Lara took a deep breath, and began. ‘OK, I’d been nineteen for seven years and it was starting to show. I’d been the prettiest girl at my high school, and seven years earlier I’d come to LA hoping to be the next Julia Roberts.’

Emily was happily mouthing the words along with her.

‘But LA was full of chicks who’d been the prettiest girls at high school and I was nothing special.’

I began to object that Lara was very special, but she stopped me.

‘Tell it to the hand. Look around you, this town is full of babes. They are everywhere and a thousand new ones arrive every week, can you imagine? But at the time I didn’t know this. So I start looking for work, hit a brick wall and end up having to do pay theatre.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Productions you pay for a part in.’

‘You pay them?

‘Yeah, but there’s always the chance that some hotshot director will spot you and you get to put something on your your résumé Anyhoo, after that, I got a few walk-on parts where they paid me and I thought I was on my way. In between acting jobs, I waited tables and got my boobs and lips done.’

‘Biggened,’ Emily explained. ‘And some casting director told her to drop ten pounds –’

‘Was her name Kirsty?’ I asked sarcastically.

At that point, the story of Lara’s life stalled while Emily had a little rant about Kirsty telling me I needed to drop ten pounds. (I had exaggerated to make her seem worse.) Lara soothed and smoothed, then Emily resumed. ‘Right! Some casting director told her to drop ten pounds, though she was already x-ray skinny – so she upped her exercise to four hours daily. Then she began starving herself and only ate twelve grapes and five rice-cakes a day.’

I didn’t believe her. No one could survive on that.

‘It’s true,’ Lara confirmed. ‘I was constantly hungry.’

‘Even though you were on pills,’ Emily reminded her.

‘That’s right. I knew every doctor who gave fake prescriptions. I took so much speed – that’s what diet pills are –my mouth was always dry, my heart was racing…’

‘… I was permanently homicidal,’ Emily chimed in with the last bit.

‘I was so poor and so unhappy. Six days out of seven I managed to stick to my diet. But – and it was like Russian roulette, I never knew which chamber was loaded – on one of the days I broke my diet. And how! Three pints of ice-cream, a pound of chocolate, four bags of cookies… then I made myself puke it all up.’

‘Bulimia,’ Emily intoned gravely at me. ‘For all the good it did her.’

‘You got it. Instead of graduating to speaking parts, even the walk-on parts stopped happening. They said my look was over. Big, blonde Aryan types were out and wide-eyed waifs who looked like they’d been abused as children were in.’

She paused and Emily prompted her, ‘“I’d been to twenty-three auditions in a row without a single call-back.”’

‘I’d been to twenty-three auditions in a row without a single call-back and I hadn’t had a paying acting job in over two years. ‘I’m stony broke and all the time I’m getting older, my ass is slipping, my face is getting lines, and every week a thousand real nineteen-year-olds are getting off the bus and hawking their fresh teenage bodies round town. I can’t, just can’t go back to waiting tables, so I slept with a director – a man – who promised me a part. It never happened. Then I got so desperate I slept with a writer.’

‘Why’s it worse to sleep with a writer than a director?’

Emily and Lara both chuckled. ‘Because writers in Hollywood have no power,’ Emily explained. ‘They’re the amoebas of the Hollywood food chain, even further down the scale than the caterers on a movie set.’

‘Then,’ Lara bit her lip, ‘just when I think it can’t get any worse, my girlfriend threw me out. She’d found out about me sleeping with the director. I had no job, no money, no girl, no self-respect – no rice-cakes, even. The long, dark cocktail hour of the soul.’ She laughed, but saw fit to add, ‘It was horrible – I can’t tell you. The dream was over, I knew I was beat and it just about broke my heart. I saw myself going back home to Portland on the bus and I felt like the biggest failure in the history of the world. So there you go – my sordid life as an actress!’

‘At least you never did a porn film,’ I comforted.

‘Oh, I did.’ She sounded surprised. ‘I even put it on my résumé. For a while.’

‘But the moral of the story,’ Emily prompted. ‘Let’s not get sidetracked.’

‘The moral of the story is I thought I would never be happy again,’ Lara said. ‘I was twenty-six years of age and all washed up. I’d had plastic surgery, I’d given years of my life, I’d used up every bit of my hope and I had nothing to show for it. I hated myself and I wished I was dead.’

‘She tried slitting her wrists,’ Emily said.

‘But I couldn’t even do that right. Did you know you’re supposed to do it longways instead of crossways?’

‘Yes.’

‘Smarter than me. But here’s a thing – my life did get better. I made the decision to let go of my dreams, because they were killing me, and I stopped asking the impossible from myself. I changed my attitude and decided to focus on what I had rather than what I didn’t have. And most of all, I decided I wasn’t going to be bitter.’

‘So you went back to school,’ Emily said.

‘So I went back to school and two days – two days – after I got those little letters after my name, I got hired by a production company. So I still got to work in the movies, right? I hadn’t wanted to work behind the scenes, I’d wanted to be in front of a camera, but I sucked it up and got with the programme. And yeah, there are times when I see a girl’s face on the silver screen and I wish it was me,’ she said. ‘But most times I’m down with it. I love my job – except for when I nearly got canned for missing Two Dead Men. I love the movies I work with and I got over the girl. So there you go.’

‘I love that story,’ Emily sighed. ‘Makes me think that whatever happens, I’ll be OK. And so will you, Maggie.’