Blurring reality

Mary Dixie Carter explores the inner workings of a convincing — and convinced — liar in ‘The Photographer’

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.”

Becoming a novelist

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.”

Mary Dixie Carter, whose stepfather was actor Hal Holbrook, entered the family business, too.

“I did primarily theater, a lot of classical theater — Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams — and I loved it,” Mary Dixie Carter says. “The reason I stopped acting was to go to work for my father, who at the time was the owner and publisher of the New York Observer.”

Not long after the newspaper was sold, Mary Dixie Carter left to write, freelancing and also finishing another as-yet unpublished novel, and putting to work not only her life experience but also a graduate degree in creative writing.

“I think the journalism background is extremely helpful,” Mary Dixie Carter says. “It forces you to be clear and concise and a little faster.

“I also think my acting background is helpful to me as a writer,” she adds. “I feel like the same process I would use when I was exploring a character and finding a character as an actor, I do the same thing as a writer. Trying to get into the body of the character. Like, really trying to be in their head and in their body.”

And growing up around actors and artists had an almost subconscious effect on her emergence as a novelist too, she says.

“Being in the world of theater and music, it sort of seeps in like an osmosis kind of things,” she says. “Especially if you’re exposed to all of it when you’re really, really young.

“My stepfather, I don’t know if you’re familiar with his one-man show, ‘Mark Twain Tonight.’ I saw that probably 30, 40 times,” Mary Dixie Carter says. “The amount of times that I saw him perform that, and heard Mark Twain’s words, I could practically recite whole sections of it.

“That kind of familiarity with the arts, whatever area of the arts it is, just rubs off on you. I think it informs everything.”

Fish out of water

Delta Dawn, the name of Mary Dixie Carter’s character, is drawn, as some will recall, from the song of that name that was recorded in the early ’70s by Tanya Tucker,

Helen Reddy and Bette Midler, and became a hit single for the first two.

“A lot of people know the lyrics — I don’t think it matters whether you do or you don’t — but in the back of my head, the sort of spirit of the woman in the song shares a lot with Delta Dawn,” Mary Dixie Carter says of her choice of the name.

She was always drawn to it because of the Southern nature of her own name, in which Mary Dixie, not Mary, is how she’s always been known.

“I have a very Southern name, and I’ve never really lived in the South; I’ve lived in New York and Los Angeles, and I have a lot of family in the South,” she says. “So I’ve always had this kind of weird fish out of water feeling about my name, which is like it doesn’t quite belong in New York City, doesn’t quite belong in Los Angeles, either.

“And so I was thinking about her as having a fish-out-of-water name,” she says. “Something that marks her as being different, and maybe a name that she wouldn’t necessarily be comfortable with but she can’t get away from either.”

In the same way, Mary Dixie

Carter says, the character can’t escape her background — raised by parents who worked as janitors at Disney World, possibly the victim of abuse as a youth. While partly aware that her natural talent, intelligence and beauty might open doors for her, she still can’t escape the feeling that she must scheme and cheat her way to where she wants to be.

As the book unfolds, the stakes increase for Delta and the family she’s targeted. Will she succeed? Will her lies and deceits be revealed? It’s a natural TV series — the rights have been sold, the project in development — in the vein of shows such as “Big Little Lies” or “Little Fires Everywhere.”

“I can’t share details about it, but I’m extremely excited about it and I’m thrilled with everyone who is working on it,” Carter says.

Delta, to be clear, shares no similarities with the photographer whose offhanded comment fired Mary Dixie Carter’s imagination.

“I still see her from time to time,” she says, adding, “The character has nothing to do with her.”

As for how the book ends, well, it wouldn’t be fair to say too much.