While Los Angeles Laker Lamar Odom chases reality TV stardom with Khloé Kardashian, the mother of his children wants publishers to know she has the write stuff.
Liza Morales, who split with Odom in 2008, tells us she’s talking to literary agents about repping a roman à clef she’s written that depicts what it’s really like to be in a relationship with a star athlete.
“It shows the lifestyle from the inside,” says Morales, who turns 32 Monday. “Since our society is obsessed with celebrity, the book gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the real reality.”
We wonder if she’s referring to her ex’s E! show, “Khloé & Lamar”?
Morales is keeping the book’s title under wraps, but she says the athlete in her novel is a professional football player, not an NBA star.
That said, a friend who read the manuscript tells us insiders will recognize Odom in the character.
“You’ll see a lot of tidbits that make you go, ‘Hmm,’”says the source. But Morales says she wrote the book with a higher purpose in mind than payback. “My intent is not to bash my ex or any pro athlete,”she says. “I want to show women that you can rise up from a certain situation.”
Morales began dating Odom in 1996, when both attended Christ the King High School in Queens. They became engaged in 2000 but never married. After they officially broke in 2008, Odom married Kardashian in 2009, barely a month after meeting her.
Morales says she “stayed too long” with Odom because she came from a “broken home” and wanted to “break the cycle” for her kids. The death of their 7-month-old son Jayden from sudden infant death syndrome in 2006 was “a real wake-up call,” she adds, because Odom essentially left her alone to deal with her grief and their surviving children, Destiny, 12, and Lamar Jr., 9.
Odom does provide financial support for his kids, but the college-educated Morales says she doesn’t want to just sit around collecting his checks. She started the RS Baby fashion line in memory of Jayden — an offshoot of Odom’s Rich Soil label — but shelved the company last year after, she says, Odom told her to change its name and “started pulling away from backing it.”
Morales could have tried reality TV when the producers of VH1′s “Basketball Wives” asked her to be on an L.A. spinoff of the popular show, but she says “it just wasn’t for me.”
She prefers to write. “I get a euphoric feel from it,”she says.
She has plenty of material, too.
