Readers who picked up their copies of Aliya S. King’s latest novel Platinum as soon as it hit stores should be done by now. It’s a quick and exciting read full of glamour, intense drama and characters loosely based on people we all love to stalk via gossip magazines and blogs.
Platinum follows the lives of five women who are romantically involved with men in the music industry. There’s Beth Saddlebrook who hopes her crumbling marriage with the dated and drug-addicted rapper Z will be saved by the birth of yet another child, Kipenizi Hill, who has spent years staggering appearances and dodging paparazzi in order to keep her relationship with successful rapper, Jake, a secret, Josephine, who believed her super-producer husband Ras was faithful until he confessed that he was in love with another woman, Alex, the journalist who broke the rules and fell in love with an up-and-coming rapper she had been assigned to interview, and Cleo, the hip-hop groupie extraordinaire, who claims to have had sex with all of these women’s men – and is prepared to tell it all in her book.
Aliya S. King’s Platinum gives readers an inside glimpse at the life they see splashed on magazine covers and billboards. The life they believe to be full of shopping, over-the-top vacations and spa days. But Platinum shows that this life has a price and after further investigation, many women may not be willing to pay it.
GG had a chance to sit down with the author to talk about her latest book.
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GG: What inspired you to write this book?
King: A couple of years ago, Vibe called me, and asked me to do a story on women who were married to rappers, and it wasn’t as glamorous as it was from the outside looking in. At the time that I wrote the story, I was about to get married myself, so I was very interested in how marriage works, which marriages work and which don’t. I’m not married to celebrity, but I’m married to someone who has his own degree of recognition in music industry. I wondered what I would do if I was in these women’s situation.
GG: There’s a pattern of unhealthy relationships in the novel. Which couple’s relationship had the strongest foundation?
King: I would have to say that would be Kipenizi and Jake. Even though it wasn’t perfect, they just had a way about them. You just knew there was love between them. I loved their love affair, and their secret marriage – I loved writing those two characters.
GG: Which relationship was the weakest?
King: The weakest would definitely be Beth and Z. They’d been together for a long time, and it’s just not working. They had four kids, and he had kids with other people, and he had drug problems. It just wasn’t working.
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GG: Why do you think Beth stayed?
King: They’d been together since they were very young. If you’ve been with some one since you were 13, it’s hard to leave.
GG: You write about these women like you know them. Which character had the hardest story to tell?
Aliya S. King: That would have to be Cleo. Cleo’s character was one of the characters that I based off of a real person.
