LOS ANGELES — Gigi Levangie Grazer is a Hollywood insider who writes clever, sharply observed novels about the promised land of big money and bigger egos.So what glamorous indulgence is this member of the industry elite, married to hotshot producer Brian Grazer, interrupting for an interview about the TV adaptation of her book “The Starter Wife” that’s airing this week?

Turns out Grazer is on her cell phone and in her car, parked down the street from a home where one of her two sons, the 7-year-old, is enjoying a play date. “I’m like skulking around, making sure he’s OK. It’s ridiculous,” she says, with a laugh. “This is the most well-adjusted kid .... Obviously, the mother’s not so well-adjusted.”

A relentless satirist, Grazer doesn’t cut anyone — herself included — any slack. And she delights in brushing shoulders with the grasping, self-absorbed types who are part of the entertainment capital and her work. “Hey, I don’t mind those people because I get to write about them. Bring on the bad behaviour!” Grazer said.

Her printed candour hasn’t led to tense confrontations, she said; quite the opposite. “I actually had more people coming up to me, especially after this book, because they saw people that they knew in it.” Grazer said. “And I’d think, ‘But you’re on page 32.’ They would give me more information that I didn’t ask for, like who their husband was sleeping with.”

“It just comes down to people want attention, and they’ll take positive attention or negative attention,” she said, adding with a laugh: “I feel like God put me here.”

“The Starter Wife,” her 2005 best-seller, is the basis of a six-part miniseries debuting 9 p.m. EDT on Thursday on USA Network. It runs through June 30.

Debra Messing (“Will & Grace”) stars as a studio boss’ wife who is abruptly edited out for a younger woman and, in turn, is shunned by her social circle. Lose your status, lose your life, Molly Kagan learns — and maybe find yourself.

It’s a realistic depiction of the industry’s social mores, said writers and executive producers Sara Parriott and Josann McGibbon. The longtime writing team’s movie credits include “Runaway Bride.”

“We knew two people who were in a Hollywood marriage that broke up and knew she was off the list,” McGibbon said. “Only one of them was going to (top agent) Ed Limato’s Oscar party and it was the more famous person, even though she herself was a producer.”

Grazer’s novel has a caustically comic edge that was eased for the miniseries, the pair said. Characters and subplots also were added to expand the story.

“The book is more cynical, and when we tried to put that in the screenplay it wasn’t likable: A billionaire woman becoming a millionaire,” McGibbon said. “We had to make her more identifiable to any woman who was dumped because she’s no longer what the guy wants and she has to start her life over again.”

Adds Parriott: “You don’t want to write about the tragedy of the woman who can’t get her manicure appointment anymore. ... We very much had to shift to make her someone you wanted to spend six hours watching.”

Which isn’t to say the miniseries plays it entirely straight. Having a skilled comic actress like Messing allowed the writers to layer in laughs, including a rehab-centre scene that Messing and co-star Judy Davis play to the hilt. The series, directed by Jon Avnet, also stars Joe Mantegna, Miranda Otto and Anika Noni Rose. Stephen Moyer plays a free-spirited beachcomber who rescues Molly from the ocean and who could be her romantic saviour.

Grazer, who also served as an executive producer on the series (she’s also a screenwriter, with “Stepmom” among her credits), was delighted when she heard that Messing was interested in the starring role. “I was like, `My job is done.’ She’s sort of incredible,” Grazer said. Messing is in the league of “the great comedic actresses who are also beautiful, and you have to go back: Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball, Claudette Colbert, Rosalind Russell.”

The redhead has “an old-fashioned, movie star quality about her. She’s just a natural,” Grazer said.

Although Grazer prides herself on her relative detachment from the industry town she chronicles, her life became grist for the gossip mill when she and her husband briefly separated in 2006 and then reunited. Stories about the couple noted that she’d written about a Hollywood split in “The Starter Wife.”

“It was the oddest thing; art imitating life imitating art. I wrote it maybe a year before our separation and, then, there I was. But no lifeguard in sight,” she said, laughing. “I thought it was a little scary. Hopefully, my next work isn’t about Armageddon.”

(For the record, it’s not: In a departure from her three Los Angeles-set novels, she’s writing “Queen Takes King,” a New York story planned for spring publication.) The expectation would be that Grazer got the cold shoulder during her time apart from her husband, whose high-flying projects include “A Beautiful Mind” and TV’s “24.”

“In my case, the opposite happened. People surprised me at how kind they are,” she said. “If you read the book, it’s really written with a wink. In every circle there’s the friends you have that you hate, but they serve their function. That’s maybe 10 percent of the people out there.

“Then you have people just trying to make the best of whatever situation they’re in.”