In The Vacation, everyone at Venice Beach International Hostel hides a secret: There’s an exotic dancer, Savannah, who’s run away from her abusive reverend father; Nicole and her BFF, Eric, on a treasure hunt for an old lady’s massive inheritance; tattooed and bearded “Jake,” a pseudonym for a celebrity in disguise; Zac, a famous actor who’s nothing like he seems on screen; fame-worshiping Ruth, who’s come to Los Angeles to meet and befriend Zac – by waiting outside his house; and Tommy, who works the hostel’s reception desk for free room and board, and who, little by little, is onto everyone else’s lies, which overlap in strange and unforeseen ways. 

 

 

For a Brit, author John Marrs has a deep understanding of Hollywood and celebrity, because – before he turned to fiction writing in 2013 – he was a freelance journalist on the entertainment beat. Though the book is chock-full with famous, real-life names and descriptions of their swanky abodes in the Hollywood Hills, The Vacation is equally interested in the grittier underbelly of Los Angeles: specifically, the cockroach-infested, stale-feet-smelling hostel that houses all The Vacation’s wonderfully shady characters.

Anyone who’s ever stayed at a hostel in this lifetime – Marrs included, as we’ll soon learn – will be instantly transported back to the backpacking life, complete with booze, drugs and hookups (but not the crime and murder, hopefully). As Marrs’ 12th book makes its unconventional route into the world, Zoomer spoke to the journalist-turned-writer about his wild travelling years, the slow burn of self-publishing and what it’s like to hand your work off to Netflix bigwigs and hope for the best. 

Rosemary Counter: So lovely to meet you! Where are you in the world?

John Marrs: I’m in Northampton, about 60 miles outside of London, in my messy office. It’s a bit of a pigsty right now, I’m sorry to say. Where are you? 

RC: No judgment here! I’m in my own messy house in Toronto. Have you ever been to Canada? 

JM: A few times when I was a kid, actually, because my uncle used to live in Toronto. Then later, when I was backpacking around many years ago, we landed in Canada for a week or so. First in New Brunswick and then in Toronto. The hostel we stayed in in Toronto – I don’t know if it’s still around, this must have been 1992 – was this god-awful place where, after a certain time of night, they’d fill any empty beds with people off the street. For a skinny little 21-year-old Brit, it was a bit scary. 

RC: I could tell by reading this book that you’d had your fair share of hostel experiences. 

JM: Hostel … or hostile?

RC: Well, sometimes those go hand and hand. I once slept in a hostel on the bottom bunk when the person on the top vomited off the side. 

JM: Wow, gross. I stayed at this really weird place in Chicago where the middle floor was a day centre for people with dementia, the top floor was where some of these patients lived and the ground floor was the hostel. People would be wandering through all night looking for their floor. That was … strange. Tons of fun if you’re 21. 

RC: And such a great place to set a book! So many different people from all different places. 

JM: Absolutely. I started writing this book way back in the ’90s. It was originally self-published under a different name, but then another publisher wanted to pick it up a few years ago, so I had to go back again and do the edits they wanted. I just cringed through so much of it, not because it’s bad, but just because it’s a bit like looking at old photographs of yourself. Why was I wearing that? What was I doing with my hair? 

RC: I love how you embrace your self-publishing past, and I really love how your website describes one book as “rejected by 80 agents and publishers.” Not many writers put the truth out there like that! 

JM: Well, maybe if I hadn’t made it in the end, I wouldn’t be acknowledging that stuff. But it’s important for writers to know, I think. I self-published for a few years, shooting for 100 downloads or something, then everything changed in the span of one week. A traditional publisher took on my third book, The One, and a production company was interested, too, and then it became a show on Netflix. If you keep the faith, anything can happen. 

RC: Tell me more about The One. What’s it like to see your work on the screen? 

JM: The One is about the idea that there’s one person who has a particular DNA strand that matches yours and if you meet them, you’re destined to fall in love with them. It’s all absolute bullshit, of course, but good fun to write. I love writing speculative fiction, which I like to say is set five minutes in the future, because you can just make stuff up as you go. But the producers do that, too, so they change things as well, which is fine by me. It pays my mortgage. 

RC: And before all this, you were a celebrity journalist? How did that affect your thoughts on Hollywood for The Vacation? 

JM: I was, yes, for about 15 years or so. It was lots of fun. Now that I’m on the other side of the interview, I understand a bit better, but at the time, I’d watch a famous person turn on the charm for a half hour. Then the camera stops, and their smile just disappears, and they have to move on to the next one. That kind of behaviour, the idea that they’re not quite who we think they are, inspired my Zac character. I covered reality stars a lot, from shows like The X Factor, when things would be going amazing for a bit but then, for whatever reason, it stops or ends. They have to get used to life after fame, which interested me a lot. 

RC: Then you have this Ruth character, an actual celebrity stalker. We don’t often get into that character’s head. 

JM: Oh, Ruth. She was so fun to write because she doesn’t start out that way. She’s just a bit downtrodden, trying to find her way, and for some reason she’s looking for answers through Zac. She doesn’t plan to do anything bad, it just happens, slowly then suddenly. By the time I got to the end, I decided to just go for it. But that’s a surprise. I do love a cliffhanger.