The child of ‘Designing Women’ star Dixie Carter and stepdaughter of actor Hal Holbrook talks about the origins of her psychological thriller.
For Mary Dixie Carter, the inspiration for her debut novel “The Photographer” came from a casual comment made by someone she’d hired to take pictures of her children a few years back. “She’s a very talented photographer, and the pictures were beautiful,” Carter says. “But when they came back, the children’s eyes were vivid, cobalt blue. “I said, ‘I’d like for my children’s eyes to be their real color,’” she says. “And she said, ‘There is no real color.’” The words stuck with her, and Carter wondered: What if a character took that to an extreme? “I was interested in a person who thinks like that,” she says of spinning a fictional character out of that simple exchange. “That just chooses to make the picture and disregard the truth. She’s lying to herself as much as she’s misrepresenting things to others. Those are the most convincing liars. They believe it in that moment they tell you what they tell you.” “The Photographer” takes that concept and runs with it. Delta Dawn, a Southerner from the wrong side of the tracks, becomes a successful photographer in New York City. Despite this, she still wants the life she imagines for herself each time she looks through her camera lens at the wealthier, more successful families who hire her. When the seemingly perfect Straub family hires her to shoot their child’s birthday party, Delta becomes determined to work her way into their lives in the increasingly strange ways Carter’s psychological thriller portrays. “Everyone does it, that kind of lying to yourself, telling yourself a better version of your life,” Carter says. “But Delta really, like, takes it to an extreme. It’s sort of the metaphor of what she does to photographs is what she’s doing in her own real life, too. “And there’s kind of no boundaries and no recognition of the line between what’s real and what’s not real.” If Mary Dixie Carter’s name sounds vaguely familiar, there’s good reason. Her mother was the actress Dixie Carter, whose long career in Hollywood included the role of Julia Sugarbaker on the long-running sitcom “Designing Women.
