S04.18: Jayne Ann Krentz: Trailblazer
Our Trailblazer episodes continue this week with Jayne Ann Krentz, who has done it all: writing for Vivian Stephens, writing historicals, writing contemporaries, writing space-set, fantasy, and paranormal romance, writing nonfiction about romance. In addition to managing life as JAK, Amanda Quick, Stephanie James and more, she’s also a legend of the genre because of her vocal resistance to the way society, literature and academia talks about romance novels.
In this episode, we talk about her journey and the way she continually reinvented herself to keep writing, about the importance of writers’ core stories, about genre and myth making, and about the role of romance in the world. We could not be more grateful to Jayne Ann Krentz for making time for Fated Mates.
Next week, our first read-along of the year will be Lisa Valdez’s Passion, an erotic historical published in 2005 that is W-I-L-D. There is a lot of biblical stuff at the world’s fair. Also some truly bananas stuff that…sticks with you. Get it at Amazon, Apple, Kobo, or B&N.
Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful!
Show Notes
Welcome Jayne Ann Krentz, she has had lot of pen names, including Jayne Taylor, Jayne Bentley, Stephanie James and Amanda Glass. Now she publishes under 3 names: Jayne Ann Krentz (contemporary), Jayne Castle (speculative fiction romance), and Amanda Quick (historical). She has said, “I am often asked why I use a variety of pen names. The answer is that this way readers always know which of my three worlds they will be entering when they pick up one of my books.”
We read Ravished for the podcast in 2021, or three decades ago. You know how it goes in these pandemic times.
People mentioned by Jayne: editor Vivian Stephens, author Barbara Delinksy, author Amii Loren, agent Steve Axelrod publishing executive Irwyn Applebaum, author Susan Elizabeth Phillips, author Kristin Hannah, author Debbie Macomber, author Christina Dodd, author Rachel Grant, author Darcy Burke, editor Leslie Gelbman, editor Cindy Hwang, editor Patricia Reynolds Smith.
Jayne Ann Krentz 0:00 / #
The thing about genre, the reason it even exists at all, is because it's the device and the mechanism by which we send our values down to the next generation. It's the way we affirm them to ourselves throughout our life, and it's the way a culture keeps its culture intact. It's the myth of the core value of that civilization, whatever it may be, that is going to go down through history and it survives or it doesn't survive, and that's what genre does, it carries the myth.
Sarah MacLean 0:35 / #
That was the voice of Jayne Ann Krentz. I am so excited! (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 0:42 / #
Jayne Ann Krentz has written, probably, hundreds of romance novels at this point. Her major pen names right now are Jayne Ann Krentz, under which she writes kind of contemporaries, Jayne Castle is where she kind of puts all of her kind of speculative fiction novels, and Amanda Quick is what she writes historicals under, but she has been around for a really long time. She's going to start off by talking about her many pen names, which also include Jayne Taylor, Jayne Bentley, Stephanie James and Amanda Glass.
Sarah MacLean 1:13 / #
Amazing. This conversation, I've had the absolute joy of, you know, sharing meals with Jayne Ann Krentz, and so she is, I knew she was going to be remarkable, but this conversation really, gosh, I felt better for it at the end. I felt smarter about romance at the end, and I felt motivated in a way that I haven't felt motivated in a long time.
Jennifer Prokop 1:13 / #
Yeah, absolutely. Welcome to Fated Mates, everyone. What you're about to hear is our conversation with Jayne Ann Krentz which we recorded last fall in 2021.
Sarah MacLean 1:52 / #
Thank you so much for coming on and making time to join us for this. We're really thrilled to have you! We are avowed Jayne Ann Krentz, Amanda Quick, Jayne Castle fans. Stephanie James fans here! (laughter)
Jayne Ann Krentz 2:09 / #
Wait, let's not name all the names, that just makes me feel like I've been around forever. (laughter) I will say that was never the plan at the start. That was not part, there was no plan to be honest, but if there are any aspiring writers out there, one piece of advice for your takeaway today is for crying out loud, do not use a bunch of different pseudonyms! (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 2:34 / #
Well wait, so let's talk about that, because why not? You have, how many were there? How many are there total?
Jayne Ann Krentz 2:43 / #
Too many and the reason was because back in the old days, a lot of the contracts tied up your name, and if you signed one of those contracts, which of course I did early on, because I just wanted to be published, and it was like no big deal. Everybody writes under a pen name. And then there were two pen names. Because once you leave that house, they've got the name. It stays behind. I don't, I doubt that that appears in modern contracts, I have not heard of that for a long time. But back at the start of the romance rush in publishing, that was not an uncommon feature in a contract. So that's how it started, but it got worse because at some point, I managed to kill off a couple of names including my own. And you do that by low sales, you know, bombed out sales, which we'll get to when we talk about what a fool I was to go into science fiction romance, but it was a good way to kill off your career that time and I did because I wrote under my Jayne Ann Krentz name. So when I destroyed that, I destroyed my contemporary career, and it was at that point that I had to really retrench and figure out how to restart and reinvent myself and that was when Amanda Quick came along. So Amanda Quick is a legitimately acquired pen name, I did that to myself. Jayne Castle happens to be my birth name. I managed to sign that away for awhile, and then Jayne Ann Krentz is my married name. So I'm just under those three now.
Jennifer Prokop 4:28 / #
Now it's just the three, right?
Jayne Ann Krentz 4:30 / #
Yup. (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 4:32 / #
So I was just thinking, was this only in romance? Did this happen to mystery writers or other genres?
Jayne Ann Krentz 4:41 / #
I don't know, but I'm willing to bet that it was pretty common in the paperback side of the market.
Jennifer Prokop 4:45 / #
Yeah. Okay.
Jayne Ann Krentz 4:46 / #
I don't, yeah, I think it was just kind of a common thing. If you look back, a lot of writers who are writing mystery and suspense today acquired a pen name at some point along the way.
Sarah MacLean 4:57 / #
So I always wondered, you know, you and I have had a lot of conversations over the years, Jayne, about patriarchy and romance, and I always thought the pen names were because of the books, but I guess mystery and sci-fi writers also did the pen name thing.
Jayne Ann Krentz 5:14 / #
The thing about a pen name, if you can get, if the publisher can get that into the contract, all a writer has is her name, and if they tie that up, you're tied to the house. It was just hard business, hard business is what it was.
Jennifer Prokop 5:29 / #
Well and I remember is an early reader of romance in the '80s, when you finally figured out, "Wait, this person is this person?"
Sarah MacLean 5:38 / #
Oh, it would blow your mind!
Jennifer Prokop 5:39 / #
Yeah, because then you were like, "Wait, there's a whole new someone I can look for in the bookstore," or the used bookstore especially, right?
Sarah MacLean 5:47 / #
Wasn't there a Romantic Times, somebody published, every year there was a publication that was like an encyclopedia of the romance novelists and it would say the names, all the names that that particular person was writing under, which when I started, maybe I started 12 years ago, and that was the time when if you wrote in different genres, which I feel like is the Jayne Ann Krentz way, you write a different genre you start a different name, but yeah, now, it's far less common, I think.
Jennifer Prokop 6:17 / #
I think it's common now. I'll tell you how it's different. I think when people self-publish, they sometimes pick a different name, and I think if especially if the heat level is really different, right? So I've had author friends say, "Well I'm going to try my hand at maybe something more erotic, and you know, is this going to interrupt my brand?" So I feel like it's so much more in control of the author, as opposed to control of the house, so that's a big change.
Jayne Ann Krentz 6:47 / #
Yeah, I think that's very true now. This was the way it was just done in the old days, and the rules were different then.
Sarah MacLean 6:54 / #
Yeah, so let's go back before you were picking pen names. So tell us about, we love the journey, so tell us about the journey. How did you become a writer? And how did you become a romance writer specifically?
Jayne Ann Krentz 7:11 / #
You know I think I just, there was never a point along the way at which I felt I could write romance better than books I was reading. I loved the genre. I found the books, I didn't really find the genre in the way we, anywhere near what we would identify it as today, until I was in, after college, until I was in my '20s. And then that's when I stumbled into Harlequin. They were the only game in town and they weren't even in town. And that was, that did me fine for few, I don't know how long it was that when I was reading them intensely that, before I wanted to try writing one. And it wasn't that I thought I could do it better than the big names at the time, I just wanted to tell the story my way. Most of the stories I was reading, well all of them, looking back on it I think, were very much the British take on the fantasy. And that's a very specific and very tweaked different take than what most American readers respond to.
Sarah MacLean 8:16 / #
Well can you explain, can you talk about that? What does that mean?
Jayne Ann Krentz 8:20 / #
Okay, the quick and easy way to understand it, is that in the British romance, your heroine is marrying up. She's marrying the duke or some version thereof. In the American romance, it's much more of a partnership kind of approach to the romance, and what matters is the man's competence. It doesn't matter what he does, he just better be damned good at it, and that's what counts. So it's a different take. There's also more sass in the American romance, and that may come from our good old 1930s movies, you know, those screwball comedies, and the fast chatter-chatter back and forth from the the 1930s romantic, and often romantic suspense films. I don't know where it came from, but it's just, it was in the American romance almost from the get go. The voice is so different, and it's more of a conversational quick repartee. It actually isn't original with us. I mean that's what Georgette Heyer was doing, but it kind of fell away in the British romance that I was reading and came back big time in the American romance.
Sarah MacLean 9:35 / #
And so when you talk about this, the American romance, these books that you were reading, we're talking about categories, the early categories? Or are you talking about historicals from the '70s too?
Jayne Ann Krentz 9:47 / #
I didn't start reading - (laughs) confession time.
Sarah MacLean 9:51 / #
(laughs) Good! Let's do it.
Jayne Ann Krentz 9:53 / #
I never read historicals. I wanted the contemporary story. I wanted romantic suspense and that was to be found in a contemporary setting in those days. So I never was drawn to the historicals until I managed to kill off my Jayne Ann Krentz career and I had to reinvent myself as Amanda Quick, and then I was starting from scratch because I had no idea how those books worked.
Jayne Ann Krentz 10:18 / #
So, but I'm a librarian, so...
Sarah MacLean 10:21 / #
Okay, so were you a librarian when you were reading and writing?
Jayne Ann Krentz 10:25 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 10:26 / #
And so tell us where you were, and you were?
Jayne Ann Krentz 10:31 / #
Well, probably the lowest point of my library career was one year I spent as a school librarian. That's a calling, not a career (laughs), and I was not called. And then spent the rest of my library career at Duke University Library, and then later, a couple of corporate libraries out West here.
Sarah MacLean 10:54 / #
We interviewed Beverly Jenkins for the series, and she, too, was a corporate librarian. So I feel like there are all these little connections.
Jayne Ann Krentz 11:02 / #
Yeah. Well, that was the most boring work, actually, the corporate work. I mean it was a job and I needed a job, but for me it was much more interesting to work with readers, scholars, students, you know, people who were actually after information, not just the latest drawing for that particular gadget that they got to dismantle. But that's just me. I just happen to like the public work better.
Jennifer Prokop 11:32 / #
Jayne, we read your book, Gentle Pirate, and the heroine was a corporate librarian, I think, right? Was that around the time that you had that job? I mean, this would have been like the very early '80s.
Jayne Ann Krentz 11:45 / #
That was the first book I wrote that sold.
Jennifer Prokop 11:47 / #
Okay.
Jayne Ann Krentz 11:49 / #
There was another book that came out, actually a few months earlier, but it was actually sold after Gentle Pirate. Gentle Pirate was sold into the beginning of the Ecstasy line. That was the line that...
Jennifer Prokop 12:03 / #
Vivian Stephens.
Jayne Ann Krentz 12:04 / #
Vivian Stephens founded, Vivian Stephens was, you know, she really turned the whole American romance industry, book publishing industry on its head. She just totally changed everything. If it hadn't been for her. I don't know how it would have developed, but she was a game changer, and because of her, a lot of what we now take as familiar voices in the genre got their start. It started with Vivian Stephens.
Sarah MacLean 12:32 / #
Yeah, it was that first class with Vivian was you and Sandra Kitt, and Sandra Brown and...
Jayne Ann Krentz 12:38 / #
Some other names that have come and gone that were big at the time...Barbara Delinsky. Yeah, but I was thinking of Amy Lauren.
Jennifer Prokop 12:49 / #
We read that one, too.
Jayne Ann Krentz 12:51 / #
She was Book One, in that line, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 12:55 / #
So you were writing, so you sat down, you put pen to paper. Did you have people who were encouraging you? Was it a secret?
Jayne Ann Krentz 13:03 / #
(laughs) Of course it's a secret.
Sarah MacLean 13:04 / #
Of course it's secret! (laughs)
Jayne Ann Krentz 13:05 / #
You're not going to tell anybody you're trying to write a book until you've actually...
Sarah MacLean 13:11 / #
I don't know. I told everyone. (laughs)
Jayne Ann Krentz 13:17 / #
Back in my day it was not something you said anything, you just, the closest you would have gotten. and I tried a couple times and it was disastrous, was to attend a writers group, a local writers group, but I wasn't really welcome there, because I was really flat out trying to write genre fiction. And romance at the time, was of all the genres, the least of them in terms of respect, and everybody else was trying to write a memoir.
Sarah MacLean 13:44 / #
Still, that's still the case. Everyone in the writing group is writing a memoir. (laughs)
Jayne Ann Krentz 13:50 / #
And I didn't see that as very helpful. What changed that landscape, the business landscape, so that I stopped signing stupid contracts that tied up my name was, again, Vivian Stephens, because she was the one that got us all together for the first Romance Writers of America meeting. And that changed everything for all of us in terms of finally being able to learn about the business.
Jayne Ann Krentz 14:16 / #
Because I'll tell you, the publishers did not want you to know about how it worked. We couldn't read contracts. I mean, it's just this gobbledygook. They still are but now, at least, you've got an agent, usually to help you, or you can get a lawyer to help.
Sarah MacLean 14:29 / #
Right, well, this is important. So you didn't have an agent in these early days selling Harlequins?
Jayne Ann Krentz 14:37 / #
I did eventually but not at the very...
Sarah MacLean 14:38 / #
But most people didn't. They just sort of packed up their manuscript and shipped it off?
Jayne Ann Krentz 14:43 / #
I take it back. I had an agent for the first couple of books and she really ripped me off. So I like to forget that, it was not a good experience. And after that I went solo because I didn't trust agents for a while. So I didn't calm down about agents until RWA. The first meeting of RWA when the agent showed up and you could talk to one and, you know, that's how I met my current agent Steven Axelrod. So...
Sarah MacLean 15:09 / #
Who is an agent for many, many, many of the big names of the genre.
Jayne Ann Krentz 15:14 / #
He was at the time because he was one of the few agents who took the genre seriously and saw that it was going to go big once the US publishers got into the business.
Jayne Ann Krentz 15:27 / #
And so he, he just jumped in early. It was timing, good timing on his part.
Jennifer Prokop 15:32 / #
So going back to these first books you wrote, Gentle Pirate you wrote first? Or did you have things in the drawer that didn't sell? What was that sort of journey to actually getting a contract or actually selling those first books? Where did those stories come from?
Jayne Ann Krentz 15:50 / #
Well, the very first book I wanted to write was actually what we would call futuristic romance, and I wrote a futuristic romance. And tip number two, for any authors out there, it does not pay to be too far ahead of the curve.
Jennifer Prokop 16:07 / #
Yeah, not in genre.
Jayne Ann Krentz 16:09 / #
Yeah, you've got to hit the wave just right to make it work. But, um, but that didn't sell. And then what I was actually reading was contemporary romance, because that's all there was. The reason, to backtrack, the reason I actually wrote the first futuristic romance and had hopes of selling it was because I came across, I was on a student cheap ass tour of Europe, and somewhere on some sidewalk, one of those book kiosks, had some American novels and I was out of stuff to read. And the book that changed my life was on that kiosk, and it was Anne McCaffrey's Restoree.
Jayne Ann Krentz 16:11 / #
Which was, yes, futuristic romance. And I don't think it did her career any good either, because she never wrote another. She moved on to dragons.
Jennifer Prokop 17:05 / #
To great success, right? To great success.
Sarah MacLean 17:07 / #
I mean, who didn't love a dragon.
Jayne Ann Krentz 17:09 / #
But she wrote a really, what we would call today is, you know, straight up what I'm doing with Harmony, and the Jayne Castle name, very much. So that was the life changing thing about that. But after that realized that I couldn't really make a living on the futuristic books, but the thing I was actually reading was contemporary. And that's what I backed off and plunged into.
Sarah MacLean 17:32 / #
So, then walk us through...I have lots of questions. So you're there with Vivian Stephens, and you're the first book, Stephanie James has the first book in one of the lines, right? You have one of the number ones, correct? Or am I making that up?
Jayne Ann Krentz 17:48 / #
I can't remember.
Sarah MacLean 17:49 / #
I might be making that up, but I'm pretty sure you're number one somewhere. So you're writing categories, and you're how many, I mean, this is one of the things that I love about people who were writing categories. How many books? How many publishers are you working for? How many books are you writing a year? What's this look like?
Jayne Ann Krentz 18:07 / #
Well, keep in mind the books are a little shorter than what we think of as a full-length paperback novel. They were probably about 68,000 words. They weren't novellas by any means.
Jayne Ann Krentz 18:18 / #
They were not as long as a full length novel. So and the other thing factored into it, is that you couldn't make a living unless you did three or four year. I mean, if you're trying to make a living at it, you're gonna, and you couldn't build a brand.
Sarah MacLean 18:33 / #
Right. You have to feed the beast. That's what we've been talking about so much. And then at what point do you think to yourself, alright, well maybe, does single title, the bigger books come later?
Jayne Ann Krentz 18:47 / #
Well, there was no market for single title except historicals.
Jayne Ann Krentz 18:51 / #
And I had resisted writing those because I didn't read them, with the exception of Georgette Heyer, which I had read those long in my teenage years, and I didn't think they were modern romances.
Sarah MacLean 19:01 / #
Sure. Well, and they're not, right. They don't have sex in them. They're not quite the same as the modern romance.
Jayne Ann Krentz 19:07 / #
No, not at all. So then after I was a success in category, category, as the publishers were starting to do one-offs. They were starting to experiment with the single title, and they wouldn't let me do it because I was not quite ready.
Sarah MacLean 19:26 / #
Oh, those words, that you're not ready. You hear that all the time from people because there was this idea, would you explain to everybody kind of how the system worked?
Jayne Ann Krentz 19:35 / #
I think the editors didn't have a sense of what really worked in the books with the exception of people like Vivian Stephens. But most of the editors I worked with were not real fans of the genre. They didn't read the books, it was a job and they did it as much as possible by the numbers, because they didn't know, they didn't react to the books themselves. I think that limits your vision of, and then they read outside the genre, and it wasn't romance. So they had a vision of what books outside the genre was and it wasn't romance. So they were probably, in hindsight, were looking for something more along the lines of what we would call women's fiction. You know, big, big book, women's fiction.
Sarah MacLean 20:18 / #
To kind of break you out of romance? The idea was eventually you would be "good enough" and I'm using air quotes for everyone, to get out of romance.
Jayne Ann Krentz 20:27 / #
Yeah, but I didn't want to get out of it. I wanted to write romance.
Sarah MacLean 20:29 / #
Thank you for that.
Jennifer Prokop 20:32 / #
Yeah, thanks.
Jayne Ann Krentz 20:34 / #
And then what happened was, it was a publisher. It was Simon and Schuster, Irwyn Applebaum. He was a publisher at Simon and Schuster. What was the name? What was the imprint?
Sarah MacLean 20:50 / #
Are you talking about Pocket?
Jayne Ann Krentz 20:52 / #
Yeah, Pocket books. Yeah, yeah. He took the first risk of publishing romance writers in big book format and in hardcover, and they just went through the roof. And so he really, eventually, I was published by him, but back at the start I didn't have that good luck. But he's the one that I think, in hindsight, really opened up that market and basically proved to New York publishing that, yes, these women readers will pay full price for a novel.
Sarah MacLean 21:27 / #
So what is your first single title? At what point do you make that switch?
Jayne Ann Krentz 21:33 / #
Well, I guess the first single title will be the one, the science fiction that failed.
Sarah MacLean 21:36 / #
Right. So I'm going to hold it up. This, Sweet Starfire, this is what we're talking about. This is, I'm sure you know about this, The Romance Novel in English which is a catalogue from Rebecca Romney. She's put together a collection of first editions and important works from the genre. She's a rare books dealer, and we're obsessed, Jen and I are obsessed with this.
Jennifer Prokop 21:55 / #
Yes, we are.
Sarah MacLean 21:57 / #
So Sweet Starfire is, I mean, it's not the first time anybody's ever written science fiction in romance, but this is it, right? This, this feels like a moment.
Jayne Ann Krentz 22:08 / #
I think because it was it was a true romance, in the American style. It had everything that the contemporaries had, just a different backdrop.
Jayne Ann Krentz 22:20 / #
And what that brought to the plate was you could do different kinds of plots. You could open up the plots.
Sarah MacLean 22:27 / #
Well, the argument being that Sweet Starfire opens the door to paranormal, as we know it, right?
Jennifer Prokop 22:34 / #
Well done.
Sarah MacLean 22:35 / #
I mean, which is a thing, it's major! There, and, you know, maybe we would have gotten there probably to vampires and everything else, but we got there, I think more quickly, because of you. So it's my podcast, so I get to say it. (laughter)
Jayne Ann Krentz 22:51 / #
I've always divided what's, okay, what Sweet Starfire had and what all my science fiction has is a very psychic vibe.
Sarah MacLean 23:00 / #
Mm hmm.
Jayne Ann Krentz 23:01 / #
And I have always drawn a very bright line between the psychic and the supernatural. So when you say paranormal, I tend to think of the supernatural, I tend to shapeshifters and vampires and witches, which I love to read, but I can't write. They're not, they don't fit my core story. So I've always thought of it as a separate area, and then there's the psychic romance or whatever you want to call it.
Jennifer Prokop 23:27 / #
Which you're still, I mean, those are still the Fogg Lake trilogy, which the, is it the third one comes out in January?
Jayne Ann Krentz 23:36 / #
I just want to take a moment here to say to anybody in the audience, this proves I can finish a trilogy.
Jennifer Prokop 23:42 / #
Well done. But that, it is psychic. It's you know essentially, everybody, the conceit is a fog goes over this town from a mysterious governmental entity and a whole towns full of people develop sort of psychic powers. And then it's like the next generation and the fallout. So it's interesting to hear you draw that line all the way back to books you're writing in the '80s.
Jayne Ann Krentz 24:10 / #
Yeah, I've always felt that difference, but I don't know that readers see it. It's just as a writer, I'm aware of it. But I think the reason I've been attracted to the psychic vibe from the very beginning, is because for me, it enhances the relationship. It gives that extra level of knowing between two people, and connection and bond. And it gives me other plots to play with. It gives me a little outside the box plot sort of thing, I think. But I also think it has a, it works because it's just one step beyond intuition, and most people can get into intuition. Most people believe in intuition. So asking them to take the psychic thing is just that one step beyond, whereas they may not be able to do the vampire thing or the supernatural thing, that may be a step too far for a lot of readers. But I think a lot of readers are fine with the psychic vibe, because everybody thinks they've got one.
Jennifer Prokop 25:10 / #
Right. Fair.
Sarah MacLean 25:12 / #
Wait, I want to go back to it doesn't fit my core story. So you might be the first person who ever explained core story to me, at a lunch at RWA, which I'm sure you do not remember. But I want you to talk about what core story is for, I mean, for everyone, but also, let's talk about yours. Because you seem to know very clearly what your core story is.
Jayne Ann Krentz 25:39 / #
I think I'm pretty familiar with it, because I had to understand it at that earlier point, when I killed off my science fiction career and had to reinvent myself as Amanda Quick, and I had never written a historical. So what I did was, I looked at that science fiction book, the last science fiction book, which was Shield's Lady. And I stepped back and I said, you know, duh, if you take out the rocket ships, and the funny animals and the other planet stuff, what you're really looking at here is a marriage of convenience. And then I thought, well dang, I know where those fit. So, so it was understanding a marriage of convenience, built on mutual trust, is what led me down the road to historicals. And then I realized it's what I always do. And I think it's important for writers to have a sense of their core story. And if you know your core story, you can sum it up in two or three words max. That's how elemental it is, because it has nothing to do with backgrounds, it has nothing to do with plots, it has nothing to do with the eras that you're writing in, it's all about the emotions you're working with, and the conflicts that you're working with. My core story is always founded somewhere on trust. And that's, like, I can write forever about it, because that's pulled from the inside. It's just a deep, deep thing that I am always curious about, interested in, everybody gets violated at one point or another, has their trust violated, everybody's been through that experience. Everybody has taken the risk of trust. You have to do it daily, basically. So it's a risk we're all familiar with, um, and it can wreck a life or it can change a life. And to me, that's all I need. That's just plenty to work with. So I think once you find the conflicts and the emotions that you love to work with, you're going to be able to explore, that's your universe, is what it comes down to. That is your universe, and you're going to write in every corner of that universe, some corner, every corner, for the rest of your career. I think. (laughs) That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
Sarah MacLean 28:00 / #
I think it's a great theory. And it also makes so much sense that you weren't interested in leaving romance, because trust and love go hand in hand so well, that it makes sense. So when you, I want to get to Amanda Quick, the choice to do the Amanda Quick switch. So you say you've killed off your science fiction career. You're not writing contemporary single titles at this point. Is that because they don't exist generally, or you're just not?
Jayne Ann Krentz 28:31 / #
You know I don't think so. I think they were all historical.
Sarah MacLean 28:33 / #
Still at this point.
Jayne Ann Krentz 28:35 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 28:35 / #
Okay, and so you decide, because this is the late '80s?
Jayne Ann Krentz 28:40 / #
Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 28:40 / #
Yeah, it feels like the only person I could think of who might have been writing an occasional single title...who wrote Perfect?
Sarah MacLean 28:45 / #
Contemporary.
Jennifer Prokop 28:50 / #
Yeah, contemporary. It was Perfect and...
Sarah MacLean 28:52 / #
McNaught.
Jennifer Prokop 28:50 / #
Yeah, Mcnaught had a couple. And there were a couple...
Sarah MacLean 28:58 / #
But that's a different angle into it, right, because McNaught was writing those big epic historicals and then, so the idea of her being asked to cut 100,000 words out of her books to write category is, I mean, she just wouldn't.
Jennifer Prokop 29:12 / #
Sure. Not going to happen.
Sarah MacLean 29:13 / #
I think Judith McNaught's amazing, but I doubt she'd be very quick to be like, "Yeah, I can write it in a third of the words." So you, at what point do you know you've killed your career?
Jayne Ann Krentz 29:27 / #
The same way you always know it. I couldn't get another contract with that publisher.
Jayne Ann Krentz 29:31 / #
When they stop giving you contracts, that's a pretty big sign.
Sarah MacLean 29:34 / #
Pretty good sign.
Jayne Ann Krentz 29:37 / #
And that's when an agent really earns their keep, in a sense, because it was my agent who sold me as, I had to come up with a proposal he could work with, and it was the Amanda Quick proposal, for my first Amanda Quick book. And he just did a dang good job selling it to Bantam Books at the time, and he sold them without telling who it was.
Sarah MacLean 30:02 / #
That is a story you hear all the time.
Jennifer Prokop 30:05 / #
Yeah.
Jayne Ann Krentz 30:07 / #
And then once they committed to the book, then he could say, "Well, that's Jayne. Yeah, that's Jayne." So, but that's, that's, you know, he did a miraculous job of resurrecting my career at that point.
Sarah MacLean 30:20 / #
Not just resurrecting your career, I mean, suddenly, Amanda Quick, you know, is everywhere. Amanda Quick is one of, Jen and I both...
Jennifer Prokop 30:29 / #
Oh, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 30:30 / #
This is one of the names that we came to romance with.
Jayne Ann Krentz 30:34 / #
I think, I think what I just realized too late, probably should have realized earlier, was that the Regency, which is where I started, it is the perfect background for my voice, and it works just like the '30s is working now for that voice. It's a very similar kind of voice or of conversation and dialogue, just suits my style. Both eras suit my style.
Jennifer Prokop 30:59 / #
So as a writer, you're choosing to do something that's really out of your comfort zone, it sounds like. So how was that experience for you? Was it generative? Did you find yourself really? Or was it always like a I would love to get back to my roots? How did that, how did it go for you?
Jayne Ann Krentz 31:19 / #
Well I hadn't been there, so there was no roots to go back to, except the realization that the story I was telling fit that Regency in the way that the old Georgette Heyer had, that I kind of, that's what I clung to. What I worried most about because I was, am, are a librarian, was the research. And that was, to tell you the truth, is the reason I hadn't gone into the historicals in the first place. I had majored in history. I knew how complicated it was, but the lesson I learned very fast, was that when you write, when you write genre, you are writing not the real history, but you're writing the myth. And the myth of the Regency was already there because Georgette Heyer had created it so I just wrote on that.
Sarah MacLean 32:12 / #
So one of the things, when we read Ravished on Fated Mates, we did a deep dive episode on the book, and you know, we love it. And one of the things that we talked about was how, you didn't invent the bluestocking, obviously, Heyer was there before you but there is a difference. Amanda Quick comes on the scene, and suddenly it's like a door opens on historicals. And I'm wondering if you, does that, I mean, first of all, do you think that that's a good read on what was going on? Because it feels like prior to that, you know, you had all of the big, you know, the four J's and you had kind of other historicals that were doing a kind of different thing. And then in comes the Amanda Quick historical with the smart, you know, savvy heroine, the bluestocking, the hero who is her true partner from the start. I mean, going back to your core story now that you've said that, of course, right.
Jennifer Prokop 33:15 / #
Of course. Exactly. That's how I felt too.
Sarah MacLean 33:16 / #
But at the same, and so I, you know, I reread all of your pieces in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women in preparation for this conversation, and we'll get there. But one of the things that you talk about is this idea of the hero as both hero and villain. He plays both roles. And I think that is really true prior to you in historicals, but he doesn't become the hero until much later in those earlier historicals, versus, you know, when you think about the hero of Ravished, he's a decent dude from the jump. And I think that is really, it feels like a Jayne Ann Krentz or an Amanda Quick Regency suddenly was doing a little bit of a different thing. Was that intentional? Or was it you were just doing the different thing?
Jayne Ann Krentz 33:19 / #
It was just intuitive.
Jayne Ann Krentz 33:26 / #
Because that's, that's the kind of character I'd always written. If you read my books from the beginning, my heroes haven't changed much over the years. You know, pretty much my heroes, they do what they do, and that they're infused with my core values in what I think works in the hero and same with the heroines. And I think if you respond to my books or any author's books, it's because, you're not responding so much to the story, the plot, the characters, you're responding to the core values infused into the primary characters. And if and if you respond to those values, you're probably going to go back to those books, that author again and again. If you don't respond to him, it's a boring book, and I think that's how it works. So if you read my books, it's probably because you got my sense of humor. And you have the same, you share a lot of the same core values. The thing about genre, the reason it even exists at all, is because it's the device and the mechanism by which we send our values down to the next generation. It's the way we affirm them to ourselves throughout our life. And it's the way a culture keeps its culture intact. It's the myth of the core value of that civilization, whatever it may be, that is going to go down through history, and it survives or it doesn't survive. And that's, that's what genre does, it carries the myth.
Jennifer Prokop 35:40 / #
I love that.
Jayne Ann Krentz 35:42 / #
That's my theory.
Jennifer Prokop 35:46 / #
That I think is really true. And when I think about myself as a romance reader for 40 years, or however long it's been. It's not that quite that long. I feel like I really do see that, like those arcs. But at the same time, I feel like there's so many ways I can talk about how romance has changed. So for you, what are the things, like they're still the big things that are the same? What are the things that have changed in romance, do you think?
Jayne Ann Krentz 36:15 / #
Those dang cell phones. (laughter) You laugh, but I'm telling you. I know, I know what you mean. And one of the tricks to success in this business is trying not to tie your story down to a particular era, unless you're really telling that era's story. I mean, if, you know, when you do the 1930s, you do the 1930s. But, but if you want the books to have a long life, it's best not to put in any gadgets or...
Sarah MacLean 36:48 / #
Celebrity names.
Jayne Ann Krentz 36:50 / #
Celebrity names, politician's names, history, local ongoing history. Keep it, the more you limit it to the myth and the mythical side of the story, the longer that story is going to survive. But that's, that's a whole other issue here. Clearly, the surface changes all the time. And that's just true of any genre. But the underlying power of the genre that you love to read, whatever that genre is, doesn't change very much. And so I'm still writing relationships that have to overcome the hurdle of trust, and it's not going to change. You know, that has nothing to do with politics or history or social problems. I think the more you deal in social problems, the more you move away from genre, in a sense, because you're dealing with the superficial again, you're back to what's current now, but 20 years from now, that won't be an issue. Some things will be issues, because they're they're universal things. I'm thinking now about women's voting, getting the right to vote. It's an interesting historical detail, and it's an important historical detail. And you can tell stories around it, because the Suffragette movement was so important, but it is, it's a different take. It's, I think what happens when you do that is like, it's like, okay, it's clear to see it set in, in a war. Any book you write set in World War Two, no matter what you do, the war is going to be the primary character. Nothing. In the end, there will be sacrifices, and everything will be sacrificed to doing the right thing in the war. Because that's the other thing that genre does, which is call upon its characters at one point or another, to do the right thing. And we have a sense of, a sense of what a real hero does when the chips are down. We have a sense of what a heroine is supposed to do when push comes to shove, and they do the right thing. That's how, that's, that's all that matters. And that works big time if you're setting the story against an overwhelming backdrop like a world war. It's Casablanca. You never see, you never see any fighting or shooting. It was one gun but you know what I mean.
Sarah MacLean 39:21 / #
War is everything.
Jayne Ann Krentz 39:23 / #
Right. Everybody sacrifices for the war effort. And it's just, I'll never write that story because it's not mine. That does not fit. It doesn't come back to the trust between two people that I want to write about. I can admire it, you know, it's not that, but it's not my story.
Sarah MacLean 39:40 / #
As you're writing, in your career, you know, you've spanned, you know, you started with categories, you've written single titles, you've written sci-fi, you've written historicals, you've written, you write contemporaries now, still. At what point in this journey are you thinking, "Oh my gosh, romance is a big deal. I mean, it's really, there are millions and millions of women out there who are reading these books, largely women."
Jayne Ann Krentz 40:09 / #
Guess when the big checks started coming. (laughter) You know, once the American publishers got into the market, it became a big business really fast, because that's just how the American market works. If it works, it explodes. You know what I mean?
Sarah MacLean 40:22 / #
Everyone's throwing books out all the time.
Jayne Ann Krentz 40:25 / #
You can clutter up the market in a hurry, you know, but that's kind of a normal process. And yeah, I just think that the process of becoming a big business happened really quickly, and simultaneously, or concomitantly, or whatever, right along with it, came the foundation of Romance Writers of America, which gave the romance writer access to information about the business. So we grew up with it, in a sense, that first generation of romance, American romance writers grew up learning fast.
Sarah MacLean 41:03 / #
Because at the time Romance Writers of America was about the business, right? It was about professional writers coming together to share, to information share.
Jayne Ann Krentz 41:12 / #
It was networking.
Jayne Ann Krentz 41:14 / #
We didn't, we didn't have that word for it, but that's what it was. And a lot of the friends I have today, I made back in those early days of networking.
Sarah MacLean 41:21 / #
So talk about that. What was this community like? Who were they? What were you getting from them? How are you interacting?
Jayne Ann Krentz 41:30 / #
Back at the beginning, only published writers were in the group. It later opened up to unpublished writers, but back at the time, we all had the same interests because we were all published, we're all dealing with publishers, we're all dealing with contracts, we're all trying to find agents, you know, that there was a lot of business to discuss, and the other organization, Novelists, Inc., also came along about that time. And gradually, I think people realized that romance writers had a lot of, all the same concerns and interests as the writers in the other genres. So there was some cross networking there too. It wasn't always comfortable, but you knew that there were other writers groups out there that had the same issues and and you could learn from them. So I just think it was the networking thing that today happens online. So it isn't maybe so necessary to have the organizations that, that we just didn't have that online option. I didn't know any other published writers until I went to that first meeting of the RWA, the very first RWA.
Sarah MacLean 42:38 / #
Yeah. Who is the group of people who keep you going?
Jayne Ann Krentz 42:43 / #
Well, Susan Elizabeth Phillips. Kristen Hannah. A lot of it is, are friends I know here, like Debbie Macomber, because we have a lot of us happen to end up in the Pacific Northwest. Christina Dodd. More newer friends who've come along right now, for example, Rachel Grant, who is doing a really interesting, modern, very modern version of the heroine who is an archaeologist, and it's kind of the new Amelia Peabody, but except very modern. And Darcy Burke.
Sarah MacLean 43:18 / #
Were there editors who you feel were essential to the growth, your growth as a writer?
Jayne Ann Krentz 43:26 / #
Yes, and to the genre, because I said back at the beginning, a lot of the editors were not people who actually loved the genre. For a lot of editors, it was a starting point in their careers, which they hoped to move on to other kinds of books, I suppose. But years ago, it's been a few decades now, I can't remember when, editors started coming into the genre, who like Vivian Stephens just loved the books, just have a gut way to buy the books, they can buy them by intuition, because they read the books, they knew how they worked. So editors like Leslie Gelbman, and my editor today, Cindy Hwang, who pretty much invented the whole paranormal publishing industry.
Sarah MacLean 44:14 / #
We should say Leslie Gelbman also edits Nora Roberts. So you've you've probably read something by Leslie Gelbman's authors before.
Jayne Ann Krentz 44:23 / #
And those editors, and they have in turn mentored a group of younger editors coming up, and they choose their people now. They choose their editorial staff knowing that they need writers, they need authors, they need these editors to bring in authors who will work long term, and that takes an editorial eye that loves the basic story.
Sarah MacLean 44:50 / #
Right. So there's this, it feels like there's this editorial mindset of building a career, of buying an author and shepherding. them through the journey.
Jayne Ann Krentz 45:01 / #
Yeah. Yeah. It won't probably last a lifetime, but their careers and the writer's careers in that kind of publishing are very intertwined. There is no getting around it. On the other side of the coin is the self-publishing, the indie published authors, who don't have that kind of connection, and it's a very different publishing world for them. It's an interesting, it's an interesting thing that's happened in the industry, because I think between the two, the writers finding editors who love the books, and the independent writers who don't need gatekeepers, which basically New York editing is a gatekeeping job. And agents are gatekeepers too. But the indie crowd doesn't have to worry about gatekeepers. So between those two groups, they kind of have revolutionized the whole romance genre, in that they have allowed an almost unlimited variety of experiments. And that has kept the genre, keeps it fresh, it keeps reinventing itself because it keeps going new places. Some of the other genres can't say that. They're much more hidebound, much more rigid, in what's acceptable. If you put a vampire cop into a traditional murder mystery, it's not gonna sell. They don't want vampires in there. They know what they want in their murder mysteries and it ain't vampires, but a romance reader will look at it. She may not like that book, but she'll give that story a chance. So the readers were inclined to be experimental too. They'll try something new. And that's, that's just been an amazing thing for the whole genre, because it keeps churning, it keeps changing. It keeps adding and experimenting, and one of the reasons we were able to do that, even in the early days, was because nobody cared enough about romance to make any rules.
Jayne Ann Krentz 47:08 / #
We skated under the radar, and it was very useful for those of us who didn't know there were rules. It's like, "Oh, okay." (laughs)
Sarah MacLean 47:16 / #
So let's talk about this, Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, because I would like to hear the story of how this came to be in 1992.
Jayne Ann Krentz 47:30 / #
I think at that point in my career, I was very successful. I knew a lot of other successful writers. And as the saying goes, we didn't get any respect. And it wasn't that I wanted people to love my books. I understood, I don't read a lot of other people's books too, you know. I have no problem that you don't want to read the books, but the criticism was not proper criticism. It was not literary criticism. It was blowing off not just the the writers, but the readers, and the implication was, they're not well educated. They don't have a lot of money. They're, it just wrote everybody off from from the consumer through the writer.
Sarah MacLean 48:10 / #
And are you talking about specifically academics at this point? Or because there's a very famous late '80s study that came out about romance readers that presents them in this way?
Jennifer Prokop 48:22 / #
Is this Radway?
Sarah MacLean 48:24 / #
The Radway.
Jayne Ann Krentz 48:25 / #
No, I read the book and it's, okay, one of the things I learned about going into academic publishing, which I did one time and we will never do it again (laughter), is that you are expected to take a, what would be the right word, of philosophical slant, and then bring in the proof that shows that your take on it is correct. I've always felt that didn't really, wasn't very helpful, because you can make anything look right, if you bring in the evidence that you want to bring. (laughter)
Jayne Ann Krentz 49:01 / #
Yeah, so I didn't, I didn't, and that was what passed for serious academic criticism. That was nothing compared to the jokes in the newspapers on Valentine's Day.
Sarah MacLean 49:11 / #
Sure. I mean, which still persist.
Jennifer Prokop 49:13 / #
Yeah.
Jayne Ann Krentz 49:14 / #
No, it ranged across the whole scale. So at that point, I was still in my feisty mode, I guess. (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 49:22 / #
I love it.
Jennifer Prokop 49:23 / #
We're still in our feisty mode, so pass the baton right over. (laughter)
Jayne Ann Krentz 49:28 / #
Just go. Run with it. Run with it. But I had been in the business long enough to know that there was one editor out there who straddled both the academic and the genre, and that was Patricia Reynolds Smith. I had met her while she was working for Harlequin. And then eventually she moved into academic, she went back to her roots, which was academic publishing, and was with the University of Pennsylvania Press. So I called her up, and I told her what I had in mind, and I said, "Where would I take a book like this?" And she said, "Right here."
Sarah MacLean 49:29 / #
Terrific.
Jayne Ann Krentz 49:29 / #
So she really is the one I give full credit to for that book, because she knew how to organize it so that it looked academic, so that it was acceptable to an academic reader, and that it met their standards, as well as told our side of the story.
Sarah MacLean 50:25 / #
And it's interesting, because at the beginning of this book, the first line of this book is, "Few people realize how much courage it takes for a woman to open a romance novel on an airplane." And it felt, I mean, I read that again, you know, this week, and it just felt like a shot to the heart because it, I mean, we've all been there, right?
Jennifer Prokop 50:44 / #
And people still feel this way, right? And this 30 years later.
Jayne Ann Krentz 50:49 / #
Why do you think romance readers were early adopters of ebooks? (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 50:53 / #
Exactly. None of your business, right? None of your business.
Jayne Ann Krentz 50:57 / #
Yup.
Sarah MacLean 50:57 / #
But the idea, this kind of transformational idea of turning the text around and saying you're missing the point. This is for the reader. This is about these women, these, largely, women who are experiencing these books, the mythology of these books, the power of these books themselves, privately, had to have been kind of earth shattering for academics, because that's not what they were talking about in those other books, which I also have read.
Jayne Ann Krentz 51:27 / #
Interestingly enough, we have several warmly received reviews from female academics. The harshest critics for that book that I recall, were male.
Jayne Ann Krentz 51:41 / #
And they just didn't get it. It just, even with all our careful explaining, (laughter) apparently we didn't explain it to a lot of men very well, but most of the women I talked to afterward got it.
Sarah MacLean 51:57 / #
Yeah. So you get to, you send out an email, or well, you don't send out an email. (laughter) Wait, how do you get all these people?
Jennifer Prokop 52:08 / #
Exactly!
Sarah MacLean 52:08 / #
Oh my god, what is happening? (laughing)
Jennifer Prokop 52:10 / #
You don't text your friends?
Jayne Ann Krentz 52:13 / #
This, this is that thing called the telephone.
Jayne Ann Krentz 52:16 / #
You dial it.
Jennifer Prokop 52:19 / #
I remember now.
Sarah MacLean 52:20 / #
So you start picking up the phone and calling you know, the biggest names in the genre. Elizabeth Lowell is in here, Mary Jo Putney. Susan Elizabeth Phillips.
Jennifer Prokop 52:28 / #
Sandra Brown.
Sarah MacLean 52:29 / #
Sandra Brown. Stella Cameron. And you say what?
Jayne Ann Krentz 52:34 / #
I tried to explain what I was trying to do. But I've never been the best proposal writer. In terms of explaining, I can write a proposal, but pitching it verbally has always been hard for me. But I, after talking to Pat Smith, the editor, I had a sense of how how to phrase what I was asking for, which is I'm not going to give you a topic. I just want you to tell me what you think makes the books work. What is the appeal of the romance? And 19 authors came back with 19 different essays, that all went together very nicely. It just, they just worked across the spectrum. And that book is still in the libraries today, academic libraries today. And then that was what sort of Pat Smith told me going in, she said, after I was exhausted, because this took a year out of my life.
Jayne Ann Krentz 53:27 / #
You try herding 19 authors! (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 53:29 / #
Yeah, right. Before email.
Sarah MacLean 53:32 / #
Before email. (laughter)
Jayne Ann Krentz 53:35 / #
And then having to be the one to pass along the edits .
Sarah MacLean 53:39 / #
The notes! How dare you! (laughs)
Jayne Ann Krentz 53:45 / #
Without losing any friendships in the process? You know, it was, but everybody came through and everybody was very gracious about it. So it was an interesting experience all the way around. But she said, "The one thing about this book is that it'll still be around 20 years from now."
Sarah MacLean 54:03 / #
And it is. I mean, it was, I mean, it's been on my shelf since the very beginning of my career. So...
Jayne Ann Krentz 54:09 / #
Thank you.
Sarah MacLean 54:10 / #
I'm really grateful for it. So we talked a lot about what your core story is and what makes a Jayne Ann Krentz novel. I wonder if we could talk about your readers? Do you, I mean, one of the things that really struck me in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women in your introduction, as I said, was centering the reader. And you're, you have this conversation in the introduction where you talk about reader service. And I wonder, we all know, of course, as readers and writers of the genre that readers are really drawn to romance and it's a very different kind of relationship that writers have with romance readers. Do you have any moments that stick out from across your career of times when you've heard from readers or really understood the power of the genre with them?
Jayne Ann Krentz 55:02 / #
I think the thing that surprises me the most, and other writers I know have the same reaction, is how often a reader will take the time to let you know that your book got them through a tough time. And I think it speaks to the underlying communication of the emotional core of those stories. When you are sitting by a bedside of somebody who isn't doing well, you want you want to read something that is speaking to your heart, and speaking to your emotional core, and affirming your own deep core values. And romance does that for women. It does it for men too, I think, but we haven't really gone there, you know, acknowledge this. I am, I'm always surprised at how many male readers romance writers pick up along the way. That they do respond to the books, and often it's the wife buying the book. And then he reads it at home kind of thing. It's an interesting play. I remember asking one male reader who came through an autograph line, he was really, really into the books that he was buying, and he was very excited. And I asked him what it was he, what spoke to him in the stories and he said, and his son was with him, and he said, "My father just came back from the war." This was, he was a Vietnam vet. And the vet said, "I just don't want any more blood." And so he got a story with a little mystery in it, a little suspense in it, a lot of action, but no really grisly, horrifying things. So there may be more of that kind of reader out there than we realize, because so much of modern romance incorporates an element of suspense, which is also that romantic suspense is a, I think, also a really core American story.
Jennifer Prokop 57:08 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 57:09 / #
That's fascinating.
Jayne Ann Krentz 57:09 / #
It's just very popular.
Sarah MacLean 57:12 / #
Jen has a whole - Jen, I know you want to talk about Vietnam, and you should ask your question.
Jennifer Prokop 57:19 / #
So my dad fought in Vietnam. And you know, I read, looking back, I am fascinated by how, so I started reading romance when I was probably 12 or 13. And this would have been like the mid '80s. And so many of these heroes were men back from Vietnam. And I am just personally really - and Sarah's whole college thesis was about Vietnam.
Sarah MacLean 57:48 / #
Women on the homefront during Vietnam
Jennifer Prokop 57:50 / #
Right?
Sarah MacLean 57:51 / #
Probably because of romance novels, I mean, of course, because of romance novels,
Jennifer Prokop 57:55 / #
Sure, of course, right? And I think for both of us, I mean for me, it was just really personal. I still don't really understand my father. And when I read books about war by men, I'm reading about combat, but when I read romance about men coming home from war, I'm reading about my family. And I think that, I've always joked, I'm getting a little weepy. It's hard to talk about, because I feel like my dad's really broken and he still is, and no one, love didn't fix him, right? And I know that that's why I get so angry sometimes when people are like, "Women reading romance." I'm like, "Look, I wanted to live out a world where it was possible for my dad to be fixed by love." And romance gives me that. And I think that I'm just really fascinated by the way that those Vietnam heroes, to me, turned into romantic suspense in a lot of ways, right? Like we, we put it back on page. So I don't know if there's a question there. I think it's your heroes meant a lot to me, because I felt like here's somebody who's talking about how hard it was to live with these men who had come back from war, and didn't know how to be parts of families anymore.
Jayne Ann Krentz 59:12 / #
Now, and that is a common story after every war. It's not just Vietnam. It's every damn war that sent them home. And what happens is, these broken men came home, and the women are left to patch them up as best they can. Sometimes you just can't.
Jennifer Prokop 59:27 / #
Yeah.
Jayne Ann Krentz 59:28 / #
You know, the damage is too great. And I think the books acknowledge that. They give a happy ending because that's what we're in the business of providing, is a bit of hope at the end. But even with the happy ending, if you say that's unrealistic, and I don't know that it is for everyone. I mean, that in your case, obviously, it was, for the real life. But what those books gave you was the fact that you were not the only person dealing with this. Women across the country were dealing with this, and not always successfully, and they acknowledge that pain, they acknowledge the problem, they acknowledge the damage. Yes, they've tried to fix it with love, but in a way, that's not why you're...
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:13 / #
That wasn't it, right. It was just that it was there.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:00:16 / #
Other people acknowledged it.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:18 / #
I often say that, if you want to read about miscarriage, you should read romance. Because it's another place where it's like, these things happen to people and we go on. And I feel like that's one of the things, to me as a reader, it's the, and I just don't think romance gets enough credit for really...
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:00:38 / #
It doesn't.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:39 / #
Really saying, "Look at what we go through and yet we still persevere or trust each other or find a way." That's why I read romance. Every every single romance gives me that.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:00:52 / #
Because it is affirming a positive core value. It is affirming hope, which ultimately is all we've really got. (laughs) But on the respect side, I will tell you one story that has stuck with me for decades now. And that was years ago, I was at a conference, one of those book fairs. Remember the big book fairs? Seattle used to have a big book fair. And I was...
Sarah MacLean 1:01:22 / #
Remember when we all went places and stood with other people? (laughter)
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:01:27 / #
Those were the days. But I was standing with a crowd of local writers of all genres, because we just have a lot of local writers here. And there was a very well-known science fiction writer, a very well-known mystery writer, a very well-known memoir writer. I mean, there was just a bunch of us standing around. And somebody started whining about how they didn't get any respect. And I being the only romance writer, and I figured I had the biggest...
Sarah MacLean 1:01:57 / #
Oh boy. Was it a man?
Jennifer Prokop 1:01:59 / #
Bite me.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:02:02 / #
I kept my mouth shut, because every single one of those genre writers had the same experience.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:08 / #
Yeah.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:02:09 / #
They might, in turn, have been able to look down on me, but by golly, they felt looked down upon. (laughs) That sense, and that was another insight into the fact that by and large, our country, our culture does not give a lot of respect to genre fiction in general, not just romance. We might get the sharp end of the stick or whatever, but there isn't really a lot of respect for the genres compared to the literary novel. And that, I think, is a huge misunderstanding of the purpose of genres, which, as I said earlier, isn't so much to capture a moment in history, it's to capture values and core cultural beliefs, and affirm them and transmit them. And that's really crucial to a culture. That's more important to a culture, than a piece of snippet of time of that culture, which will never be, will never happen again. So you can write New York City problems or LA problems today or tomorrow, and that's a piece of history that you're doing, but it's the underlying core values that will decide whether or not it's the genre or literary. I think it just has a really important place in our culture. Every culture has a version of genre stories, and that's how humans tell stories, and why they tell them, I think. Because it's really kind of interesting, when you think about why do we tell stories, you know?(laughs) And we, even if you don't read, you're gonna be exposed to stories, you'll be inundated with stories on TV. I mean, it's just roll through.
Sarah MacLean 1:03:48 / #
Well, we talk all the time about, you know, how romance really scratches a kind of primordial itch. It feels, it hits you emotionally first, and then the story waves over you, crashes over you. And I think that's the power of all genre, is this idea that the stories have to be compelling, they have to keep you interested, and you know, keep you turning the pages, in a way that, and I don't, I'm with you. I don't understand why that's somehow less valuable. It feels more valuable in a lot of ways.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:04:24 / #
RIght. I think it's because there's so much of it. Humans, just in general, tend to blow off anything that's got tons of it around. And there we are inundated with stories from film, from TV, from audiobooks, from books. It's just everywhere, so we tend not to give it a lot of respect.
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:43 / #
So back to your books. Are there books of yours that you're the most proud of or that you hear the most from readers about?
Sarah MacLean 1:04:52 / #
Maybe those are two different books.
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:54 / #
Yeah, could be.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:04:55 / #
I've always heard a lot about Ravished. And that's because it is the most fundamental version of my core story.
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:02 / #
Yeah.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:05:03 / #
And that's it's beauty and the beast thrown in with the trust thing.
Sarah MacLean 1:05:08 / #
For me, it's because Harriet says, "Well, it's not like I'm doing anything with my virginity." (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:15 / #
A classic line forever.
Sarah MacLean 1:05:16 / #
It's the greatest moment in romance history when Harriet says that! (laughter)
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:05:21 / #
What is this doing, yeah? So I hear a lot about that one. But to tell you the truth, I, the book I love best is always the one I just finished. And I suppose that's because it's the one that I just most recently wrote my heart into, you know. And people tend to quote lines back at me. I'll hear lines from books and forget I wrote the line. I think the only line I really remember writing, and it's only because I heard it quoted so many times after the book came out, which was, "Good news. She doesn't need therapy." (laughter) That was from Perfect Partners, and I've heard that line my whole life. (laughs)
Sarah MacLean 1:06:05 / #
Proof Jayne Ann Krentz is not from New York City. (laughter) So that's great. Do you feel like there is a book that you, is there a book of yours that you wish would outlive you? If you could choose one?
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:06:25 / #
It isn't, I don't think of my own books as being that kind of book that would speak to future generations. I don't, it'd be nice if it did, but I don't have a strong sense, it's not part of what I'm trying to write for. But what I hope outlives and lives on is the genre itself. Because I think the romance genre is probably the core genre from which everything else derives. You can't write any of the other genres without that core story of relationships. At least they won't be very interesting stories if you don't. [include romance] So I hope we never, I hope as a culture, we never lose the romance genre, simply because I think it is, it's a critical voice and a critical kind of story that we need, because it's all about the foundation of a union, a family and a community. And that core value is what holds civilization together. So there we go. We need romance to keep civilization going.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:38 / #
Amen.
Jennifer Prokop 1:07:39 / #
So much pressure.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:42 / #
I think that's a perfect place to end. Jen, do you have anything else?
Jennifer Prokop 1:07:45 / #
No, this was unbelievable. I'm going to go lay in my bed and think for a long time.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:53 / #
It really, it's transformational this conversation. It makes you think. I mean, when she said, "genre carries the myth." Stop it. I just, I immediately wrote it down on a post-it note.
Jennifer Prokop 1:08:05 / #
Yes. Well, I mean, so I said at the beginning that we recorded this months ago, right? We're actually recording the topper the week before it airs and this part. And I have been thinking about that part of the conversation for so long. Not only because I think it's so smart about what genre does and why it works the way it does. You know, specifically the thing that she said too about in genre characters are called upon to do the right thing.
Sarah MacLean 1:08:33 / #
Aww, right! It just makes sense!
Jennifer Prokop 1:08:35 / #
It's just to make sense, right? Like this myth making aspect of it. But next week we are going to be talking about a historical romance called Passion. And one of the things that we ended up talking about and I think we've talked about over and over again, is why it is that so many readers will come after historical authors and say, "That's not true." I think a lot of people look at it about like historical accuracy. But it's, when you think about it instead as being no, they're fighting. They don't like the myth changing on them.
Sarah MacLean 1:09:06 / #
They don't like characters doing the right thing in a way that, you know, they aren't used to.
Jayne Ann Krentz 1:09:11 / #
Or they don't like valorizing characters that they've never thought of as being...
Sarah MacLean 1:09:16 / #
Worthy of valor. Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:09:18 / #
Yes. And so I was thinking about it so much as I was re-listening because I was like, this, to me really helps understand these are not people that are going to be swayed by, "Oh, but the word cunt has been around for, you know, hundreds of years!" Because that's not, it's not about historical accuracy. It's about, "I don't like that I'm not the primary character in this myth anymore.
Sarah MacLean 1:09:42 / #
Right. The hero of it.
Jennifer Prokop 1:09:44 / #
And I think that that then if you think about these changing mores as being these conversations are a proxy for not just how romance is changing, but how society is changing and who we make a place for, and who gets to be the star of the show? Then those conversations just take on a new kind of relevance and importance. One that I think I would approach in a different way, in the future, after thinking about what what Jayne said.
Sarah MacLean 1:10:13 / #
Yeah. I think that there is such power, I mean, clearly we talked about this in the episode with her, but there's such a sense with Jayne that she carried the banner of romance for a while. And she carried that banner because of this, because of her bedrock belief that romance and genre fiction are the successors of the core stories of us as humans.
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:43 / #
And the core stories of us as a society. right?
Sarah MacLean 1:10:46 / #
Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:47 / #
I mean, lay me down. Even just saying it I got covered goosebumps, like, "Oh, that's what it is! Of course!
Sarah MacLean 1:10:53 / #
Yeah. I mean, and that's without even talking about core story, which she is so brilliant about. I mean, she was the first person who ever said, "core story" to me, I think. And talk about somebody who just understands her work.
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:53 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:11:04 / #
And never deviates from her path. And even with all, I had no idea that so many of these pen names came because she was quote, "failing," right?
Jennifer Prokop 1:11:25 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:11:26 / #
That she had to restart her career so many times. The idea that Jayne Ann Krentz/Amanda Quick/Jayne Castle/Stephanie James had to restart, had to reboot is bananas to me, because I do think of her as being the best of us in so many ways. You know, especially coming off the re-read of Ravished that we did.
Jennifer Prokop 1:11:50 / #
We have talked a lot about the Trailblazers in terms of, offline, what are the things that keep coming up over and over again? Vivian Stephens, the role of those, Woodiwiss, right? The things that really were markers for so many of these writers, but the thing that I keep thinking about is, but what about our listeners or the, you know, new, young, up and coming authors to hear that Jayne Ann Krentz was like, "Yeah, I was a failure." I mean I was like...
Sarah MacLean 1:12:19 / #
"My agent told me I should try historicals, and we didn't even tell them I was the author." That is, aside from just being almost unfathomable, the other side of it is so inspirational!
Jennifer Prokop 1:12:37 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:12:38 / #
You know, not to be cheesy about it, but the idea that she, that this kind of rockstar, a true Trailblazer, struggled over and over again and had to reinvent herself over and over again, it's really amazing. Especially because, on the the New Year's Eve episode, I said my sister was looking for an old Stephanie James. Which by the way, we think we found. We'll put in show notes. But there's this idea that failure to the industry also, is, looks very different to readers.
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:19 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:13:20 / #
Then failure to readers, because my sister, who is in her fifties, and read that Stephanie James book in the '80s, does not believe that that book, or Stephanie James are...
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:30 / #
No.
Sarah MacLean 1:13:31 / #
In fact, I had to tell her that Stephanie James was Jayne Ann Krentz. So she was like, "Whatever happened to her?"
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:36 / #
You're like, oh, it's better for you.
Sarah MacLean 1:13:38 / #
She did okay. (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:40 / #
She's doing all right. That's the part I think that is really, in a lot of ways, just really almost wildly inspiring. Because I think it is so easy in our modern world, or wherever we are right now to think, if I don't, that it has to be a steady, upward trajectory. And if it's not, you know, if it's not that...
Sarah MacLean 1:14:08 / #
You're not an instant bestseller.
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:10 / #
Then you're a failure, and it really speaks to no, this is a marathon, it is not a sprint, and there are going to be times you're going to fall down. There's going to be times you have to, you know, reinvent yourself come up with a new name, abandon a sub-genre you love because it is not the right time to be on that wave.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:31 / #
Fantasy, I mean, speculative fiction, speculative romance, it still doesn't have a strong foothold, and it's not out of line to suggest that Jayne Ann Krentz is the founder of that particular sub-genre, and you know, still, we're still fighting for that to claim space there.
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:52 / #
So, I mean, I think that that's sometimes the hard part about romance is, you know, I think I'm a deeply pragmatic person, and sometimes I'm like, you know, the things I personally, as an individual reader want, like and think are great, or not what the market will bear right now. And you know what? Oh, well, figure out what is going on in the market right now and enjoy it 'til your thing comes back around. I don't know.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:52 / #
Yeah. And I think that that's kind of what I took away from this conversation, what I have taken away from most of my conversations with Jayne is you can have both, right? You can both write what you love, and write to market. I mean, there is a space for both of those things. But her pragmatism, to use your word, is a lot about sustaining a career. I mean, sometimes you write to market, because that's what the market wants, and you know, you can deliver it and you know, you can succeed with it. And you know, every one of those books makes room for you to write the book, you know, in space.
Jennifer Prokop 1:16:03 / #
The book, that right, eventually you hope to make room for. There was a part where she was talking about, we were like how's romance changed? And she joked and said, "cell phones," and she was really talking about, essentially, if you are right now, if you're talking about celebrities, or politicians or technology that exists right now, that it really limits you, because your, it kind of almost takes away from that mythological aspect.
Sarah MacLean 1:16:34 / #
Sure.
Jennifer Prokop 1:16:34 / #
And one of the things I found myself, everyone has heard me ranting and raving at some point or another about how annoyed I am when people are using really old pop culture only in their books, and I'm like, well, if you think about it as mythmaking, I guess people our age are really trying to entrench Ferris Bueller's Day Off and the American myth or whatever. But it's really interesting to also think about, I personally think still, when we see that disconnect between the author, and their personal myths, or cultural myths versus their characters, and this, so I just, I found this conversation with her to be so generative in thinking new ways about things that I spend a lot of time thinking about.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:21 / #
Yeah. Well, it's also that piece of, you know, the balance of doing the important, romance doing the important work of society, right.
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:32 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:33 / #
And also romance placing a character and a love story in a specific time.
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:40 / #
Right,
Sarah MacLean 1:17:40 / #
That, you know, 40 years from now, hopefully, we don't, we don't have that conversation anymore. So I think, I of course, always think about, you know, that is a struggle, that is a particular struggle with contemporaries, but it also is so important for us who don't, for those of us who don't write contemporaries to think about that, because the conversations that our characters are having on page. You know, the the work of the genre is to figure out how to have those conversations without aging the book, dating the book. And maybe sometimes that's impossible, you know, I don't know. I think about that Nora Roberts book we read where the hero smokes all the time.
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:23 / #
Sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:18:24 / #
And it's like, how could she have known?
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:26 / #
Of course. Well, and I mean, I think that's the part where it's like working too hard to make your books out of time sometimes means...
Sarah MacLean 1:18:38 / #
But sometimes, yeah, then you get like, I've been thinking about The Hating Game a lot recently, right? Because as you know, I love The Hating Game so much. And the movie, and one of the things that I think Sally made a real choice about is you have no idea, it's in a city, but the city is very amorphus, right? There's no, there's no city, because she didn't want to place it in, she didn't want to ground it in a place. And I think that there is a reason, that's one of the reasons why The Hating Game is a global success, because everybody can place it in their particular, the city they love the most. And then the movie, put it in New York, and it was like, oh, huh. Now these are New Yorkers in a car, you know?(laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 1:19:25 / #
Right, it changes it.
Sarah MacLean 1:19:26 / #
Why are they driving? (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 1:19:28 / #
It's and these are I think, really, I mean, I could have this conversation over and over and over again. But I just, like I said, I think the thing that was really interesting for me is, I sometimes get really stuck in this conversation. I'm just you know, annoying the shit out of people saying the same thing over and over again, and I found this conversation with her to really give me new avenues for these questions and new ways to think about the genre itself. Well, I guess I would say also, thank you to everyone for letting me have my Vietnam moment again.
Sarah MacLean 1:19:58 / #
Hey, listen, I will, I will have you and whoever you want to talk to about Vietnam talk about Vietnam anytime. Yeah, but it's interesting because it proves that we don't know what we're doing all the time. It's the Venn, it's that Venn diagram, right? What your English teacher says the author was sure what the author was doing. And we don't know, because we can't, we, you know, that Vietnam thing is a perfect example of we know what we're trying to do sometimes. But when something that massive, you know, and I think about Vietnam or you know, COVID is happening around us, and we're not overtly talking about it, but it's in there, it's in all the text. And so there it is, right, the genre carrying the myth.
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:51 / #
Last week, I ended up reading this book, I actually don't recommend, called Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, and I found myself really having that moment. It's a nonfiction book by a Stanford professor, really disagreeing with a lot of what he said. And of course, then you can just, you know, take it to Twitter. And one of the things that he ended up talking about was the difference between, he admits that genre essentially is working, you can tell what genre's interested in only by looking at the collective.
Sarah MacLean 1:21:27 / #
I don't disagree with that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:21:28 / #
I absolutely agree with it. I was like, okay, we agree with this, but where we disagreed was him saying, essentially, he talked about Virginia Woolf and how, you know, Mrs. Dalloway, of course, is just superior, because it's the singular work of art as opposed to the genre, and I was kind of like, but that's what I'm actually interested in, is how that collective works.
Sarah MacLean 1:21:54 / #
Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:21:54 / #
How does it work, that there is a hive mind where everyone is somehow chewing on the same thing? And I think Jayne answers it for us, right? We're grappling with our own mythmaking. And that is interesting to me, where this guy was sort of like meh, that's, you know, not interesting to him. It's just this totally different perspective. Mrs. Dalloway and genre can exist together. There's no reason to choose one or the other, we can have both. That's what's amazing about it.
Sarah MacLean 1:22:25 / #
One of the things that I've been really struggling with over the last couple of weeks, is, you know, this best of the year lists, right? Not the sub-genre list, not the best mystery of the year, the best romance of the year, but best overall books lists, which a lot of the publishing media are, they're kind of culling together. They, at the end of the year, they cull together what they believe are the best lists, the best of the books of the year, by virtue of what other, what the big critics have all named their ten best books, right? So it's, you know, everybody makes their list of ten, and the ones that are on multiple lists rise to the top. And so of course, if you have, say, The New York Times make a list of the 10 best books of the year, there might be one romance on it. It's rare, but there might be, you know, and other places, too. But that romance or that thriller, or that mystery, or that sci-fi novel, never makes it to that sort of, "and these are the 10 best novels of the year." And so I often think to myself, there's so much missing from these lists, and we know that by virtue of making a list, there's going to be stuff that's missing. But the idea that whole segments of mythmaking text, of myth text, is, are the myths of this time and place and society and culture are missing from these lists and just lost, right? Without Rebecca Romney, they're lost.
Jennifer Prokop 1:22:33 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:22:43 / #
What are we doing?
Jennifer Prokop 1:23:10 / #
So that's it. I mean, I was essentially having the same thought to myself, right. And I think, look, we obviously are genre fans for a lot of reasons, that we love romance for a lot of reasons.
Sarah MacLean 1:24:12 / #
But empirically, right. I don't read sci-fi, but I do think that surely there is a science fiction novel from the year that is remarkable and deserves to be held up as one of the best texts.
Jennifer Prokop 1:24:26 / #
I think, here's my theory. I remember when Stephen King used to be genre, and now he's like literature. And maybe it's just that there has to be, I don't know, maybe you just have to put in your time. I'm not sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:24:46 / #
I don't know. I mean, it's not like Nora hasn't put in her time, you know.
Jennifer Prokop 1:24:51 / #
I think there's a lot of you know, the patriarchy.
Sarah MacLean 1:24:54 / #
Oh, really? Do you think that? (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 1:24:56 / #
I don't know. Maybe.
Sarah MacLean 1:24:57 / #
Anyway, Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, it's awesome. And it's, every time we have one of these conversations, I think to myself, we're never going to get them all, right. We're never going to get every person who held the banner. But I'm really, really happy we got Jayne.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:14 / #
Yeah, me too.
Sarah MacLean 1:25:15 / #
And I hope you all were too. I hope you were all inspired the way we were, and you know, overwhelmed the way we were.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:23 / #
Oh, god, yeah. Even listening to it again, I was like, I'm just gonna sit here for a while. So brilliant.
Sarah MacLean 1:25:29 / #
We're so, so grateful.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:32 / #
So before we go, it's worth saying that Jayne has a new book coming out on January 18, called Lightning in a Mirror. It is book three of the Fogg Lake trilogy, of which I have read all of them. I mentioned it actually on the episode. And again, this is part of a series that has to do with intuition and you know, like sort of some of the very things that she was talking about. So if you would like to prepare for that you could read the first two books, The Vanishing and All the Colors of Night and then prepare yourself for Lightning in the Mirror which comes out in a couple of weeks.
Sarah MacLean 1:26:07 / #
We are Fated Mates, you are listening to a Trailblazer episode, which we've been doing for all of Season Three and will likely continue to do until we die. (laughter) And you can listen to all the other Trailblazer episodes at fatedmates.net. You can find us @FatedMates on Twitter and @fatedmatespod on Instagram. Please tell us tell us how you're liking the Trailblazer episodes, shoot us emails if you would like Sarah@fatedmates.net or Jen@fatedmates.net. And tell us what you're thinking and shout about these Trailblazers because they deserve it.
Jennifer Prokop 1:26:51 / #
Next week is Passion with Lisa Valdez
Sarah MacLean 1:26:54 / #
Get ready. It's a ride. (laughs)
S03.31: Morality Chain Romance
We’re so thrilled to be talking morality chain romance! We’ve owed this episode to Katee Robert for nearly a year, and we have no excuses for how long this has taken, except that time in 2020 was a flat circle. Here, we get down to business—we tackle the definition of Morality Chain, and how it differs from Dark Romance, how it connects with mafia, criminals, pirates, highwaymen, and the original Alpha.
Check all your Content Warnings before you begin with these books!
Whether you're new to Fated Mates this month or have been with us for all three seasons, we adore you, and we're so grateful to have you. We hope you’re reading the best books this week.
Next week, we’re reading Alexis Daria’s You Had Me At Hola, one of our Best Books of 2020! Find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or Apple Books.
Show Notes
One very important note: we highly recommend doing a thorough search for content warnings for all the books and movies we mention this week.
We love Katee Robert, who we had on as a guest for the menage interstitial. Katee bid on this item at Kennedy Ryan’s Lift 4 Autism auction. It happens every spring, so keep an eye on this page for the 2021 auction if you’d like to pick the topic for a future interstitial.
This week, Katee released Seducing My Guardian, the 4th book in her SUPER HOT Touch of Taboo series. If you'd like to read a morality chain romance written by Katee, we recommend The Bastard's Bargain.
“In springtime, the only pretty ring time” is from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. It's also possible Sarah knows it from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. She would like you to believe that it's from the former, but we'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. Either way, “If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it,” is from Beyonce.
As it turns out, Chicago is a great town for beach volleyball.
It’s hard not to talk about morality chain & dark romance together, but we think they are inverse tropes. The internet definition of Morality Chain is “is a character who is the reason another character is Good.” Jen and Sarah’s current definition is that in morality chain romance, the Love Interest pulls a hero towards humanity and goodness, while in dark romance, the love interest is pulled down into the hero’s lawless world.
Some examples in pop culture are Spike from Buffy and maybe Barney in How I Met Your Motherr. Also, check out a movie called The Professional, where a child (played by Natalie Portman!) befriends the assassin next door. The Jason Statham one with a kid is called Safe.
The Hero’s Journey is very common character archetype in literature and pop culture, but Sarah and Jen are both very taken with Gail Carriger’s description of the alternative archetype, The Heroine’s Journey.
If you want more about morality chain, so many of Kresley’s books from The Immortals After Dark series will work, so please listen to season one! Our favorites are Dark Needs at Night’s Edge, Lothaire, and Sweet Ruin.
We were divided on whether the character has to be a danger to others in order to qualitfy as morality chain. In the Gamemaker series: The Professional is about an assassin who is a danger to others, while in The Player he’s only a danger to himself.
Jen Porter wrote a long thread about what she thinks of as PEA, or problematic ever after, romance.
Mickey is "kind of a Fagin-y" as a character, but without the antisemitism. In interesting historical facts, Dickens rewrote Oliver Twist later in life to remove all anti-Semitic characteristics from Fagin, after he'd been criticized for the portrayal of the character. Of course, it's not that simple. Read more about it from Deborah Epstein Nord.
Scottie is the main character of Managed, and is classified more as grumpy one/sunshine one, which we argue is just morality chain dialed down.
More about how most writers have a “core story."
Next week, we'll be reading You Had me at Hola by Alexis Daria
MUSIC: Cardi B - Money
S02.25: Asking For Trouble: Tessa Bailey is the Queen of Dirty Talk
This week we're mixing it up, talking about an author more than a specific book -- the Queen of Dirty Talk herself, Tessa Bailey. But we're not just talking about the sexybits -- we're also talking about working class heroes, women and worry and how awesome it is to watch authors evolve.
We love having you with us! — subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and like/review the podcast if you’re so inclined!
In two weeks, we’re reading a book that blooded both Sarah and Jen — and approximately 50% of Romancelandia, we think -- Stephanie Laurens's Devil's Bride, starring Devil Cynster, who also happens to be the only romance hero Sarah's husband can name (yes, even now). Find it at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or your local indie.
Show Notes
Sarah was heading to Birmingham for the Southern Voices Book Festival. The last time she was there, it was when she was a kid going to a Science Olympiad competition. Based on the description of that event, Jen suspects that she was outside orienteering. She's going to see Rachel Hawkins and Naima Simone!
Meanwhile, Jen went to see Bug by Tracy Letts at the Steppenwolf Theater, which is known for being the home theater of John Malkovich and also where hope goes to die.
Jen wrote about Johanna Lindsey and her New York Times obituary in a column for Kirkus.
The hero of Protecting What's His is Derek Tyler, which is Jen's second favorite romance Derek. Derek and Ginger also appear in a follow-up novella, Protecting What's Theirs. Derek also appears as a secondary character in the Crossing the Lines series, where he assembles a team of ex-cons and misfits as a special crime fighting team. Ginger's sister gets her own book in Unfixable.
The rise of eBooks made room for indie publishing and small presses like Entangled. Here's the story of how Barabara Freethy took advantage of the Kindle revolution.
Enemies to Lovers is one of the most beloved romance tropes. Jen is going to talk about her whole energy theory in an upcoming Kirkus column.
This is a romance that deals with class in an unusual way--she's the poor little rich girl, while he's working two jobs because of family obligations to his siblings.
Tessa Bailey is the Queen of Dirty Talk. She just is. Jen's favorite is Duke from Worked Up, who is a perfect grunting hero.
Jen noticed that several motifs that appear in Asking for Trouble appear in other books -- for example, there is a trip to Atlantic City in Worked Up, and connecting doors in a hotel room in Driven by Fate.
Sarah identifies "heroine as rock" as part of Tessa Bailey's core story, Jen noticed the pull between familial duty and individual needs. At first Sarah thought Tessa's most recent book, Love Her or Lose Her, doesn't fit into the core story...but after talking it through, she thinks it fits perfectly.
Sarah mentioned the one with a hero who is a recovering alcoholic called Indecent Exposure. Jen also loved it and reviewed it for The Book Queen.
Some advice in case you ever need to stop a wedding.
Buy buttons and stickers from Kelly at Jen's shop and the newly available full line of t-shirts from Jordandene.
Listen to this week's music selections and peruse this episode's transcript.
Next time on Fated Mates, we'll be reading Devil's Bride by Stephanie Laurens.
TRANSCRIPT
Sarah MacLean 0:00
Yeah, I'm big mad. I told Eric we were we were having a late addition to the to the podcast schedule this week.
Jennifer Prokop 0:14
I told Darryl the same thing. I was like, look, so I'm recording tonight and he's like, "only one episode?" I was like, "Yes, it will be roughly 800 hours long."
Sarah MacLean 0:22
I know. You'll never see me again.
Jennifer Prokop 0:24
My fury will not be contained.
Sarah MacLean 0:30
Body autonomy, Jennifer.
Jennifer Prokop 0:33
It's all a girl wants
Sarah MacLean 0:37
I'm just a girl standing in front of the world, asking for you to get your hands out of my uterus.
Jennifer Prokop 0:44
You know, I used to say "my uterus" a lot like people be like, "Why do--" "I'm like my uterus!" And I think back then there are some men in my life who thought it was like charming or funny. I'm like, "Did you think I was kidding? Motherfucker. Get your hands out of my fucking uterus."
Sarah MacLean 1:03
Yeah. Well, Victoria Dahl had this great tweet today about hysteria. And how hysteria is the truth that they always spoke of, but never really wanted to see. And I was like that feels right to me today. So you guys the world is aflame again. It's 2019. So like, again still, I was on the subway today and someone said to me, "I just sometimes wonder like, Am I drinking tea on the Titanic? And is it before or after we hit the iceberg?" Like, this is all fair.
Jennifer Prokop 1:40
Yeah, it's how it feels, right? There's a thing that we talked about at school where it's like, like "the bomb face," right? Something goes so wrong that you just have that thousand-yard stare. And I feel at some point, it's me and every woman I know. And I just want to say I think a lot about the women who live in states where, this, they're on the front lines.
Sarah MacLean 2:07
Yeah. So wait. I think we should, You probably know by now what we're talking about and who we are. If not, this is going to be a crash landing into Fated Mates with Sarah and Jen. I'm Sarah MacLean. I write romance novels. I read romance novels. I like to talk about romance novels.
Jennifer Prokop 2:28
Yeah, and I'm Jennifer Prokop. And I talk about romance on Twitter, and I'm a teacher and I basically believe that nobody's business what's going on in anybody's uterus.
Sarah MacLean 2:42
Yeah, I got it. I agree. Can I just cosign that? And are we done now? Four minutes in? And that's where we stand.
Jennifer Prokop 2:49
here's here's where I think we came up with this idea is what we did was kind of
Sarah MacLean 2:54
it's a what date is it? It's May, it's May something 15?
Jennifer Prokop 2:59
No. 16
Sarah MacLean 3:00
I think 16th but yesterday was May 15, and some real shitty laws were passed in, or a law was was passed in Alabama. Regarding abortion,
Jennifer Prokop 3:12
well, and by the time you hear this, which which should be next Wednesday, the 22nd. It might be that these laws have passed in Missouri and in Michigan. I mean, like these are laws that are like making their way through states.
Sarah MacLean 3:28
Yeah, the Republicans are coming for Roe. And Jen and I are big mad.
Jennifer Prokop 3:36
Yeah, well, and I think the way that we're always both interested in talking about things is like, how does romance-- which is like a genre we both profoundly love-- like help us understand where women are, where women have been, and what our future will be. Kind of in a relationship with our bodies. And I think that, you know, one thing -- We really want to be sensitive for sure. I think there's a lot of like, "if, you know, men could be pregnant, there'd be, you know, like abortion kiosks at every Walgreens" or whatever. And we're not looking to be that has like, I think it that's language is really trans-exclusionary, right. But at the same time, we were really interested in talking about this without talking about gender?
Sarah MacLean 4:34
Yeah. Well, I want to acknowledge the trans men are extra terrified right now and have every right to be. yeah. And I think, you know, I said earlier today to somebody, this is a conversation that needs to be had about every person with a uterus and so I think both of us just want to set that set that out at the start, but this is gonna it's a tough conversation to have without using gendered Yeah. language so forgive us, for..
Jennifer Prokop 5:01
We want to be sensitive to it and we want our listeners to be sensitive to it, too. And so it's a like mea culpa in advance, we're going to try to do our best but we like really welcome feedback, I guess, from for us like, it's important to us to be inclusive, but it's also like a conversation that so tied into the way gender and women's bodies and like actual, like physical parts are seen in the world and perceived in the world that it's hard to imagine that we won't. Like we were just going to do our best, everybody. But we're also, I think it's urgent to talk about it, especially in romance because, as we've talked about many, many weeks, this is the place where, like the interior life of a woman is really like the most fully developed. And for, for I think every woman these concerns about like reproductive organs and how they sometimes feel like they betray us, is one that I think is we're really interested in talking about.
Sarah MacLean 6:12
Yeah, so this episode is going to be different than all of our other episodes, it's still going to have a lot of books in it, where we encourage you to get a pen. Show notes will be extensive, but we're going to talk about bodies and, and the female body, and the parts of it and the things that happen inside us and the reasons why romance has always seemed to be a place where that's a safe conversation and a safe dialogue. For us to have but a big, the big I think reason why we're doing this this week is because yesterday, I asked on Twitter for people to hive mind a list of romances where... in which the heroine has a abortion, has an abortion without shame. And I think we got, what, like 15 books? And I think that is the thing that we should talk about. So we're going to talk about-- so content warning, we're going to obviously talk about abortion. We're going to talk about miscarriage. We're going to talk about stillbirth. We're going to talk about contraception. What else we're going to talk about?
Jennifer Prokop 7:31
My rage.
Sarah MacLean 7:32
A lot of rage, you guys asked for it! See, be careful what you wish for our listeners. Um, so where do you want to begin? You want to begin with [Fanny!] Fanny Hill. "Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," which is an erotic novel, written in 1748. Don't, don't be expecting this to be like Sierra Simone style.
Jennifer Prokop 8:02
I actually am really curious to read it in the light of that statement, a little levity.
Sarah MacLean 8:08
Wikipedia calls it "an erotic novel." That's what I have opened in front of me, because I wanted all the dates in front of me. It's written by a man named John Cleland. And it was published a serialized, So Jen would have loved it {on brand.} In 1748, I did not know this. So 1748 I'm going to repeat that because, holy crap. I did not know this, but John Cleland wrote it while he was in debtor's prison. And, it is considered I'm now just reading from Wikipedia, but "it is considered the first original English prose pornography and the first pornography to use the forum of the novel." It is one of the most banned books in history but is considered by many, including Maya Rodale, to be a primordial romance novel, to use a Kresley Cole term.
Jennifer Prokop 9:13
I actually love that. I love calling it a primordial romance novel.
Sarah MacLean 9:16
I mean, I and I think it probably is. So Fannie Mae-- Fannie Mae, that's a that is where you get your college loans from, which is a different rage. If any Fannie Mae or Sallie Mae? I don't know. Anyway, doesn't matter. Maybe we'll skip all that.
Jennifer Prokop 9:34
So we're never good with titles! How is that not on brand for us?
Sarah MacLean 9:39
There are there are a lot of editions. If you can find an edition of Fanny HIll with illustrations, they're super graphic. And also you can go on Wikipedia and there are several very graphic illustrations. So you know, enjoy yourselves. Enjoy yourselves. So okay, um, she writes letter there. It's written, it's epistolary, she is telling her own story to, uh, to to the recipient of two letters. And it's basically Fanny's life account, and I'm not going to get too deep into it, but essentially, her parents die, and she goes to London and she gets lured into a brothel. And it's the story of, sort of, her life in the brothel. And the reason why we're bringing up Fannie Mae--Fannie Mae, goddamnit! The reason why we're bringing up Fanny Hill is because, like, ultimately, she gets married to Charles the hero. And so that's why we call it a primordial romance novel. It does end with Fanny in happiness. There's, warning, a whole lot of like, problematic representation or prostitutes in this book, it was written in the 1740s, and it can be, like, very preachy about that. So, obviously, you know, consider the date of publication. Fun fact.
Jennifer Prokop 11:09
I'm gonna retcon this, this that like Sarah from Dreaming of You, that that's what she wrote. Matilda, right? I'm sure that's probably what it is.
Sarah MacLean 11:19
Yeah, yeah. Um, there is a lot of, just to talk about like etymology for a second, there is some discussion that the reason why like, you can call it, like some people call it vagina a Fanny is because of Fanny Hill. Um, so you know, fun facts, just fun little, you know, historical facts. But Fanny, importantly, spends a lot of time in a brothel, working in a brothel, where she loses her virginity. There's a bisexual Madam, I want to say in this book, and you know, there's a lot of sex in all different forms and all different places. And there are a lot of prostitutes who have to terminate pregnancies, and they do it on the page and Fanny sort of articulates how it's done. It's not super graphic if I, you know, if I recall correctly, but it is like abortion is on the page in this book, because of course it is! Contraception is on pages book, because of course it is! And it's 1750, so, let's set aside this idea that any of this is new. Because, as I've said, multiple times ad nauseum over the last few days, like women have been dealing with..
Jennifer Prokop 12:32
Unwanted pregnancies.
Sarah MacLean 12:33
Yeah. Since pregnancy began.
Jennifer Prokop 12:37
Sure. And you know what, it's really interesting because I feel like-- and you and I were chatting about this before we started recording-- that I'm pretty sure like my first introduction to abortion was like women and historical romances. Like somebody knew somebody who knew the right cup full of tea to drink. Yep. Right. And, and even though I can't name specific ones. Like, I just feel like I imprinted on that idea that there was, like there was a woman somewhere in the village who knew how to take care of this business. Yeah. And and that's who you went to see.
Sarah MacLean 13:12
I mean, and she was a midwife, right? Because so one of the things that we talked about all the time, you and I, and I mean, I'm sure we talked about it here, but like, the romance novel, from its very origins, has been a place where, at the beginning, a subset of women, right, like written for women, white women, white cishet women, right? Right, were able to have a dialogue in an enclosed space away from the prying eyes of patriarchy, right. So and we've talked about this over time, as romance has become more inclusive of marginalized people, is has become the literature of happiness and joy, and hope and how Happily ever after. And now in 2019, that's a political act, And it was frankly a political-- It's always been a political act, right, for marginalized people to live happily. Women have been marginalized as a block. ...forever. And so I think what's really interesting here is that when we talk about pregnancy, on the page, and we talk about abortion, on the page, you and I both have the same experience, which is when we were young, and we were reading those historical romances, it was a midwife in the village who was in charge of birthing children and taking care of it, if you didn't want one. And I don't just mean abortion. I mean, like contraception, too. Like it was midwives who had tinctures and tonics and teas. And [Yep] I'm the same way, Jen. Like, I'm pretty sure that I didn't... that my first understanding of abortion came from romance novels, like there was a trick to not getting pregnant.
Jennifer Prokop 15:06
Yeah. And this was something, in pop culture for me, that moment was the movie "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." Now it came out in 1982. And I did not see it, then I would have been too young. But at some point, like later on, right, I mean, I was I was 10 then, right? It's around nine or 10, or whatever. At some point later on, I saw it and there's this like, really matter of fact, like scene where the brother essentially takes, you know, takes this his sister into the clinic and she gets an abortion, and that's that. But I would say, like those to me, but like, really that that didn't even stick out to me the way the romance novel and the sense that like women took care of each other in these moments, was like really powerful for me. Like I often remember it, although you have an example we're going to talk about I
Sarah MacLean 15:57
have a really interesting example. Yeah
Jennifer Prokop 16:00
But for me, it was like women, you know, it's like a woman went to another woman or like whispered among the maids, like somebody knew who this person was. And in that sense, like one of the most powerful like, romances I've read with a miscarriage is called "The Mayor's Mission" by Piper Huguely, where she actually experiences, she has a miscarriage. And Virgil, who's the hero, is kind of like wanting to help Mandy, his wife, and he's like, sort of like, told by, essentially, the the midwife in their village like this is Women's Business. And I think that the reason it stuck out to me is because that very much felt like, I felt that, right? When that midwife says that to Virgil, "this is Women's Business," that even though I feel differently about it today in terms of like how men and reproduction things happen, that ultimately, that was how I imprinted on this idea.
Sarah MacLean 17:03
I mean, I think that it's certainly I feel differently. It's complicated. That should be a show title of this. It's complicated. So I just turned 40. And like, my body's doing all sorts of weird shit. I'm like, I think about all the ways that like, something strange happens, and I think to myself, like, "oh, Is that normal? Like, is that is this just a thing that happens now?" And I don't like say anything to my husband, I call my friends or I asked my sister, or like, I, I sort of reference it in passing to someone who is, you know, has the same parts as me and I say, like, hey, "Has this ever happened to you?" And then suddenly, you have these moments where you're like, "Oh, wait, that has happened to me" and we never... women, I think all the time about Emily Nagoski's "Come As You Are." So, Emily writes, Emily's amazing. Right now, she's sort of everywhere in romance, because she, she wrote these wonderful contemporary romances under the name Emily Foster. The first one is called "How Not to Fall" and the second is called "How Not to Let Go." It's a duology, you have to read both, but they're both published. But she's also a sex educator, and has a PhD in human sexuality. [Oh, wow.] First of all, you want to know who writes a hot hot hot sex scene? Somebody with a PhD in human sexuality like, yeah. Emily's first book, non fiction book, written as Emily Nagoski, is called "Come As You Are," and it's basically like a informational guide to women and sex. And I bought it and it taught me so much about like, what's normal 'cause No one sits women down and says like, no,"here's what sex is like. Here's what's normal. Here's what's not normal. Like, frankly, everything is kind of normal." So and I think and I read this book and it was like, a revelation for me and I was 36 or 37 like, way too, and I've been reading romance novels since I was 11. My God, like, it's something revalatory about, like, lady bits? The fact that I got to it at 36 or 37? I went to Smith, we spent a lot of time talking about lady bits there! So anyway, I think a lot about that and I think a lot about the fact that like, romance has always for me been a place where like women's issues can be discussed without,
Jennifer Prokop 19:41
without fear or shame,
Sarah MacLean 19:42
Without fear, without shame and also with no shrouding, like there's no like, you know, you can go to the woman, the midwife, and she will give you a tincture and it will take care of the business.
Jennifer Prokop 19:55
I also have been reading romance since I was like, you know, a teen, a young teenager. And, but I went to Catholic schools and then I went to a Catholic... I went to Villanov.
Sarah MacLean 20:07
That is the opposite of Smith, I would guess.
Jennifer Prokop 20:10
Yes! In fact, I still have very vivid memories, and I don't remember her name. So you know, I can't name shame, but I remember meeting girls on my floor my freshman year of college, who, like literally didn't really even understand why they got a period,
Sarah MacLean 20:28
Jesus Christ.
Jennifer Prokop 20:29
And I just remember being like, what in fuck are you doing? What are we? And this was, you know, a long time ago, because I'm 45. And I think, I think a lot about like, abstinence only education.. and one of the things I think a lot about is, even though it is not the job of romance to teach sex ed, we are fooling ourselves if we don't understand that many, many readers are are learning about sex. Literally learning.
Sarah MacLean 21:03
Yes.
Jennifer Prokop 21:03
Through this genre.
Sarah MacLean 21:05
Yes.
Jennifer Prokop 21:05
And that is that's a responsibility. I think that we like you can
Sarah MacLean 21:10
Absolutely. You're 100%. Right. And I mean, that's not we didn't have a different, we don't, that's not different between us. I learned about sex from romance novels, without question. And I've told this story before, that I read Beatrice Small's "All the Sweet Tomorrows" when I was 14 and I was like, "Oh shit, I'm gonna get in trouble if my parents see that I'm reading this." You know, I had lactation porn. It was a ride!
Sarah MacLean 21:41
Yeah, you're 100% right. And I do think like, I think romance in those early days didn't shy away from---interestingly, yes, it had purple prose, and yes, there was a lot of euphemism, and what the hell is a throbbing member, and where did what go, and who's what --- But at the same time, you know Jane Feather's "Vixen," which actually was posted 1996, so it's much later than I would have expected. So Jane Feather's "Vixen," this is real old school ones you guys, the hero is just awful. He's awful. It's Guardian / ward. Um, and he's a real, the hero's real bad. But like if you're into like, really rough alphas who are impenetrable and ultimately end up loving their ward. It's you know, solid choice if that's your old school kink. But what's really interesting is so they have sex. He's drunk, he's like real drunk, and he comes home to his manor, and she's there. And he didn't he doesn't know who she is. She's just like, beautiful young woman in his house. And so, and he's super drunk and they have sex. And in the morning after, he's like, "Oh shit, like, what have I done?" And he makes her a tonic and brings it to her and says, and we'll put this image in show notes will put the quote in show notes.
Jennifer Prokop 23:12
It's an amazing thing. Honestly.
Sarah MacLean 23:14
It's astounding because, he basically says to her "Here. Drink this," He is not a good dude. And he's like, "drink this." And she's like, "why?" And he's like, "because it will take care of any unforeseen problems from last night." And she's like, "what problems?" And he's like, "You're an idiot." I think he calls her "a little fool." And he's like, "you could be pregnant." And she's like, "Oh my god, I didn't even think about that." And she takes the drink, and she knocks it back without hesitation, she's like, I don't want to be pregnant. Like, I'm taking this ... I'm taking herbal PlanB, like Jane Feather Regency PlanB. And It's awesome.
Jennifer Prokop 23:19
It's kind of a great scene.
Sarah MacLean 23:30
There are a lot of problems with this book. But right now, today, I read that scene and I sent a screenshot to Jen. And I was like, This is fucking great! And then she says, "Will it work?" And he says, "it'll work." And that's it. And it does work. She doesn't get pregnant. It works.
Jennifer Prokop 24:20
And, like, what I found fascinating about that scene is it does go against type in the sense that he's the one who knows about it, right?
Sarah MacLean 24:28
He's taught, interestingly enough, he is taught how to make this herbal concoction by his first lover.
Jennifer Prokop 24:37
Yeah, well, and what's really interesting, though, is what is though to type is, the sort of virginal young heroine, I mean, who goes to a man's bed for the first time having no fucking idea what's going to happen. And that's another thing I really vividly remember from like early romance, right? Especially historicals: was you know "it's your wedding night" and you know they get some stumbling half assed explanation, if that!, about what's gonna happen.
Sarah MacLean 25:10
you're gonna bleed and then you know Marlo and no good deed goes unpunished with like a gallon of pig's blood because how much show
Jennifer Prokop 25:18
idea no idea and I mean and I think I do remember being really fascinated by like by this, the stories about like, like women are sent like lambs to the slaughter. right? They have no idea what's going to happen and I just I find that fascinating still, right? Like how much I imprinted on this idea that women were there to teach each other because it was a woman-- It was her mother or her sister-- who told her and if she didn't have that, then she had to rely on the goodwill of this lover, her partner.
Sarah MacLean 25:57
I texted with Lisa Kleypas earlier today because I could only think, one of the only romance novels I could think of where where I can name contraception on the page is one of the Hathaway books, Amelia and Cam, at this point, have already been married and Amelia doesn't want to get pregnant. And so she's taking this like herbal tea, which is basically like, what she's drinking every day. Yeah, and it actually doesn't work in the book and she gets pregnant. And interestingly, I I think that's a real thing, too. Look, I mean, like, the actual pill now, with science, doesn't work 100% of the time, so like, these teas definitely didn't work all the time. I texted Lisa and I I sort of said like, "Do you, Am I missing something else? Have you written this and other books?" Because, you know, Lisa's always-- we've talked about this before about Lisa's like talismans--And Lisa is really like fascinated with the history of stuff and she'll get really interested in like the history of like land management and then suddenly that's like a huge piece of a book. So I asked her, and she actually reminded me, and I had forgotten this, that in "Devil in Winter," Evie asks about pregnancy and Sebastian says, "There are all these ways," like he sort of articulates a number of different ways that you can use contraception and he brings up the use of, Hang on-- I'm going to pull up I'm going to pull it up-- He brings up the use of, quote, "little charms," which were Lisa just said to me today, usually gold or silver or sometimes lead, and which yikes. But they were intra cervical, and sometimes even intrauterine devices that
Jennifer Prokop 27:46
like a pre IUD?
Sarah MacLean 27:48
yeah. [Dang] So the idea that these things are on that like Lisa Kleypas setting this on the page, Jane Feather setting this on the page, is a real dialogue in the 90s about how women, how this is women's work. Contraception is women's work! I mean, [yeah], yes, there is no male birth control pill and there's a reason for it. Right like, [sure]. First of all, you know, it unfortunately it is our work to make sure we don't get pregnant. People with uteruses are responsible with make sure it making sure that we don't get pregnant, which is problematic and in an immense way, but reality.
Jennifer Prokop 28:32
Yeah, well and it but it's also because thousands of years of patriarchy has made it so, right? Well, and I would think to like back in old historicals, like about French letters, right? Like I..
Sarah MacLean 28:46
the French letter!
Jennifer Prokop 28:47
How did I I mean, I totally had to like figure that out from context. There was no Wikipedia, there was no Urban Dictionary.
Sarah MacLean 28:54
And they all have like bows on them and like ribbons and you're like, "What the fuck is this?" And then what was amazing is like, I, I can't believe this is the first time we're ever going to talk about "Harlots" on this podcast because I am in love with "Harlots." The show on Hulu, which is set in a bordello in the 1700s. It's like bordello wars, but the set it's in the 1700s. It's amazing. It's super feminist it has a full female writing staff, a full female, female showrunner. Female directors, like the cast is something like 98% women, the speaking cast, like it's very intersectional, they are queer characters, there are characters of color. It's amazing. If you haven't watched "Harlots" you should. But it said a a bordello, and it's the first time I ever saw anybody, any historical anything, show a French letter the way French letters are, which is... hard. They're dried skin, and they have to be soaked in water to use them. I mean, like you guys, show notes are really going to be rich this week because we'll link, Jen and I will work on them together and we'll link to everything. But basically a French letter is it's just, it's like imagine a dried like sausage casing-- that's literally what it is, tied up sheep intestine. It's tied on one end with like, a string as tight as possible. But it can't be tied until it's softened. So you couldn't just grab a condom and go! You had to soak it for, I don't know how long, 45 minutes an hour I don't know. I don't know how long it takes, let's say an hour,
Jennifer Prokop 30:34
2020, 2021, whatever it takes.
Sarah MacLean 30:36
it's like that scene in The Princess Bride when they say, "don't go swimming for at least an hour!" So imagine Carol Kane as your friendly bordello owner but the you know, like, and that shit doesn't work either like tying up a sheep's intestine with a bit of string does not protect you from pregnancy. Which brings us back to you gotta figure out how to manage pregnancy.
Jennifer Prokop 31:06
You and I have been reading long enough that we watched the condom evolution happen in romance.
Sarah MacLean 31:12
So much.
Jennifer Prokop 31:13
You know, it's funny because part of me is like, I don't know, I don't know where I saw it, I don't know if these were conversations I overheard with people, this was pre-social media, But I remember when, like people started sort of saying, like, "you need to have your characters talk about safe sex. This has to be a conversation that happens before they get into bed." And I remember people being like, "oh, but it's gonna ruin the vibe" and yet-- Like, do you remember this? I mean, yeah, this all happened, right? There still people--
Sarah MacLean 31:47
--Not long ago, a pretty big author said, you know, publicly, "Let's just all agree that my characters are all clean and are having safe sex because I don't want to write condoms anymore." Which, look, fine, It's a it's a bit of like a, you know, I don't write contemporaries, but it's a bit of, I imagine, like, "oh, now we have to pause, pause now for a condom break." But like, some people do it really great, first of all. And second of all, it's just good sense, everyone!
Jennifer Prokop 32:17
One of the most interesting conversations I had on Twitter, though, was that gay men now can take PrEP, right, which is essentially instead of using condoms
Sarah MacLean 32:28
Yes, I've seen ads for these on this on TV.
Jennifer Prokop 32:32
One of the things that's like, really interesting is like that can be part of your, like, your Grindr profile or whatever, if you're on PrEP, and in order to keep on it, you have to be tested, I think every, like, every month or whatever, I will get these details right in show notes. And so, you know, one of the things is like in gay romance, that that like sort of conversation might be changing because it's essentially part of the, like part of the scene already. So it's really interesting to me how even the rules for like, like male / female romances might be different from gay romances or lesbian romances in terms of like that safe sex conversation because the way, essentially the ways we can protect ourselves from sexually transmitted diseases and from pregnancy are so different than they were when Jane feather was writing this historical, right, in 1996. [Right.] So and I just think that's really interesting that contraception the sort of putting on a condom is so normalized now I notice it if it's not there.
Sarah MacLean 33:35
In contemporaries, for sure. I mean, like, I've never, I've never written a condom, in a book.
Jennifer Prokop 33:41
No, of course.
Sarah MacLean 33:43
And I partially that's because of, you know, it's because of sheepskin, and soaking, and all that, but I mean, like, Elizabeth Hoyt has written condoms. Lisa uses has used like half a lemon, I want to say, or a brandy soaked sponge, so like there are certainly contraception becomes a part of it and then--
Jennifer Prokop 34:05
Pulling out, I think is one that happens in historicals.
Sarah MacLean 34:05
yeah, I've used pulling out a lot. [sure] and I just you know assume all my heroes are clean.. But the, but again, in contemporaries have to have to clear a different bar I think then historicals do. And that's because of reality, that's because we live in the same world as characters. I think it's really interesting, look we're doing a whole podcast about Kresley Cole, nobody does birth control like Kresley does, where literally Valkyries have to eat, you know demons have a seal, like they're just so there's so many ways that Kresley tackles contraception in like a important way
Jennifer Prokop 34:11
And fertility, right. Yeah, absolutely. Like it's really coded into the world, but in a way that often where women are in charge, versus women being like victimized by it.
Sarah MacLean 34:59
Well, and that's Classic Kresley, right?
Jennifer Prokop 35:02
on brand.
Sarah MacLean 35:03
Where do you want to go from here, Jen?
Jennifer Prokop 35:05
I mean, I want us to talk about miscarriages. And I want us to talk about abortion.
Sarah MacLean 35:09
Well, let's talk about abortion. Because so, I brought up early in the episode, but aside from those early drafts, yeah, you could just you could drink a thing, and it would magically wave away the problem. [Yeah.] We don't have that in contemporaries anymore. I mean, we've never had that in contemporaries. And again, it's because the bar is higher, right. You have to clear a higher bar when it comes to contraception. But we have a couple of problematic things that happen in contemporaries. And we have a couple of, and we have started really see an evolution. I think, like we have seen the normalization of condoms. And I want to say, I want to give a nod to the normalization of Plan B. [Yeah.] Do you want to talk about Plan B?
Jennifer Prokop 35:55
Yeah, I would love to talk about Plan B. So it's really interesting because in that list of 15 books, it wasn't like 15 books where an abortion happened. I think there were like a handful.
Sarah MacLean 36:04
Yeah, five or six.
Jennifer Prokop 36:06
Yeah. And then there was sort of another group where the heroines use Plan B. And one of them I read is by an author named, by an author, Melanie Greene, who I actually know from the Tournament of Books-- Hi, Melanie! And she's written a book called "Roll of a Lifetime." And I read it today. And it's really interesting because the heroine, Rachel, is a single, like a single mother, but they're divorced fathers in the picture, but he's real... he's a real jerk. He doesn't pay his child support on time, he doesn't always, you know, their daughter is two, he doesn't pick her up or drop her off on time, and Rachel is kind of financially stressed, but also, she you know, she's worried enough about him that she doesn't want him having her address, right? So she has like a very guarded relationship with him. And he has this big Greek American family and so there's like a lot of family obligations, and she ends up dating her ex's boss, this guy, Theo is that hero, but they get together and it's kind of like an just like an affair, like very casual and they have sex, like the first time and then a week or two later they're together again, and the condom breaks. And I will tell you, the scene is so matter of fact. And they're just it's just like this interlude they had an hour or two to be together, and he says to her, okay, you go pick up your daughter, Hannah, and you go put her to bed, and I will go to the pharmacy, and I'll pick up the emergency contraception, and then I'll meet you back at your house and you can take it. And it was... and she's like, "Great, sounds like a plan." And I love the detail. Like, you know, sometimes authors just get that one detail right? And here's what it is. He looked it up on his phone before going into the drugstore, because he wanted to know what it looked like.
Sarah MacLean 37:55
You want to get the right thing.
Jennifer Prokop 37:57
Yes!
Sarah MacLean 37:58
That's dreamy.
Jennifer Prokop 37:59
It was! He buys the name brand, and not the generic, because he really wants her to understand that he was taking this seriously. And then when he gets and then this part's actually kind of romantic. I mean, again like,
Sarah MacLean 38:12
Oh god, you're such a romance reader!
Jennifer Prokop 38:14
No wait! Listen to this! Listen to this! He says to her, "I want to stay. I want to stay overnight. I'm worried. I'm, you know, what if? You know it can be painful. You can have cramping, and your daughter's here." And she's like, "Okay, but I called my friend, so I don't want you to stay." And he's like, "okay." But he wanted to and I'm sorry, that's fucking romantic, everybody.
Sarah MacLean 38:38
No, it's perfect. Its nobility, heroic nobility, right? I've said 1000 times, that the hero's, in every romance novel the hero has to be a king. They don't have to be royal. They do have to be a king, and that's heroic nobility. And like, that is a perfect example. That guy's a king of Duane Reed! [yeah] That's a New York drugstore. The king of Walgreens.
Jennifer Prokop 38:59
Of CVS! Right, but here's my point like, yes, it's like a small moment in the book. And then that's it. It's not a big deal. They don't talk about it again
Sarah MacLean 39:06
No! Becasue really, it really shouldn't be. It's a pill that you took after you had sex. It's fine.
Jennifer Prokop 39:12
Yeah, it's fine. And the fact that it is coded as a romantic moment, to me, was really meaningful in this book, because what it's saying is, this is a decision, like we made together, right?
Sarah MacLean 39:26
Its partnership, [Yes.] Look. romance novels are about finding equal partnership, about standing shoulder to shoulder with somebody who you want to spend the rest of your life with, right? Happily ever after in a romance novel involves partnership. And we have seen over the years, a whole lot of books about partnership around pregnancy, partnership around babies-- like the secret baby trope is about noble men who quote, "do the right thing" and marry the girl. Right? And, and are our solid, sound partners in a relationship. And this is also really wonderful partnership. It's, "we're in this together, you are not wholly responsible for not getting pregnant, I'm responsible, too." And like that's real sexy.
Jennifer Prokop 40:24
It was! And you know what? I think it's it, and that's why, I think our conception of that first time you saw a condom-- and it felt fumbling and awkward and weird, right? no, because it's like us saying, it's the couple saying, "our safety is important. Your health and safety is important to me." And this is the same thing, right?
Sarah MacLean 40:46
I would really love, and I'm going to text, I'm going to text, I'm going to tweet at Bowling Green and see if the guy, the people there, know. But I would really love it, if you're a listener, and you can sort of think back to your old school experiences, I'd really love to know who started this condom thing. [Yeah.] Because they were not on the page in those early contemporaries.
Jennifer Prokop 41:10
No, they weren't, never.
Sarah MacLean 41:12
No! Who...
Jennifer Prokop 41:13
When did that happen? Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 41:14
Can somebody find a date? I would guess it has something to do with the AIDS epidemic.
Jennifer Prokop 41:20
Yeah, it must have, right.
Sarah MacLean 41:22
I mean, this is, this is me like super spitballing. But I would be very interested. I'm also going to ask Kelly Faircloth at Jezebel if she's done any research on this, because I feel like somebody out there knows where condoms came from in romance--
Jennifer Prokop 41:37
--when it started. Yeah--
Sarah MacLean 41:38
right? And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they have been there since beginning. Maybe Mills and Boon has been using them forever.
Jennifer Prokop 41:45
I don't. I felt like there was a sea change, though. And I remember it happening, right? And I remember the conversations where people are like, "No way" and then it just happened. And I feel like this Melanie Greene book to me was the perfect example of how Plan B can be used the same way, right?
Sarah MacLean 42:01
Well, that Ruby Lang book. Yes. Which we recommended it on an on a another podcast here, but recently
Jennifer Prokop 42:10
When we did best friend's sibling, right?
Sarah MacLean 42:11
"Clean Breaks." The Heroine is an OBGYN and she, not only does she counsel a character on the page about abortion, the condom breaks. Ruby reminded us today that a condom breaks in that book. And the-- I'm just getting it, I'm just pulling it up-- and the hero basically says like, "I'll marry you." Everyone is like, "Um, no, thank you, first of all. Second of all, like I'm a professional human being. And also a fucking OB, and we're going to get some emergency contraception and it's going to be fine." Right? And, you know, Ruby's awesome and we love her. We stan her hard here.
Jennifer Prokop 42:58
I think the other side of the contraception question, though, is... because Jenny Holiday's whole "Bridesmaids Behaving Badly" series has women dealing with these issues in one way or another. So one of the friends has really severe endometriosis and her period is a plot point, right? Like and how, like how debilitating her pain is. And I've talked about one of those series, she then does get pregnant and has to like really consider: I never thought I'd be a mother. Is this what I want? But Wendy, who's another friend, takes Plan B. And then Jane, another one of them, is... they're going to be childless by choice. And you can only be childless by choice if you have contraception available to you! And so that is a series that aren't fully, for all of them, like weaves in the decisions that women are making-- about who and what they want their futures to be like. And then what, or not, and there's an-- I really like that there's no judgment or blaming. You know, Jane, not wanting kids is not really a thing that-- you know I'm spacing on her name, the one who was like "I would be I would desperately love kids but I have endometriosis"-- She's not mad that her friend doesn't want them. Right. Like it's just women with different choices and they all support each other. And I think that see that whole series is really committed, like Kresley, I think, to really talking about contraception in a, like, a really comprehensive way for different women at different points in their lives and what they want and different couples.
Sarah MacLean 44:39
Yeah, I mean, I think that there is, I think we-- but Jen, you and I've talked so much about the fact that these body issues, these kind of endometriosis, One of my very favorite romance novels of the last few years, is a really beautiful, erotic, friends to lovers romance called "Unconventional" by Isabel love. The heroine, So it's basically like "friends with benefits," like they know each other, they have mutual friends. They are each-- it's like they're the, they're the Marie and Jess in the "When Harry Met Sally" relationship here, they're like,
Jennifer Prokop 45:19
Oh, got it.
Sarah MacLean 45:19
Okay, um, they're like the Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby characters. So, and then they sort of meet through this couple, this middle couple. And they have this like beneficial relationship. She's divorced, because she had to have a hysterectomy when she was very young while she was married to another man. And he left her because he wanted to have children. And so she sort of has this sense of, well, there is no future. There's no long term relationship in my future because I can't have children, and like, that's part of a long term future. She has this relationship with with Charlie--that's the hero's name. And they have this like incredibly sexy relationship that involves exhibitionism and voyeurism. You'll love that part. And there's there are threesomes in it. And like, it's really an incredibly sexy relationship. And he starts to fall for her, and she's so panicked by shame. Like, she has such shame for this reality. I mean, like, this happens to women, and she doesn't, she's, she kind of protects herself and protects herrself from loving him because she's so afraid that he'll reject her. Because, you know, she feels in some way "less than" because she's had something happen to her. And he's ultimately, and he wants kids like he sort of is very open about the fact that he wants kids and she's just like, "I, you know, that's never going to happen, that's not going to happen." And then when it finally sort of, when it's when she reveals It, when she's like, "I love you, but I can't be with you because of this. I would never ask you to give up that dream to be with me." He's like, "I love you. Kids are separate from this. Kids don't-- you I love! kids are an imaginary thing."
Jennifer Prokop 47:16
Right? Right.
Sarah MacLean 47:17
And they have their happily ever after. And it's really beautifully done, because it's very honest. You know, we have all, I mean maybe we have not, I don't want to speak for every woman, but I feel like many, many, many, many women, myself included, have felt over time, sort of shame about things with our bodies that we can't control. [Yeah] and this book does that beautifully. And it feels very authentic and honest, and also super sexy.
Jennifer Prokop 47:50
Again, I used that like phrase earlier that sometimes your body betrays you, one. So I want to return to talking about abortion maybe at the end, because there's one book I think that's really interesting by Melonie Johnson. But I want to talk about miscarriage first because I do feel like, and you have written really one of my-- and I, you know I I'm not here to stan for Sarah MacLean all the time--
Sarah MacLean 48:15
--we don't stan for me that often--
Jennifer Prokop 48:18
But "Day of the Duchess" is probably one of my top three favorite romances ever.
Sarah MacLean 48:25
That's very kind.
Jennifer Prokop 48:27
And I think some, but miscarriage is something that romance does put on page. Abortion is something a little different; Miscarriage, it happens a lot. And I, and I actually wrote a whole piece once about it because I was just really curious...what is it that's happening on the page? And like not every miscarriage is sort of doing the same thing. It's mining different like emotional like depths. So I want you to talk about "Day the Duchess," but we can talk.. and I mentioned the Piper Huguley book,
Sarah MacLean 48:57
I should add, "Day of the Duchess" has stillbirth in it. I mean it's a [yeah], it is it's obviously, it's it's a type of miscarriage, but it's a lot. It's very intense. It does happen, it happens right at the very beginning of the book. I know that it, it has, I want, I just want to very strongly content warn this for anybody who who might have trouble with stillbirth as a plot. I mean, I, that book is very personal for me. I have not had a stillbirth. But I have had pregnancy issues. And I was working through some stuff. I wanted to write a book that was about women and the way that we relate to our bodies as failures. And that's because I was going through some stuff. I have had, I-I've had trouble with pregnancy. I've had I had trouble breastfeeding. I have felt a lot of shame about what my body can and cannot do. And I hate that. So many women, one in four women, one in four pregnancies, end in miscarriage and/or stillbirth. And the reality is that we are trained and conditioned to believe that that is a malfunction of our body. And the reality is, is that when 25% of something-- when 25% of times-- something happens, that's not a malfunction. It's just, it's just a thing that happens. And I hate that women are shamed by that. And I hate that it is so emotional and that it is so personal and that it is so private and that we keep it to ourselves and we struggle with so much anger and frustration. [Yeah], and I, that's all in this book. I mean, that's what this book is and yeah,
Jennifer Prokop 51:06
Well and I think the reader's experience is always really different. And one of the reasons that book moved me, right, is like not just because of the grovelling, but because of her journey and--
Sarah MacLean 51:19
You love a grovel.
Jennifer Prokop 51:20
I do love a grovel, but--
Sarah MacLean 51:21
--it is an epic grovel, I will admit.
Jennifer Prokop 51:23
Yeah, yeah, it is, but there's this part in particular where she's basically, she knows something is wrong. And you use, it's like I've called it a miscarriage, but you're, it's like really a stillbirth right?
Sarah MacLean 51:28
She's...very far along.
Jennifer Prokop 51:39
Yeah, she knows something is wrong. And to me, there's this, like the most chilling kind of scene in this book, and it is probably within the first 20 pages, maybe even earlier. She knocks on the door right there. They're separated. And the you know-- whoever answers the fucking door, the footman or whatever-- and she feels like she has to say that there's something wrong with the baby in order to get in the door. That's what I remember, right? And he's like, "there's someting wrong?" And she's like, "With the heir" essentially. And I remember thinking, not only is it this failure of her body, but it was this devastating moment where she knew that this baby was more important than she was in terms of how she was going to get the help she needed. And in that way, I guess, things have not really changed that significantly. But to me it was this, like, heart rending moment. And romance I know delivers those moments. But one of the things I've said to people about this book is: it's the rare romance that starts with the low moment, and it's the lowest of low moments, and then we have to see them recover. And I think it's brilliant and not just because you're sitting here, but
Sarah MacLean 52:59
Well, you're very kind. I mean, I do want to say one thing about that book because it's a-- you know that I struggled with it. Serafina, who is the main character of that book, she's the heroine of that book, believes she's barren. She's told after she loses the child by the doctor-- or the sort of male doctor who's been brought in as a voice of patriarchy-- that she'll never have children again. And so, and she, she has a very specific condition -- medically her stillbirth, her stillbirth is not coincidental. It's medical. It's a condition that actual real human females have. And she ends up believing that she is barren. And at the end, and I'm going to spoil the ending of this book. They have children. And they have them in the epilogue and they have more than one because my-- I realized that I couldn't write, I wanted to write a birth. I wanted to write a live birth. And I couldn't write the next live birth because it would be full of fear.
Jennifer Prokop 54:09
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 54:10
--and terror. So I had to, I had to give them more than one child in that in that epilogue, and I ended up giving them lots of children. But I have received letters-- and I know that there's a lot of discussion in romancelandia about this--the sort of magic child that comes at the end for a barren couple. And I went back and forth. And there are two versions of that epilogue, one where they have children and one where they do not. And we-- my editor and I-- went over it again and again and again. And I actually just pulled the trigger on the epilogue literally the last possible day before it went to print. And I gave them children instead of not giving them children, and I did it for lots of reasons. And I can tell you they were happy either way. And I probably did it for me more than for them. It was this-- "Day the Duchess" is an incredibly personal book for me for many, many reasons. And so for me, it was really important to me that, that experience happened on the page and that they have happily ever after with children. But I want to say that there is there was no reason why they couldn't have happily ever after without children.
Jennifer Prokop 55:34
And it's funny because I know people struggle with that, I don't, I never struggle with it in historicals because I feel like-- some quack told her she couldn't have kids again based on.. what? you know. Yeah. And whereas in a contemporary,I will say the, like, "all of a sudden I just got pregnant because I was with the right man" plot.
Sarah MacLean 55:56
Right. The magic, magic sperm.
Jennifer Prokop 55:57
Yeah, that part -- meh. You can stop that. It's 2019.
Sarah MacLean 56:02
I mean, the baby epilogue is-- it's a lie. It's something that we all sort of need to talk about because it is sort of heteronormative. And there's, you know, there's a lot about it that is, that needs to be unpacked. And I think it's a conversation that it's healthy for us to have as romance, as people who talk about romance. But I also acknowledge that I love a baby in an epilogue, so you know, but I also have a baby and I like baby, so whatever.
Jennifer Prokop 56:30
That's a personal problem.
Sarah MacLean 56:31
If you know-- if your choice is-- it's "your body, your choice", "your marriage, your choice", "your partnership, your choice." And that's all we're just trying to get at.
Jennifer Prokop 56:41
Yeah, there's a lot of books with miscarriages.
Jennifer Prokop 56:44
Yeah, we've talked about that.
Sarah MacLean 56:44
Yeah, I mean, I want to just shout out my favorite Julia Quinn novel, which is "The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever." It may not be Miss Miranda Cheever, but "Secret Diaries of Miranda Cheever" there's a miscarriage in that book that is devastating. I honestly believe that is Julia Quinn's best book, it is emotional and intense. And the miscarriage is so important. But again, it's told through the lens of the heroine's experience. And I know you have thoughts about this.
Sarah MacLean 57:16
Women, if it's happening to your body, it's your experience, you own it.
Jennifer Prokop 57:20
Right? Yeah, I believe that I totally do. And I think it also makes sense to me that romance would like, I don't know, mine miscarriage is a possible topic. Because it is so personal and because so much of romance is about, about hope and about.. and so like exploring the ways in which women experience failure, but then bounce back and figure out who they are after that. I think that for many women-- and I also think you're right, like it's not so--it's very hard to talk about. But then in a book, it gives you a way to like have that experience, right? You're with you're this heroine becomes your friend who is going through this experience. And I think that that is something that, it's a way for us to sort of collectively share our miscarriage stories kind of with each other.
Sarah MacLean 58:16
Sure, you know, loss of a child is normalized in romance, and that's valuable. That's valuable for every woman, every one of that 24% or 25% of women, of pregnancies. What's interesting is that 25% of women before they turned -- before they turn 45, in the United States-- will have an abortion. And we have not normalized abortion.
Jennifer Prokop 58:42
No. No, we sure have not.
Sarah MacLean 58:44
--as a genre.
Jennifer Prokop 58:46
Here's the bad way we've normalized it.
Sarah MacLean 58:49
Uhhh, I hate this way.
Jennifer Prokop 58:50
I do, too. And I'm real fucking over it, which is the hero has been traumatized by bad ex who had an abortion that he didn't want her to have.
Sarah MacLean 59:04
Yeah, she either didn't tell him, and then she told him to stick it to him, Or she didn't tell him she was pregnant and then he found out.
Jennifer Prokop 59:11
Yeah, like, it's real bad.
Sarah MacLean 59:13
Fuck. That. Noise. Burn it with fire.
Jennifer Prokop 59:18
That plot really needs to die. And you know what? Those are plots actually to that have been around a really long time. In one way or another.
Sarah MacLean 59:26
I want to, I'm going to confess something, which is 20 years ago, when those plots were everywhere. I liked that, because I was like, oh-- that again!-- it sort of says, it's code, it's codifying like nobility of the hero, right? Like it's codifying maturity, readiness for commitment, willingness to partner, the ability to be a decent father, and like take responsibility. These are all valuable tools
Jennifer Prokop 59:57
Like some deep well of emotional feeling, too, right?
Sarah MacLean 1:00:00
Sure, sure. It was, it's humanity, It's a hero's humanity coded in there. I get it. It's great shorthand, but at the same time, like it's real problematic shorthand.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:10
Not right now.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:12
You know it, for me, it was like pre- and post- Smith College. Pre Smith College there was, "Oh, I love theseevil abortion storylines." And after Smith College, I was like, "No. Absolutely not. Abortion is for everyone."
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:26
And I think it also really, I mean, here's the other thing, though, it doesn't just code something for the hero, it codes something for the heroine, right? Which is that she is committed to mothering and family. It's a very patriarchal way of like making sure we understand that this is "a good one," right? That this heroine is going to be different or better-- and better!-- right, and all those things because she would never do that.
Sarah MacLean 1:00:51
She would never do that to him. That's nonsense. A lot of people have very ordinary abortions, in marriages that are otherwise happy.
Jennifer Prokop 1:01:01
A book I really recommend that it's not a romance, It's called "Scarlet A: The ethics, law, and politics of ordinary abortion." And this woman, I saw her at the Chicago Humanities Festival. And she was this fascinating speaker where she was like, "we have like these sort of like, myths, these sort of abortion stories we tell. And then when we talk to real women who've had abortions, and none of them are true." It It is a great, great book. But I remember we've talked about our love for like kind of category romances in the 80s, and one of a series I really loved was the series by Barbara Boswell where these brothers all married these sisters.
Sarah MacLean 1:01:39
Oh, I love it already.
Jennifer Prokop 1:01:41
I know the Ramseys and the Bradys-- and here's the thing, in one of them, and I really remember this, and in one of them, Erin is the heroine. And she has like kids already, she's-- of course she's still like, she's 24-- and her, you know, she got pregnant right after high school and got married, and now the Dad's out of the picture. And she gets with this new man, and she they're not using birth control because he thinks he's barren because, from his previous marriage, they weren't able to have kids. And of course, now-- all of a sudden-- Erin's pregnant and he says, "You've been cheating on me!" They run into his ex wife at the mall, and the ex wife is like, "I'm just so glad that this happened. You know, it wasn't that I was barren it was that basically like his sperm and my egg like bad body chemistry"-- some 80s bullshit-- but I remember, I vividly remember this plot and and how angry, like rightfully so, Erin was at this ex wife for like, not ever really being honest with the hero right? But it's also super problematic to imagine that somehow she had medical knowledge that he didn't. Right? it's also crazy and it's this right the bad ex, who either withheld Or aborted a child, or whatever is s ... I... it's an automatic like, first of all, I'm not reading your book anymore. And I'm probably not reading you anymore.
Sarah MacLean 1:03:10
Yeah, yeah. I mean, certainly, you know, somebody on Twitter, I sort of ranted a little bit about this on Twitter yesterday, and somebody on Twitter came forward and was like, "In the 90s, I wrote this book." And I was like, "In the 90s, it was a different time!" We all have to have room to grow, right? We have room. We, I talk all the time about the fact that I've been writing for 10 years, what I wrote in 2009 is not representative necessarily, of what I write now in 2019, and like, that's just life. We have to have room to grow.
Jennifer Prokop 1:03:43
Sure. And that's romance. And that romance, right?
Sarah MacLean 1:03:46
We're moving too quickly. we're iterating on society, the whole time. That's fine. What I want is for us to as writers, as responsible citizens of the genre, for us to just try and do better. That's all we can ask for is that everybody try and do better. Can I just have a fun moment? It hasn't been a lot of fun moments, but I want to give a shout out to the only vasectomy I can think of, Jennifer. Which I had not actually thought about until you told that crazy story about the brothers marrying the sisters and the like, how he thought he was barren. And then he thought she was cheating on him. And that he--
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:24
The 80s! They also owned a mall, so it's all bad.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:28
Sure. Of course they did. Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:30
The Ramsey Park. Well, the what their last name is Ramsey, the Ramsey Park Mall.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:36
Oh my god. What?
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:37
I actually bought these books on Amazon because I like right. I was like, I gotta have--
Sarah MacLean 1:04:41
Sure. Seminal texts. So... speaking of seminal texts,
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:48
I was like "ha ha." All right, I love you so much right now.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:53
Air high five. So okay, Jude Devereaux, who everyone knows is like my seminal text, "The Black Lyon," at the beginning of my time in romance, Jude Devereaux wrote a family saga, every book, like every book she ever has ever written has been a Montgomery book. And they have this like intense Montgomery, this Montgomery family tree, and the Montgomerys have a lot of twins. A lot. A lot. You're making a funny face.
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:22
Yeah, no, I'm just curious about like, tell me more. Where's this all going?
Sarah MacLean 1:05:25
FYI everybody, Jen and I have a twin interstitial coming. So, I'm not going to give you too much information about the Montgomery twins because I'm sure we'll talk about the full twin experience then, but this is a good one. So at some point, so "Sweet liar" is this contemporary, like wacky kind of time travel-y? ghosty? like St. Valentine's Day Massacre, Chicago period? Like weird... there's a lot packed into this book "Sweet Liar" Hero's name is Michael. I don't remember the heroines name because it doesn't matter. Michael is a twin. And he's like, he has a lot-- There's a lot-- Michael is pretty dreamy and weird and kind of amazing. But there's this legend in the Montgomery family of one of the cousin's got, he's... here... They're so virile, all the men, all the men in the Montgomery family. Virility is also a big piece of romances of a time, right? And they're so virile, and one of the men had a vasectomy, because his wife is like, "I've had too many of your fucking babies. Like, we're not doing this anymore. You're getting a vasectomy." And so he went off and he got a vasectory and he came back and then they had sex, and she got pregnant, and he was convinced she had cheated on him. And she was like, "Fuck you. I'm getting a paternity test for this baby," which she did. And she was like, "see it is your baby, you're just too virile for vasectomy."
Jennifer Prokop 1:06:42
I am dead over here.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:16
If I remember correctly, he buys her like a Porsche and like a 10 carat diamond ring to apologize--
Jennifer Prokop 1:07:24
for basically having super Montgomery sperm--
Sarah MacLean 1:07:26
For basically having crazy Jude Deveraux sperm.
Jennifer Prokop 1:07:31
Oh, guys, that's some good stuff right there, that really is.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:35
You know what, that's the perfect example of like, some crazy shit and romance novel, that definitely coded some real problematic, like virility issues into my life. However, I really love that a vasectory was on the page. And I love that the heroine was like, "fuck you were getting a paternity test." Like, it was great. This isn't actually the heroine of that book, but whatever it's referenced. It's a story that's referenced in there. I like that the vasectory was just codified like, this is a thing that happens even though in this particular case it didn't work because he has super sperm.
Jennifer Prokop 1:08:07
Well, I mean, Hello Sarah.
Sarah MacLean 1:08:09
But obviously, he's a Montgomery, so stay tuned for our twin episode and more Montgomery shenanigans. Um, what else?
Jennifer Prokop 1:08:17
I want to end this episode by talking about this Melonie Johnson book. So I don't know if we're ready for it yet.
Sarah MacLean 1:08:22
Let's do it. Because we're,
Jennifer Prokop 1:08:24
yeah, we're like, we're over an hour, everyone's like, "Oh my god, stop being so angry!" "No, never." Um, here's the thing. One of the things that was really interesting is when you asked on Twitter about abortion books, like there really were a handful, right? So there's a book by Jenny Trout, one of the Tiffany Reisz-- Nora, I guess in one of the Original Sinners books. But I want to talk about this book by Melonie Johnson called "Once upon a Bad Boy," and it doesn't actually come out until June 25, So I don't want to spoil it entirely. But this is one of the few books-- like among a very small list of books-- we could have where like a heroine has an abortion. And, and in this case, it was something that the heroine and hero were like teenage, dating, dated as teenagers. They broke up, it was very sudden. He broke up with her. And then we get, it's 10-11 years later. So now, you know, they're almost 30, and one of the things that's really fascinating about this book, in terms of-- that the exploration of her journey, like the the abortion, is she does not have any regrets at all. About, I mean, she has moments of like, what-if-ism, right? What if, what if I would have made a different choice? She doesn't have any regrets. She doesn't feel any guilt. She doesn't feel like she did anything wrong. But what she has done is kept it a secret for 10 years because women in our society just don't talk about their abortions. And so that the pressure of keeping that all inside is something that has really-- like right, it's it's not the "what she did" that's the problem. It's the pressure to keep it a secret. And this is something that only her grandmother knows. I don't want to spoil the book, or like necessarily talk too much about why it happened. I was, I will be honest, I was really on the fence with it. I'm kind of ready for the heroine who is like, "Fuck yeah, I had abortion" and we just all0. move on. Right. It as matter of fact as taking Plan B but--
Sarah MacLean 1:10:31
--yeah, but is that really authentic?
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:33
Well, I think.. we certainly.. Well, according to "The Scarlet A" book, It is.
Sarah MacLean 1:10:37
No, no, I don't mean that. I mean, I mean, is it authentic for us to just sort of, for many of us to step forward and say--
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:44
Yes, I like Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:10:46
"Fuck yeah, I had an abortion." I mean, right. This is the problem, right? Like, we keep, we've spent the entire episode talking about how we keep our bodies secret.
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:57
Yes,
Sarah MacLean 1:10:57
Like we protect, and it's not It's, I mean, in part, its protection, right? Nobody wants--I spent the last two days like, you know, fighting people on the internet. Not everybody has the bandwidth or the desire to do that work. But the truth is, as long as this is, as long as our bodies, as long as the uterus is politicized, speaking up like that is a risk. And it's a risk that we should not expect any woman to have to take like,
Jennifer Prokop 1:11:33
absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 1:11:34
It's a risk that if you are willing to take it-- Jen and I are here for you! like we, I will, I Sarah, will fight you-- will fight for you. I will fight alongside
Jennifer Prokop 1:11:43
But we shouldn't insist that people have to--
Sarah MacLean 1:11:46
Yeah, and I think like there is a certain sense like look, it takes a lot to get past, codified, ingrained shame. And that is not to say that anybody should feel shame about an abortion. And that is to say that like many, many people in society expect you to. And that's, and like the way patriarchy sucks.
Jennifer Prokop 1:12:07
Well, and, you know, a really powerful piece I saw on Jezebel today was sort of like, okay, so for the past two days, everyone, you know, lots of people--women-- are getting out there and sharing their abortion stories, but we're not changing hearts and minds, the people who are closed to this, the people who, you know, think that it's, you know, who are pro-forced birth. Those people don't care about our stories. And I ended up finding, therefore, Sadie is the heroine of this Melanie Johnson book, I therefore-At first I was sort of like, I want you to feel less conflicted. But as the book went on, I ended up really feeling like it was an honest portrayal of, like, sort of--we all have regrets, right. And regret was, you know, it was a man she loved, it was a relationship that ended suddenly, it was, you know, now someone who's back in her life, it's a secret she kept from her best friend. It's, you know, and I, and I really found that journey to her acceptance of-- not the decision she made, she never regrets that decision-- but like the need to hide it. And that felt, I will be honest with you. I have never read anything like it in romance before.
Sarah MacLean 1:13:31
Well, that is a high praise. No matter, no matter what this book is like, that's, I want to read thing-- that we we owe it to women to tell every possible story. We owe it to all people, to all marginalized people to tell every possible story of happiness. And that is, that's our work as writers--as a genre.
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:53
Well, and I think one of the things I kept thinking about, was we talk a lot about representation matters, right? Like it is really vitally important that if you that we're not sort of saying like, okay, I read this romance with a black character, now I've read romance with black characters. No, you haven't! You read one! And part of the problem with there being so few stories in romance where women have abortions is then we hang our entire like hopes, dreams and needs for that book, that story inromance, on this one book.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:29
Right.
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:29
Right. Are these three books? And that is why we need more of them.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:34
We need more. I mean, the fact that.. Jen is right. I mean, I said 15 books the beginning there, there are maybe 15 books on that list. Many of them are Plan B. Some of them have no abortion at all, but have a doctor in them. So if we're talking about fewer fewer than 10, less than 10 books on this list, hive minded from our romance Twitter people, and old school romance, the book club that I host on Facebook-- Which you can join, If you'd like to--
Sarah MacLean 1:15:02
Yeah, we'll put it in show notes. I'm like, "That's an incredible hivemind." And if we can only come up with this number, like there aren't that many more, there really just aren't, I'm sure of it. I mean, every, if again, we go back to one quarter of all American women under the age of 45 have had an abortion. And there are--that is millions of stories!-- and we're not, and what is happening? I mean, it just takes us back to that original question, which is: why in this genre that has made, carved out, such important domestic space-- and I say domestic as, like female centered, like women's centered space; as a genre, as a matter of course, centering the female gaze and female identity and female politics, or women's politics, I should say-- how have we never, how have we not come to a place where there are at least, you know, 250 we can point to?
Jennifer Prokop 1:15:02
we'll put it in show notes.
Jennifer Prokop 1:16:12
Exactly! I mean, and that's the part where when you see how small the sample size is and you know, this Melanie Johnson book-- I'm about where you're going to hear about it next week-- it's going to be available a month later and we will signal boost it, you know, to high heaven once it actually comes out-- because I do think that I found Sadie's journey as like an individual character, and her moments of sadness, and her her sense that she couldn't... I mean, I found it all very moving and I thought, you know what, we deserve to see a woman who was, "Yeah, I kind of have some regrets and sometimes I wish 'What if' and I still know I did the right thing, and it was still my decision to make."
Sarah MacLean 1:16:56
Well, because bodies are nuanced!
Jennifer Prokop 1:16:58
Feelings are complicated!
Sarah MacLean 1:17:00
It is not an easy discussion, which is clear in the in the world. And it's why Jen and I rage so hard when anybody comes at this with a black and white answer. This is a hard conversation to have. And all I think I'm saying is: I stand with women being able to make their own choices about their own bodies. And that's really all.
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:24
That's it. Right? Well, and I think that that's why we don't, we started out talking about trans men and trans women and and sort of bodies and who we are but-- if you believe in bodily autonomy for women, then I think you have to believe in bodily autonomy for everybody. And I think you have to look at people and say, "I want you to be who you are in the world. And I want the world to accept you and that journey for what it is and if romance cannot be there for that in every way, then romance is not doing what it needs to do to support the people who need it the most."
Sarah MacLean 1:18:07
Right? If it's the genre of hope, and happiness, it has to be the genre of hope and happiness for all of us.
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:17
Yeah, no exceptions. No exceptions.
Sarah MacLean 1:18:21
No.
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:22
Except Nazis. Except Nazis.
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:26
But I mean, and that's the part where I find this conversation and these books, you know, and I know we talked about like a probably 50 different books today. And we didn't even talk about all the books that we could have. But I mean, I think we were really interested in exploring what is it that romance is doing really well? Romance is talking about miscarriage. It's talking about grieving and loss. You know, romance is talking about condoms and safe sex. Romance is talking about preventing pregnancy. But it's not really talking at all about abortion. And this is about to be a right that many of us are not going have access to anymore. And that fear is something I would like to see romance normalizing for ourselves as women and for readers. And I get I'm not a writer, right? I don't have to make a living off my book selling and putting my kid through college. You know, I know those risks are out there. But I hope that we all get behind Melonie Johnson's book and prove that there is a market for like nuanced stories about women who make hard decisions for themselves, or easy decisions for themselves, but they make those decisions for themselves.
Sarah MacLean 1:18:35
Except Nazis.
Sarah MacLean 1:18:54
People deserve to have body autonomy. period. Tthat said, what I do want to add is that we are, I think, and this is me sort of looking into my romance crystal ball, I think this week could be, this could have started a sea change among writers thinking about the fact that we don't-- we limit, we create space to talk about bodies, our bodies and how they work. And like you said, we create space to talk about sorrow and shame around the way our bodies work. But we don't we have limit, we have stopped, we've come to a stopping point when we get to this piece of the puzzle. And I think a lot, a lot of romance novelists, I mean, just in the last two days, I've heard from so many writers who acknowledged that they've never tackled it, but they want to. And so I would like to think that a year from now we're going to start seeing in books a little more. I don't think we're ever going to see it every book, like I don't think we're-- and that's not what I'm asking for--But I think we're going to see more and more and more of these stories on the page. And that's all we're asking for. We're just asking for us all to just think a little more carefully about representing that choice that a lot of us have made. And, and I mean a lot! I just, I gave an interview about this today and I just feel like I said at some point, you know, everyone, everyone knows a woman who has who has done this, everyone has interacted with a person who has done this, you may not know, and nobody is asking anyone to risk like I said earlier--
Jennifer Prokop 1:21:28
--if it's not safe for you to share that story, either emotionally or physically or for whatever reason, like I like, no one's gonna push anybody into the limelight. But romance then is a way-- like miscarriage-- where we can share our stories and, there's truth in fiction. I say that to my students all the time.
Sarah MacLean 1:21:49
Romance is a private space. It is private space for people who read romance and it's and it's so far removed from like the prying eyes of the world, the rest of the world. If we can't have this conversation here in our private space, where can we have this conversation safely? And look, the reality is that readers-- there are going to be readers who don't like it. And so it's going to take risk, and it's going to take bravery. And I really am looking forward to the, to the books that come from it.
Jennifer Prokop 1:22:24
Yeah. Well, and you know what? I think your crystal ball is right on because when I think about the books that I talked about tonight, like specifically, right, Jenny Holiday's books, that whole series, the Melanie Green Book, the Melonie Johnson book, these are books that are all 2018 or later.
Sarah MacLean 1:22:41
Yeah, Ruby Lang.
Jennifer Prokop 1:22:42
Right. Ruby Lang. I mean, so we are already we are talking about old books within a lot of the books that we are like talking about right now are RIGHT NOW. So we, these are really the women who are putting these things on the page. They're the forerunners. And if we support these books and buy these books and show that there's a market for these stories, then we work-- we will get more of them. I know that there are books that we missed we tried to cast the widest possible net.
Sarah MacLean 1:23:11
Well, we've only had 48 hours, so we're going to, I'm committed to reading all those books on the list. And so you know, follow me on twitter, follow the Fated Mates Twitter account, and I'll tweet about the ones that are great and hopefully we'll get more. If you have a book, listeners, if you have read a book where there's an abortion on the page, please please rec us you know, good good abortion rep, we want that. Tell us about books that have meant something to you, as representing kind of body autonomy and and the body politic. We're interested in that. Jen and I especially are interested in how, how fertility and contraception and all of that lives on the page. If you can point to an early use of a condom in a contemporary, we want to hear all about it.
Jennifer Prokop 1:24:16
definitely want to hear all about that.
Sarah MacLean 1:24:18
I'm gonna do some research. And you know, again, follow Fated Mates on Twitter, follow me on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, we'll put everything there.
Jennifer Prokop 1:24:24
I mean, I think that's it, we are, it's a call to action, right? Because we know that when you change people's worldview and their empathy and the way they think about the choices we get to make and to have that we change the world. The urgency of this isn't just like, because we want you to have better books to read. It's because when we change the way we think about what our possibilities are, we change our futures.
Sarah MacLean 1:24:53
Well, that's a good place to stop. I think.You're listening to Fated Mates, Everybody. Follow us on Twitter @fatemates follow us on Instagram @fatedmatespod. Go over to our website, fatedmates.net and check out the show notes on your apps or over on fatedmates.net. You can leave comments there. You can talk to us any time. Leave us reviews, all that good stuff. Next week we are back with "Dark skye." Another another broken demon man. He's a demon, right? I mean, a winged demon.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:35
And I think it's going to be very relevant and interesting conversation. Yeah, to this one that we well. Kresley always is, but I think this book in particular, is really landing at a time where I think it's gonna be really interesting. So, go out and do something you want to do with your body today.
Sarah MacLean 1:25:52
Have a good night.