martini lunch at Musso, or perhaps some Eve Babitz over dinner at the Chateau.

I also wrote a book with the band GWAR.

I spent about a decade interviewing celebrities for magazines like *Dazed*, *The Face*, *BULLETT*, and many others. I remember lunch with Cameron Diaz at the Chateau Marmont for *Cosmopolitan*—she was so open, so opinionated about womanhood. She told me to freeze my eggs ASAP (as did Molly Ringwald). I didn’t take their advice, so now I’m a child-free dog-mom of five, blowing my inheritance on Juvederm — you can read about it in my story PILLOWFACE that was published by Dream Boy Book Club this year, about my Mar-A-Lago facial aspirations.

Around 2010, I started ghostwriting memoirs while pursuing screenwriting; my first was with a deaf-mute championship motocross racer named Ashley Fiolek who lived in Florida, and it was a tough gig, because I know nothing about motocross and she also couldn’t hear me and I don’t know ASL. But we wrote a fine book in the end and it did quite well, still one of the top selling motocross memoirs, I believe.

In 2013 I started my MFA in Screenwriting at USC, and in my graduating year I landed a dream job, writing a film about the painter Mark Rothko’s life and death with his daughter Kate. That job got me into the WGA, which was nice. I also wrote three vampire films, one of which (Mimi and Ulrich) was optioned by Sadie Frost (Lucy from Coppola’s “Dracula”) and Emma Comley’s company Blonde to Black. Jonas Akerlund was attached to direct, and iconic German vampire actor Udo Kier was gonna play himself, since the character of Ulrich was entirely based on him.

That dream died, slowly at first, and then all at once. I think Hemingway said that.

Im 2013 I co-authored *Dirty Rocker Boys* with Bobbie Brown—“the Middlemarch of groupie lit” according to a reviewer—a wild, tea-spilling memoir about the Sunset Strip in the ’90s. Definitely buy it, so I can get more royalties. This year I wrote Shari Franke’s #1 *New York Times* bestselling memoir *The House of My Mother*, which you should also read because it’s incredibly moving, and she’s one of the most courageous humans I’ve ever met. I’m now adapting it into a film.

I just wrapped Spencer Pratt’s forthcoming memoir, *The Guy You Loved to Hate*. Buy that book instantly. It’s a WILD WILD story filled with Hollywood intrigue, hummingbirds and crystal healing.

I also write extremely weird literary fiction—last year Maudlin House published an epistolary story I wrote imagining a love affair between Lana Del Rey and Kid Rock. She revealed her alligator-man romance shortly after. I swear, sometimes I’m tapped into something uncanny.

Speaking of which, I recently contributed three essays to Taschen’s *Spirit Worlds*, a stunning art book about the mysteries beyond the veil.

Truly, I love my job. 🙂

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.carolineryder.com
• Instagram: @carolineryderwriter
• Facebook: @CarolineRyder