Author Beth Raymer at the Blue Planet Writers' Room in Northwood. (Bruce R. Bennett / Palm Beach Post)

It was a surreal moment for Beth Raymer.

There before her was her old office — well, not really her office, but its exact re-creation, from the desk to the lighting to the chairs.

"The difference," she recalls, "is that Catherine Zeta-Jones was sitting in one of the chairs."

The Chicago star wasn’t one of Raymer’s real-life co-workers, and neither were Bruce Willis and Vince Vaughn. But the details of Raymer’s real life, a journey that began in her hometown of Wellington, are so surrealistic that they practically demanded to be written into a book and a Hollywood movie.

And now they have.

Raymer’s life in the unpredictable world of bookies and offshore gambling provided the background for her memoir, Lay the Favorite, and a new movie of that same name starring Zeta-Jones, Willis, Vaughn and British actress Rebecca Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) as Raymer.

The film, directed by Stephen Frears (The Grifters, High Fidelity, The Queen), premiered this month at the Sundance Film Festival, where reactions among critics was mixed, and does not have a general release date yet.

Raymer, 35, is temporarily back in Palm Beach County to research her next book, a semi-autobiographical novel about a young girl who moves from the Ohio Valley to the wilds of Loxahatchee.

She will appear Friday for a reading of Lay the Favorite at Harold’s Coffee Lounge in West Palm Beach’s Northwood Village, to benefit the Blue Planet Writers’ Room.

The book covers her adventures in environs both wild and mild — the North Florida trailers of the clients she visited as a social worker, the Tallahassee-area homes and offices where she worked as an "in-home stripper" while working her way through Florida State University, the offices of gamblers in Las Vegas and New York, the beaches of Curacao, and the halls of Columbia Journalism School and a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship.

That weird, colorful journey starts in Wellington, which, when 5-year-old Raymer moved there with her family in 1981, "was just rattlesnakes and strawberries." The future writer admits that "I didn’t read at all as a kid. The Books on Wheels (truck) would come by, and I would just get movies, like those PBS histories of presidents. I didn’t really like reading until my 20s, or start writing until my late 20s. Until then, it was just experience, experience, experience."

‘Horrible student’

The so-called "horrible student" and former basketball player graduated from Wellington High in 1994, and then took an unhurried approach to her post-secondary education, getting her associate’s degree from the then-Palm Beach Community College. She admits that her priority as a young adult "was about making money," taking various jobs as a shot girl at a local bar and waitressing at the Waffle House and at a barbecue joint.

By the time she made her way to Florida State to study social work, she was working for the Department of Children and Families inspecting homes in Wakulla County, "which didn’t go so well, spending time telling people what to do, going into their trailers to see if they were clean. I had to report when they were dirty, when my house was dirty."

During her stint in Tallahassee, Raymer also worked briefly for an adult website and as a stripper who made home or office visits, which she writes about in her book. When asked about it now, she grimaces comically and covers her face with her hands. "It’s in the book. Oh, Tallahassee. Where it all comes together," she says, playfully borrowing the city’s tourism catchphrase.

While the stripper angle is made a lot of in the promotion of the movie version of Lay the Favorite, it’s her following gigs in the gambling industry that not only give it its title, but fill the bulk of the book.

In 2001, she moved to Las Vegas with a boyfriend, planning to spend a few months there making money as a cocktail waitress before heading with him to Los Angeles. But the relationship ended "almost immediately," and she found that cocktail waitress jobs in Vegas are highly competitive. While waitressing at a Thai restaurant to pay the bills, a frequent customer, who was a masseuse, mentioned that one of her clients was a professional gambler looking for an assistant.

And that’s what led her to Dink, played in the movie by Willis. As with many assistant jobs, Raymer started around 8 a.m., although the tasks were very specific. "I made all of his bets, then went to the casinos," she says. "I started getting promoted to sort of a junior partner. I was the only woman there – in that world you don’t meet so many. But I was a solid employee."

Deep into gambling

Raymer did so well in Vegas that she wound up in New York, working for a professional bookmaker, played in the movie by Vince Vaughn. It was with him that she moved to Curacao to help run his offshore sports betting business while enjoying living in the Caribbean, shark fishing with local friends and taking four-hour lunch breaks.

Of course, it wasn’t all beach time and papaya milkshakes. "It was stressful. Gambling’s not the most sensitive business – it’s not like the people have MBAs. But it’s constantly changing – things are legal one day, and illegal the next," Raymer says. "Not to get dark here, but we’re working 17 hours a day in a vacuum, with a lot of middle-aged guys from Long Island watching baseball all day. It drove me nuts."

She stayed there for about a year until "the business kind of imploded. It went bankrupt. Someone was stealing – it was an inside job, and there was no money to pay anybody (on bets)."

Her experiences engendered a certain amount of fearlessness, something Raymer believes she always had: "I believed that something better always comes along. You have to be open to it."

Raymer worked on the book while in Costa Rica as part of her Fulbright scholarship. She says that she hadn’t kept a journal or notes during her adventures, but had written her boyfriend letters the whole time she was in the Caribbean, which she used as her writing sample to apply to Columbia. The Ivy League was "so different from PBCC, as you might imagine. It was such a serious place. I remember standing at the gates at 116th Street and thinking ‘I can’t believe that five months ago, I was in the Caribbean.’ "

It was in her last semester that a professor suggested writing about her experiences. If the meat of her story sounds unlikely, any writer who’s dreamed of a book deal will tell you that the circumstances of Raymer’s deal with Random House are almost as much of a fairy tale.

The story was bought as a movie just from her proposal, before she’d even written the book. "I sent the screenwriter the chapters as I went along," she says. "There was a lot of pressure, but it taught me how important momentum is, especially in film. If someone is interested, you’ve got to get it to them."

Memoirs are a vulnerable thing – there’s your life out there for everyone to peruse and judge. Raymer says her biggest concern was how her friends from the gambling world would like their portrayal (they turned out to love it). In the end, she says her journeys proved "I certainly had drive, even in my stripping job. I took the jobs I took to make it the best I could."

And she wants the readers and, now, viewers of her story to understand that their stories have worth, no matter where they take them.

"It’s OK to have an unconventional life, to have an open mind," she says. "I’ve met so many kids in their 20s who are so rigid. It’s OK to have new experiences. There could be a whole other path waiting for you."

Beth Raymer: A reading: 7-9 p.m. Friday, Jan. 27, Harold’s Coffee Lounge, 514 Northwood Road, West Palm Beach. Information: (561) 837-9000. | Directions, invite a friend