Has Katherine Taylor ever done cocaine?

Is Gwyneth Paltrow really a bad tipper?

First-time novelist Katherine Taylor answered these and other questions last night at Cody’s Books in Berkeley. She was at Cody’s to speak about her debut novel — Rules For Saying Goodbye.

Taylor’s book is about a girl from Fresno, California, who is sent back East to go to prep school when she is thirteen. The novel follows the girl as she comes of age. She goes to college and later attends a graduate program in writing. She does a stint as a bartender in New York, where the cocaine is “so good it’s pink” and where celebrities, such as Gwyneth Paltrow, do not leave tips. She wanders around California, England, France and Belgium. She has one failed romance after another.

Like the main character in her novel, Katherine Taylor was raised in Fresno, went to a prep school on the East Coast, earned a graduate degree in writing, tended bar, and has traveled widely. There is another thing that the two share: the name of the main character in the novel is (you guessed it) Katherine Taylor.

The real Katherine Taylor told the audience at Cody’s that she based the fictional Katherine on 20 to 30 percent of her own life. The rest is made up. She chose to use her own name because everyone would assume that the main character was her anyway, since this is her debut novel. Taylor said that this was “my own little private joke, my double bluff.”

What about the cocaine? Where does it fall in the real vs. fictional divide? The real Katherine Taylor has never done it, though she thinks that, as a writer, she probably should have experienced it.

Taylor worked on Rules For Saying Goodbye, intermittently, for twelve years. She was tending bar in Los Angeles when she completed it. She worked desperately to sell the novel because she could not bear the thought of continuing to tend bar in L.A., where the clientele, she said, were jerks.

Oh yes, Gwyneth Paltrow does not leave tips. The famous actress is apparently not capable of determining how much of a bill is 15 percent, says (the real) Katherine Taylor.