Today I chat with Dr. Kecia Ali, Professor of Religion at Boston University, and author of a new book, Human in Death: Morality and Mortality in JD Robb’s Novels. We discuss what inspired her to write a book about the series, which is now 45+ books in, and what she discovered with her multiple and attentive re-reads of key novels. We talk about portrayals of ethics, family, friendship, race, women’s work, and of course violence, and we hear what she’s working on next – and of course what Dr. Ali is reading, too.
If you’re at all familiar with the In Death world, this part should not be a surprise: Trigger Warnings for discussion of sexual assault, violence, abuse, and rape in the plots of the In Death books.
I also want to give a very special thank you to Dr. Sara Ronis, Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at St. Mary’s University in Texas. She emailed me before this book came out to suggest. Dr. Ali as a guest – and she was totally right. I learned so much from this interview. So thank you to Dr. Ali, and to Dr. Ronis.
And! If you’re at all curious about Human in Death, Dr. Ali’s book, her publisher, Baylor Press, has been supremely awesome!
First, we have a giveaway of one hardcover copy, so if you’d like to enter, head over to the podcast entry. There will be a Rafflecopter widget for you to drop your email into. This giveaway is open to US and Canada only, must be over 18 and ready to learn all the things, void where prohibited. By submitting an entry to the contest as set forth herein, each entrant does acknowledge and agree that, in the event such entrant is victorious, such entrant will perform a ceremony reasonably appropriate to such circumstance, including, without limitation, the Miposian Dance of Joy or all the dances from What the Fox Said.
We also have a discount code! Use code BSBT at BaylorPress.com, and you ’ll get 20% off the cover price and free shipping. Thank you to Dr. Ali, and to David and Savannah at Baylor Press for hooking us up.
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This week’s podcast is brought to you by Falling for Trouble by Sarah Title.
With her signature wry wit and humor, librarian turned author Sarah Title returns to delight readers with Falling for Trouble, the second installment in her Librarians in Love series. With starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, an Amazon editor’s pick and a glowing review from The Washington Post, this series is highly acclaimed and just plain fun. Falling for Trouble features a librarian hero with a penchant for running in very short running shorts, and a rocker heroine, who bond over music.
Liam Byrd loves Halikarnassus, New York. He loves its friendliness, its nosiness, the vibrant library at the center of it all. And now that Joanna Green is home, the whole town sizzles. A rebel like her stirs up excitement, action, desire—at least in Liam.
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Falling for Trouble by Sarah Title is available now wherever books are sold and on KensingtonBooks.com
Transcript
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[music]
Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to episode number 252 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. With me today is Dr. Kecia Ali, who is Professor of Religion at Boston University and the author of a new book, Human in Death: Morality and Mortality in J. D. Robb’s Novels. We are going to talk about what inspired her to write a book about the series, which is now forty-five-plus books in, and what she discovered with her multiple and attentive rereads of the entire series plus some key novels inside it. We talk about portrayals of ethics, family, friendship, race, women’s work, and, of course, violence, and we hear what she’s working on next and, of course, what she’s reading.
Now, if you are at all familiar with the In Death world, this part should not be a surprise: trigger warning for discussions of sexual assault, violence, abuse, and rape in the plot of the In Death books, like, all of them. I can’t pinpoint specifically where we talk about violence, ‘cause we kind of talk about it all the time in different ways. So if this is a series or a world that is not for you, this might not be a great episode to listen to. I want you to feel safe, so I’m sorry I can’t be more specific about when we talk about these things, ‘cause they come up a lot. If you ever read or heard about these books, that makes sense.
I also want to give a very special thank-you to Dr. Sara Ronis, who is Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at St. Mary’s University in Texas. She emailed me before this book came out to suggest Dr. Ali as a guest, and she was totally right! I learned so much from this interview; I cannot wait for you to hear it. So thank you both to Dr. Ali and to Dr. Ronis.
And more news! I have so much to say in this intro. I gave myself, like, nine minutes to get this in, ‘cause there’s so many things I have to tell you! If you are curious about human death – Human in Death, not human death; that’s a whole other thing – if you’re curious about Human in Death, Dr. Ali’s book, her publisher, Baylor Press, has been supremely awesome. First, we have a giveaway of one hardcover copy, so if you would like to enter, head on over to the podcast entry at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast. There will be a Rafflecopter widget inside the podcast entry for you to drop your email into. This giveaway is open to US and Canadian residents only – my apologies. You must be over eighteen and ready to learn all the things. Void where prohibited. By submitting an entry to the contest as set forth herein, each entrant does acknowledge and agree that in the event that such entrant is victorious, such entrant will perform a ceremony reasonably appropriate to such circumstance, including, without limitation, the Myposian dance of joy or all the dances from what the Fox said.
We also have a discount code! You can use code BSBT at baylorpress.com and you will get twenty percent off the cover priced and free shipping! So thank you to Dr. Ali and to David and Savannah at Baylor Press for hooking us up!
So if you’re working out and you’re walking the dogs and you’re dyeing wool or cleaning or occupied and you’re like, I want to, I want to enter! I want to find out more! No worries! All of the details are also in the podcast entry, so you can head over to smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast!
In addition to all this awesomeness, I would also like to tell you, we have more awesomeness! This podcast is being brought to you by Falling for Trouble by Sarah Title. The riot grrrl and the book worm: just the pair to get the whole town talking. With her signature wry wit and humor, librarian-turned-author Sarah Title returns to delight readers with Falling for Trouble, the second installment in her Librarians in Love series. With starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, an Amazon Editors’ Pick, and a glowing review from the Washington Post, this series is highly acclaimed and just plain fun. Falling for Trouble features a librarian hero with a penchant for running in very short running shorts and a rocker heroine who bond over music. When the library’s funding is threatened in favor of a local sports team, Joanna and Liam band together – heh-heh – to try and save the library that’s become so important to the community. Opposites attract as good-boy Liam and bad-girl Joanna just can’t help it when the sparks fly. Falling for Trouble by Sarah Title is available now wherever books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com.
I also want to tell you about two things! First, we have an iTunes page. It’s super-rad. iTunes.com/DBSA! If you’re an iUser, a user of iBooks, iTunes, iAllTheOtherThings, you can see the most recent episodes and some of the books we talked about, all conveniently linked inside the iBooks store.
And I also want to tell you about our Patreon campaign, ‘cause we are so close to the goal! I’m so excited! Oh, my gosh! We are close enough to my goal to start transcribing back episodes that I have started going through episodes one through five to get transcripts going. The podcast transcript for episode number two was posted this, this past weekend. I want to thank you if you’ve had a look, and if you are a podcast supporter, thank you so very much! You can have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches to see how close we are – we’re so close! – and if you’d like to support the show, thank you! And if that’s not an option, if you tell a friend, leave a review, subscribe, what is it I’m supposed to tell you to do? Like, everyone on YouTube says this: like, subscribe, and comment? Like, subscribe – like, subscribe, and review. I think that’s what I’m supposed to ask you for. Can you tell that this is not my, my strength here? Like, subscribe, and review to the podcast! No, that doesn’t make any sense. You can’t review to a podcast. Either way, if you are in some way telling people about the podcast or reviewing it or subscribing or telling people that you subscribed or going to the Patreon page, whatever you’re doing, if you’re listening, it’s awesome! Thank you! I am really bad at asking for things like this. Gosh, it’s embarrassing! So for all the things, thank you.
Our music, as always, is provided by Sassy Outwater. I will have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is and where you can buy these funky, funky tunes.
I will also have links to all of the books that we discuss in the podcast, and there are several, a number of them a little bit outside what we usually talk about, but truly sound fascinating, and I’ll also have links to some of the places that we discuss, including the Popular Culture Association conference, which has a romance track, if you’re interested in doing things like that, and links to the book Human in Death, which just came out a couple months ago.
So without any further delay, on with the podcast!
[music]
Dr. Kecia Ali: I’m Kecia Ali. I’m a Professor of Religion at Boston University, and I am a popular fiction junkie. I wrote Human in Death after reading the books and getting really interested and realizing I had something to say about them. It’s not at all my area of specialization; my other books are about Islam, women, gender, law, biography, but this, in some ways, is a reflection of the same kinds of questions that I ask in those other books about who’s a person, what’s a good life, how should we be in the world?
Sarah: So my first question was obviously, what inspired you to write about the series, because I don’t know if you’re aware, but this is a lot of books in this series.
Dr. Ali: [Laughs] I’m aware!
Sarah: Like, like, you could write about this one series and read this one series and still never run out of things to talk about or read.
Dr. Ali: Yeah. Absolutely, and, and I did read all the books and all the novellas, twice in fact. I read them once for fun and once again all the way through once I decided I was going to write this book.
Sarah: Wow. That’s quite a lot of reading. So what was the moment where you were like, okay, I, I’ve got to write about this?
Dr. Ali: Well, it sort of crept up on me. Actually, the first thing that I did, which was a kind of academic crossover from this book, was give a paper at the Popular Culture Association about mentoring practices in the novels, right? Because Eve Dallas –
Sarah: Oh!
Dr. Ali: – takes Peabody under her wing, and, and I have a sort of sideline in my professional life where I do some mentoring, and I write about professional development for women in my profession and, you know, host sessions at the big annual conference to talk about mentoring and to encourage certain kinds of contacts between senior scholars and junior scholars, and so I’m reading these books, and I’m starting to notice that Dallas is a really good boss and a really good mentor to the junior cops in her department. And, and so I proposed a conference paper, and then I thought, well, that’s all well and good, but there’s something more about women and work and the place of work in the lives of these figures, and then I realized, well, it’s really not just work, right, because you can’t separate out what’s going on in her work life from what’s going on in her personal life –
Sarah: Nooo.
Dr. Ali: – for bigger questions about, you know, violence in this universe to bigger questions about this universe’s notion of human perfection, human development, human community. And so, you know, gradually it became clear to me that this was a book.
Sarah: Yeah!
[Laughter]
Sarah: So you’ve read the series multiple times.
Dr. Ali: Yeah.
Sarah: I, I’m thinking that that is sort of like the, the romance reader equivalent of running an ultramarathon?
Dr. Ali: [Laughs]
Sarah: Like, that’s a lot!
Dr. Ali: It’s, I, I did the math, actually. I added up the pages for the editions of the books that I have, and it came to between fifteen and sixteen thousand pages.
Sarah: Good gravy. That’s some serious academic undertaking right there. Like, I mean, I know that scholarly work can take your entire lifetime, and you might never find the answer, but that is a substantial amount of pages. My next question was obviously, at least for me, was there anyone who looked at you and said or implied, why would you study that?
Dr. Ali: So this was really interesting: this book was kind of a secret. I didn’t talk about it with anyone while it was in progress until it was really almost finished, apart from the editor who published it, Carey Newman at Baylor, and I’d never done a book with him before. He and I had conversations about some of my other books, but they do a fair amount of publishing around religion and ethics and a fair amount of publishing around religion and popular culture, and this book sort of leaves religion out but, but does ethics and popular culture, and, and so I, you know, floated to him the idea that I had of doing a book about this and sent him some notes and, and, you know, with apologies for how embarrassingly rough they were, and he wrote back, and he said, yeah, it’s kind of a hot mess. You know, there’s a lot of really banal stuff in here, there’s lots of repetition, way too much extended quotation from the books, but you might actually have something!
Sarah: Oh, like that’s a bad thing! Too much quotation!
Dr. Ali: [Laughs] Well, I mean, when you’ve got fifteen thousand pages’ worth of source corpus, there’s a limit to how much you’re actually going to be able to do.
Sarah: It’s true. This is true.
Dr. Ali: So, yeah, it was kind of something I did on the sly! I didn’t even tell my husband about it until I had a complete first draft of the book.
Sarah: Oh, wow!
Dr. Ali: Yeah, he’d seen me with these novels, right, and I have these color-coded sticky flags; that’s how I organize the chapters?
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: And he’d say, what are you doing? And I’d say, oh, nothing! Nothing! No!
[Laughter]
Sarah: This is completely normal behavior. I don’t know what you’ve noticed here. This is, this is all very standard. I need to go to the office supply store; I need puce.
Dr. Ali: And I didn’t tell my colleagues about it, and, and then it was about to be published, and, and so then I told them.
Sarah: Well, yeah, that, that helps.
Dr. Ali: [Laughs] Yeah.
Sarah: So the way that you’ve structured the book, you look at intimacy, both emotional and physical, and then you look at friendship, vocation or work, violence – which, let’s be real, could’ve been, like, its own book about these books. [Laughs]
Dr. Ali: Yeah. Absolutely.
Sarah: And then the idea of perfection. And I, I’ve, I’ve, I personally found the chapters on friendship and vocation terribly fascinating, and you look at the way that friendship evolves in the novels. That’s one of the things that readers who, who like the series talk about as one of their favorite elements. What, what struck you most about the friendships between Eve’s groups and, and Roarke’s? ‘Cause there’s a little overlap, but not a whole lot.
Dr. Ali: There really isn’t a whole lot. I mean, one of the things that was so compelling to me about the novels is the way that they get into the complexities of human relationships and the ways that they, they acknowledge that being friends with someone is a really complicated endeavor, right, particularly for someone like Dallas, who is, to put it mildly, prickly as an individual. How can she make these contacts with people? How can she have enduring ties? What does it mean to show up for someone in ways that may not be all sweetness and light? What does it mean to meet them where they are, not where you’d like them to be? I mean, it’s really all about the possibility of relationship across difference, and, and of course that’s a compelling piece of her relationship with work as well.
Sarah: It is, and the, the, one of the things that I noticed was that after Roarke, both when I was reading your book and then thinking about the, the books – I have not read the whole series, ‘cause I have reached a point where I can’t read that much violence.
Dr. Ali: Right.
Sarah: I certainly can’t read that much – I, I like to say, no children in peril and no entrails in my romance, and there’s children in peril and entrails in all of these books, so they are, unfortunately, no longer for me, though I will recommend Naked in Death for anyone who would like to disappear into a rabbit hole for, like, two or three years?
Dr. Ali: Yeah, absolutely.
Sarah: In my own notice of reading the books, I noticed that after Roarke, Eve began to bend a little bit and make more friends, so that this fundamental intimacy on her part reached into her ability to make friends with other people. The, up until Roarke, the only person I remember being, like, in her apartment was her friend who bought her dinner in, like, the first chapter.
Dr. Ali: Right. Absolutely! Mavis, right?
Sarah: Yes, thank you, Mavis.
Dr. Ali: It’s, it’s only Mavis and, and sort of Feeney, who’s not really exactly a friend –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: – but they are former partners, and they spend time outside of work, and, and, you know, Dallas is just closed off, and Mavis is only a friend because she just won’t leave Eve alone.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Ali: It’s her tenacity and persistence that makes it possible for them to be friends, and with this relationship with Roarke, you see the opening up to allow people to get a little closer. And part of why I think that’s really wonderful that Robb does this is, so often what you see in, in real life, and also sometimes in books with romances, is that you get kind of a narrowing of focus, right. All the emotion, all the effort, all the time becomes invested in this primary intimate partnership, and other folks become window dressing maybe, and, and what we see here, actually, in In Death is that it’s the relationship with Roarke that actually provides this foundation for Dallas to open up to these other folks, many of whom were already in her life in one way or another. Not Trina, but other people – [laughs] –
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Ali: – in her life. And, and to actually let them in a little bit.
Sarah: And it’s, it’s an interesting contrast to what she does professionally, because when you have a dead body and you have to figure out how the body got dead, you look at the relationships that that person had had until their death. You look at that network –
Dr. Ali: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: – and without Roarke and without Mavis, her network is, like, half a person? Like, barely, many fundamental network relationships, and then by the, I think we’re at forty, forty-five now? Forty-six?
Dr. Ali: Right.
Sarah: She has a, a very large extended network of found family, for lack of a better term.
Dr. Ali: Yeah, I think found family is actually a really terrific term, and that’s a commonality in Robb’s work and, and the novels that she publishes under the name Roberts, right?
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Ali: That, that, sometimes it’s extended family, biological family, or adoptive family, and, and sometimes it’s really found family comprised of neighbors, of friends, of colleagues, and one of the ways that this network is kept together in the In Death series is the connections that don’t just rely on Dallas, right. So these people, this cluster of women who are her friends are also friends with each other. Right, she becomes the pivot in some ways, but Peabody and Mavis continue to have a relationship even when Dallas isn’t immediately in the picture.
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Ali: And that’s a, a really interesting and, I think, important way of thinking about relationships, right, that they’re not just all spokes radiating out from this primary wheel, but rather that, that there are independent kinds of connections and layers.
Sarah: And there’s a, an almost political sense of interdependence as well in, in the way that Robb has set up the society. I remember being very struck, and I – when did Naked in Death come out?
Dr. Ali: 1995.
Sarah: 1995, so I would have probably discovered it soon afterward, which means that I was a little bit over twenty, and I remember being struck by the entire idea of having a, a salary, a, a stipend for women who are raising children.
Dr. Ali: Yeah, yeah.
Sarah: And that, you know, one of the, one of the problems in a future book is that someone wants to take away that stipend and make it this unpaid labor, which is the next thing I want to talk to you about. The idea of work and calling and vocation and job are all different concepts in this book, but even then they rely on that network of people who are going to support and, and allow other people to be codependent on them in various ways.
Dr. Ali: Yeah. You know, it’s very interesting, because one of the things, as I say in the book, that Robb spends almost no time on is formal politics.
Sarah: Yes!
Dr. Ali: You know, politicians, like, individual bad actors who show up in, in the first book and then in one of the recent books, Brotherhood in Death, right –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: Senators are bad guys! [Laughs]
Sarah: Right?
Dr. Ali: Given where we are as a country in this moment, that seems totally plausible to me, right, that, that, you know, rich, white-guy senators are trying to do bad things to people, particularly women. And yet, for the most part, Robb is not, and Dallas is not, and Roarke is not particularly invested in electoral politics of any real kind, but the paid stipend for stay-home parents, and they’re very clear, the books, that it’s not just women, right –
Sarah: Yes, yes.
Dr. Ali: – stay-home parent of any gender, that’s a really political choice, and as radical in 2017 as it was in 1995, maybe even more so.
Sarah: [Laughs] The, one of my two favorite quotes from your book addresses the idea of the – so, I, I – let me back up a second. So one of the things that we talk a lot about on the site lately is female rage and the centering and primacy of portrayals of female rage that are coming out of romance fiction. It used to be mostly paranormal, and it was often dudes, but now it is female rage, and it is unfettered, unabashed, unapologetic female rage. There’s a lot of rage in these books from 1995 all the way till now –
Dr. Ali: Yeah.
Sarah: – but it’s not just consistently Eve or Roarke; it’s, sometimes the idea of injustice makes the whole community within the book subject to that rage.
Dr. Ali: Absolutely! Absolutely. Brotherhood in Death, which I talk about only a little bit in the book – it came out as I was finishing the final draft – has this group of privileged, powerful men who meet at Yale, I think, you know, five decades before, and kind of get together every year to gang rape a young woman –
Sarah: As you do.
Dr. Ali: – on a day, they consider it this – yeah – this tradition, right.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: You know, and it’s just sex, and it’s just tradition, and they’re friends, right. This is the antidote or the, the antithesis of the kind of powerful female friendship that’s talked about in the books and even Roarke’s much less developed notion of male friendship and male bonding.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: It’s these toxic male friendships that are built on misogyny, right, that cement their partnership through the use of other individuals treated as ends rather than means. And – I don’t remember exactly where I was going; oh, I remember where I was going with this!
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Ali: So these murderers in the book are actually these women, former victims, who’ve come together as vigilantes to target this group of men, and so Dallas’s job is to find and stop the murderers, but really, you know, even though she makes the case that the important thing is, you know, these women should have sort of gone through channels, right, and she cannot condone them murdering these men –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: – nonetheless, really the ones who come off absolutely the worst in the book are these men themselves, right, and so even though they’re not the villains in the sense that they’re not the ones Dallas has to catch, they really are the bad guys, and, and the ultimate crime is their misogyny, and society is culpable for having let them get away with it for so long.
Sarah: That was one of the most interesting points that you made in, in your book in, specifically that, when, when you wrote, “In critiquing inherited wealth and snobbery, In Death implicitly critiques white privilege as it intersects male and class privilege.” My, hands down my favorite I-could-cross-stitch-this-line from your book is –
Dr. Ali: [Laughs] Please do!
Sarah: – “In the series’ first and most recent installments, wealthy, educated, privileged white men, rich and politically connected, commit sexual crimes, persistently harm women, and expect their privilege to protect them. It doesn’t.” YES! Awesome! Yeah, like, I would cross-stitch the hell out of that, because it, she really, the, the world – I, I think it’s fascinating when you look at what an author is doing but also what the world that has been created is doing, ‘cause the books themselves do things, and I, and it’s interesting to look at what is the work that they’re doing. You’re, you’re totally right; the entire power structure is questioning white male class privilege, which is sort of startling when you turn the page and then start looking at the portrayal of race, which is very different.
Dr. Ali: You know, it is, and it, it’s so interesting. There’s a kind of obliviousness around white womanhood in particular in these novels, and as a white woman reading them and as a white woman thinking more about race in the last few years than I have in quite a while, it was really, really striking to me, the ways in which whiteness tends to go unspoken in the novels and the ways in which this group of friends that Dallas surrounds herself with, you know, it’s all white women, and it’s really remarkable that as different as they are in all of these ways in terms of age, in terms of background, in terms of profession, in terms of fashion sense –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Ali: – in terms of feelings about children, right, Nadine, Mavis, Dr. Mira, Trina, right, all of these women are white, and nobody, and they’re all heterosexual, or at least they’re only shown partnered with men in the series, that it never comes up. It never comes up, and it’s so, so striking.
Sarah: Especially as you move through looking at the books as the, as they came out in 1995 all the way through now, twenty-two years later, that, the absence of politics and the absence of any kind of interrogation or even examination of race beyond the portrayals that you talk about in the book is, is really startling, and because I don’t keep up with the series, when I started reading it I, I had this moment where I had to, like, I usually read on the treadmill, and I had to step off onto the sidebars and be like, holy crap! Holy crap!
Dr. Ali: [Laughs]
Sarah: Oh, my goodness, how did I not notice? Like, cause I, like you said, as the reader, you’re culpable in not noticing what isn’t explicitly said.
Dr. Ali: Right, and I mean, I, I want to suggest that, that as white readers –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: – many of us are culpable for that. I doubt that Robb’s readers of color have failed to notice, right?
Sarah: Oh, no.
Dr. Ali: I think, you know, when, when an author is white and presumes the readers are white, very often there’s just a kind of unwillingness to – not unwillingness even – a just, kind of, an ability to let it pass unspoken without thinking through it, and – so I’ll say two things: one is that I do think Robb is thinking about race.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: But I don’t think she’s thinking about white womanhood, right, in, in particular. Because many of her male characters are men of color. Not the primary one, you know, not Roarke –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: – not Summerset, but the medical examiner, both of her bosses, right, both the commander and the chief, and she thinks about race a lot in the sense that this world that she constructs, New York in the middle of the twenty-first century, has mixed race individuals mentioned constantly –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: – sometimes with further specification, sometimes without. It’s when you get to that intimate sphere of friendship that women of color just don’t appear, or occasionally they, they show up near the fringe, right.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: So there’s a new character who was introduced a couple of books back who identifies herself as being part Black and part Asian, and she’s not cracked Eve’s inner circle, right, and maybe she will. I’d love to see that, but it, it’s really interesting that she doesn’t when other women, including women with whom Dallas starts off having antagonistic relationships, right, like Dr. Louise, right, end up incorporated into that circle fairly quickly.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. They do.
Dr. Ali: Yeah. So that, that’s point one about race, and then there was something else I was going to say, but – oh! Yeah, the other thing that I was going to say about race is that I think one of the things that struck me most about these novels is the way that, that they tend to have a more compelling ethical sensibility the more they explicitly examine whatever the issue or the question. So on the question of white women’s friendships, that’s not something that particularly gets examined, and it, and it ends up, you know, not, to my mind, being a particularly thoughtful take on the issue, whereas the question of women’s different attitudes around clothing, women’s different attitudes around work, women’s different attitudes around childbearing, these things get a little more attention; they’re more richly imagined.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: There are a variety of different possibilities brought together, and hence, I think, ultimately they’re, they’re more richly thought through. And I, I think the other place where Robb really could do better is around the question of disability. Right, so there’s –
Sarah: Yes, that is one of my questions for you. Please say all the words.
Dr. Ali: [Laughs] I’ll say a few of the words.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Ali: So, so one of the things that’s so, so striking if you compare this futuristic universe to other futuristic universes, whether utopian, dystopian – I sometimes talk about these books as quasi-dystopian. I don’t think they’re really dystopian, but nor do I think that, that they are presenting a kind of normal vision of the future. I think there is a strong strand of what might have really gone wrong and, and couldn’t quite be put right again. But one of the things that rarely comes up, and it comes up a little bit in Conspiracy and a little bit in Origin, both of which I talk about in that chapter, is this notion – and a couple of other places – this notion of what is a sort of adequate human body to be engaging the world through?
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: And this world just doesn’t really imagine anything other than perpetual able-bodiedness or decrepitude and death. So for all these technological innovations, you know, there are artificial limbs and artificial eyes and so forth that get mentioned briefly in passing, but there’s no technology built with access in mind, right. The scanners are all at eye level of someone standing up. There’s no access, nothing that would compensate for not being able to read, not being able to hear, not being able to see, and anytime a temporary disability arises, so, you know, McNab gets hit by laser fire and is temporarily using a wheelchair, it’s this catastrophe, right, that he worries that he’ll be paralyzed forever, and, you know, Dallas is very worried because he might have to, you know, be stuck in a chair, but at other times you see e-geeks, right –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: – people who are primarily working on computers doing their police work through that, sitting down on chairs, moving back and forth on stools by counters. It’s not like he couldn’t do the work –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: – from a chair; it’s that the notion is hugely frightening, and again, this is something where I think it, it’s just a question of not really having thought about it, because when Dallas does think about cloning and the quest for perfection, you know, she and Peabody do engage in this kind of extended exchange about who decides when something is perfect enough and what constitutes a defect. But where it’s not thought through, it becomes a little trickier.
Sarah: And it’s, it’s, it’s a very strange sort of exclusion in this future that includes so much advancement in terms of recognizing how people live.
Dr. Ali: It’s strange exclusion, except it’s really not if you think about the ways that most American conversations about disability take place.
Sarah: Oh, this is very true.
Dr. Ali: Right? Alison Kafer has a really wonderful book called Feminist Queer Crip in which she talks about –
Sarah: I was going to say, well, what’s that book about?
Dr. Ali: [Laughs] I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s about all the things, right. It’s about the intersections of queer identity, of feminist perspectives, and about disability and the ways in which disability is constructed, not just in gendered ways, but about a kind of social model of disability, right, where disability isn’t about individual people falling short and needing to seek medical intervention or cure, but rather that the obstacles in place are there largely because, you know, people don’t think expansively about access.
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Ali: I, I had this put to me in a wonderful way by someone recently, and she said, you know, when we talk about access technologies and only use that for technologies that enable people that we conceptualize as living with disabilities to access certain kinds of services, we forget that we all need certain kinds of services, so we talk about ramps as accessibility technologies but think of stairs as just, well, what you do.
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Ali: You know, we’ll say, well, why can’t they whatever-whatever. It’s like, well, you know, you want stairs; you don’t want to haul yourself up the side of a building and, you know, over the window ledge, right?
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Ali: Or, you know, you say, well, posting certain kinds of handouts that will be accessible to people with screen readers, that’s an accessibility technology, but what about the fact that you have to pay the light bill so people who are sighted can see in the classroom, right?
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Ali: These are all kinds of resources that are necessary. Anyway, that, that just goes to say that I think part of the reason Robb hasn’t robustly imagined accessibility in this universe is that we as Americans haven’t very robustly imagined –
Sarah: No.
Dr. Ali: – accessibility for the most part.
Sarah: This past week I was at a Five Guys, and I noticed that the soda machine is, has, like, a touch screen. You can get every possible soda in the universe, which makes this a fantastic bribe for young human beings, should you need one.
Dr. Ali: [Laughs]
Sarah: But there’s a button to make it accessible when the screen is too high, and then next to that was the iced tea dispenser, but the controls for it were on top, and there was a separate panel for access that was at counter height, and I was like, my Five Guys is more accessible than, like, sixty percent of the doctors’ offices I’ve been to in the last month. That’s very strange.
Dr. Ali: Yeah, yeah. It is. Well, you know, maybe Five Guys will lead the world – [laughs] –
Sarah: So that’s a different dystopia. That would be a very different, beefy delicious dystopia, but bad for people with peanut allergies, ‘cause that giant, that place is, like, one giant peanut. [Laughs]
Dr. Ali: Okay. All right. Well. And we haven’t even touched on, like, food and soy and real food in the In Death universe, right, ‘cause that’s like a –
Sarah: Oh, my gosh! Well, the thing that I, I’m fascinated by as, in addition, when you were looking at how race is examined and called out in specific characters and then not, the default is whiteness –
Dr. Ali: Right.
Sarah: – all of this world exists after the Urban Wars.
Dr. Ali: Yeah.
Sarah: Have, have we talked at all about the Urban Wars? Like, urban is coded for a whole lot of things here. What kind of, what kind of world? Is there, like, a handbook? Was there a guide to this world? Like, I’m waiting for the Urban Wars history book to show up in the books?
Dr. Ali: Right, it’s like Quidditch Through the Ages, right? You need it!
[Laughter]
Sarah: Yes! This, this has a very important role in –
[Laughter]
Sarah: Urban Wars. A little broom on the cover.
Dr. Ali: Yeah.
Sarah: Like, there’s no – this massive pivotal event happened, and it has –
Dr. Ali: Right about now, actually, right? I mean, the middle of the –
Sarah: Right!
Dr. Ali: – [laughs] – second decade of the twenty-first century, which is a little creepy, a little freaky, a little scary.
Sarah: I’m telling you, she’s hiding lottery numbers in these books. She’s writing them from the future and just sending them on back. But there’s, there’s no examination of what that was and what, what those terms mean.
Dr. Ali: Right. Yeah, so, so that’s true. I mean, one of the things that you get is urban is, of course, coded in particular ways, and, and Crack as a character, of course, is hugely important. Even if he doesn’t get a lot of page time, he becomes important in conceptualizing race, in thinking about gender, in thinking about the intersections of the professional and the personal and the way that those collide in Dallas’s world. But of course, there’s also the urban-ness. The Urban Wars don’t really seem in this imagining to have actually had anything to do with class or race, except insofar as when we see the parts of New York that never really recovered from the wars, of course they’re the poor parts, right.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: Of course the slapdash construction that went up in the wake of the war and has never actually been really properly rebuilt, you know, these are apartments that poor folks live in. There’s clearly some kind of allusion to dysfunctional public housing and in general, again, a kind of – I don’t want to quite call it subterranean; well, actually, let’s call it subterranean, ‘cause there’s also the whole underground – a kind of subterranean critique of the class structure.
Sarah: Yes. Yes, that’s definitely true. And you mentioned gender a minute ago. I did want to ask you about that, because there are a lot of ways in which gender expectations are overtly switched. Eve is the one who struggles with emotional vulnerability, whereas for the most part Roarke is like, oh, sure, feelings? Okay! No problem!
Dr. Ali: Yes, yes.
Sarah: And then there’re others in which Eve consistently rejects femininity as a weakness.
Dr. Ali: Yes.
Sarah: Do you see a changing awareness in the characters as to how they respond to or react to gender? Because there’s also that, a very visible and enforced inside the text binary.
Dr. Ali: Yeah. So, so there is a real binary, and I think that one of the things that’s most striking if you read one of the books from the early ‘90s and you read one of the books, you know, from last year is, is that overt aggressive masculinity as part of Roarke’s character in his engagement with Dallas has diminished in some kinds of ways?
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: Right, so, so the aggressive, controlling, dominant courtship narrative has sort of faded, but some of the things that Dallas was really anxious about and I think Robb is sort of anxious about in the ‘90s about, you know, what does it mean if Roarke picks her up and carries her, which is a thing in Roberts’ novels too, right? I mean, it’s there in, I don’t know, seventy-five percent of – [laughs]
Sarah: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Ali: In the ‘80s and the ‘90s, right, the women are like, no, this is a problem for gender politics reasons, right –
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Ali: – and, and so in the ‘90s, that, that’s kind of an issue. Today, it’s like, it’s not a problem, right, because we’ve sort of won that battle; we don’t have to be aggressively fighting it. One of the things that, that I was most struck by in reading the novels is, on the one hand, Eve’s rejection of dominant modes of feminine self-presentation, of feminine emotionality, of fertility and childbearing as sort of the be-all, end-all, necessary teleology of women’s existence, and at the same time, how Robb manages not to make those things be a war that women fight each other about, right.
Sarah: Yes! That’s definitely the case.
Dr. Ali: So that Dallas can be kind of a prude, and she can also say about sex workers, well, you know, she’s got this job, this is the job she likes, good on her! Right, this is how she wants to organize her life. Fabulous! And she can have friends who have children and adore them, who wear lipstick, who wear high heels, and yeah, she’s going to be a little derisive about those heels, right –
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Ali: – particularly when it means that Peabody can’t keep up very well in a chase, but it doesn’t become woman against woman on the basis of those issues, and, and that’s smart, because I think that so often women get convinced to fight other women about these things, as opposed to, you know, joining up to smash the patriarchy –
Sarah: Yep! Totally true.
Dr. Ali: – some of us in high heels and some of us in combat boots, and, and I think that that’s really an achievement of the series when it comes to those questions about what does it mean to be a woman, how, how can one be a woman, how should one be a woman?
Sarah: It’s, it’s definitely something that I notice now, and I’ve said a couple of times that, you know, a few years ago, I could not have told you what cisgendered meant?
Dr. Ali: Right.
Sarah: And I was on Twitter, and I learned a whole hell of a lot over the past, you know, six or seven years about, about gender and decolonizing stories and things like that, and so it’s very interesting to see this, this very strong binary definition –
Dr. Ali: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: – still being explored. There’s not a lot of gender fluidity portrayed at all.
Dr. Ali: No, there really isn’t, and thank you for coming back to that. I lost, lost track of this piece of the question. I mean, in the 1990s books, right, it, it’s not so surprising that –
Sarah: No, not at all.
Dr. Ali: – that you get the kind of transvestite or transsexual who shows up just a couple of times in the books and is sort of a figure of either amusement or is kind of this, you know, isn’t New York grand, right? You know, so, so this is just part of what New York is like as a place.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: But this notion that, that trans individuals or folks who don’t comfortably fit into a binary, who are genderqueer, would show up in these novels is really just, it, it’s just not part of the universe, at least not yet, you know. Maybe books that are written going forward will have that. What you do have in the books and what was really, if not revolutionary, certainly unusual in the mid ‘90s is you have same-sex partnership, that you have gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals. None of them, mind you, in Eve’s inner circle, right. There’s no one who, that we know of, who identifies as gay or as lesbian or as bisexual in those characters who show up very frequently, but policy-wise and just in terms of the slice of the population that Eve interacts with professionally, same-sex relationships are just part of the story, right –
Sarah: It is there.
Dr. Ali: – it is part of the imagined world. And, and this is really interesting, right? So, imagining sixty years into the future, Robb posits a universe where same-sex partnerships are just a humdrum fact of life.
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Ali: In 2017, this is not amazing. In 1995, this was pretty fricking unusual!
Sarah: Very unusual. As well as licensed sexual companions?
Dr. Ali: Yes, exactly! Exactly.
Sarah: Licensed and – there’s a word I’m looking for that, for, there – sex work is a, is a vocation treated like any other vocation in that world.
Dr. Ali: It is, it is, and, and in some ways, that’s also framed in ways, you know, for 1995, for mainstream America, this is a very progressive and different kind of picture. You know, today, those involved in sex work activism would probably say, you know, what she’s talking about is not legalization or decriminalization but, but legalization and regulation, and the ways in which it gets regulated and cops can, you know, use expired licenses against folks, you know, that, that’s maybe not the model to be striving for, but the fact that it shows up that way twenty years ago is really something.
Sarah: It really is. Are you going to read, I mean, did you read Echoes in Death that, when it came out in February? Are you going to read the next one in September? Are you going to keep up with the series, or do you need a little break after –
Dr. Ali: Oh, oh, yeah! I, I –
Sarah: – taking such a deep dive?
Dr. Ali: [Laughs] I have kept up with the series. I, I’ve read Echoes in Death, I’ve read Apprentice in Death, and let me tell you, I felt really validated, and I don’t remember which of those two books it was in, but, you know, I said in the book somewhere, well, you know, some places it says Crack is a bouncer and other places it says he’s an owner; we don’t really quite know exactly what he is, you know, so we’ll just call him sort of bouncer/owner, and in one of those books, Robb talks about him as a, the club bouncer/owner, and I –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Ali: And, you know, I read Apprentice in Death, and, and so I’m testing my hypotheses from this book in the new editions that come out, and in, and I talk about Roarke and Summerset having a kind of complicated sort of quasi-filial/paternal relationship, and the interactions that they have in Apprentice in Death at the scene of the second one of those mass shootings is actually exactly like that, right.
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Ali: It very much comes to the fore that they have this familial kind of bond, and I thought, oh, yeah, I did get that right!
Sarah: [Laughs] That was one of my questions actually: where do you think that the series is going to go in terms of the areas that you examined, or, and if you don’t think it’s going to go in that direction, what would you like to see?
Dr. Ali: Well, you know, I think it’s going to continue really on its trajectory of exploring these relationships, exploring these questions of power, exploring these questions of violence, of systemic corruption. What would I like to see? I guess I would like to see Robb more explicitly tackling some of these issues around race, some of these issues around sexual orientation and gender identity, but I think, you know, it really is a, a pretty richly imagined world, and there is room to have the characters think differently about disability, to raise those issues again with a new case. I mean, this is what’s so striking: every book is a fresh chance to take some of these themes, filter them through the prism of these powerful relationships and these worldbuilding assumptions, and tell a new story, and a story that allows for growth and change. I mean, that’s one of the things that we’ve seen over, you know, it’s roughly three years in the series timeline, twenty-two years in the publication timeline –
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Ali: – that these are characters capable of change and growth and development in all kinds of surprising directions, and so I, I don’t think it’s static; I don’t think it’s just plug a case in and, you know, spit out whatever it says. I, I think there’s, there’s room for exciting things to happen.
Sarah: Well, the series wouldn’t have much of a readership if, if the world and the characters did not continue to evolve and grow and change.
Dr. Ali: Right. Right!
Sarah: Like, that has to happen.
Dr. Ali: Yeah! Yeah.
Sarah: When you were reading all fifteen to sixteen thousand pages –
Dr. Ali: [Laughs] Yes?
Sarah: – did you happen to notice any quirks or habits or patterns outside of the ones that you addressed in your book? I noticed, for example, when you were writing about work and vocation that everyone’s damn good. [Laughs]
Dr. Ali: Yeah, everyone is damn good. Everyone is damn good! You know, I mean, that’s the fantasy, right?
Sarah: Yep!
Dr. Ali: You can surround yourself with competent people who are satisfied in the work that they do –
Sarah: Yep!
Dr. Ali: – and because they like it and because they’re good at it, good work gets done! So, you know, hey, look, if that’s the fantasy, I could totally live with that just continuing! [Laughs]
Sarah: I am totally fine with that.
Dr. Ali: Yeah, and you know, are there some writing things, some syntactic patterns that Robb uses and reuses? Absolutely!
Sarah: Oh, yeah, triple infinitive, right?
Dr. Ali: [Laughs] Yes, absolutely! One of the things that, that people sometimes sort of ponder about Roberts online, oh, she can’t possibly write all those books herself, right?
Sarah: Oh, no, she does! [Laughs]
Dr. Ali: She’s so prolific! If you read them, right, if you start in the early ‘80s and, and you just, you know, every decade you read a handful of books, you see it’s very clearly her. Right, ‘cause they’re –
Sarah: Oh, it’s absolutely not anyone else.
Dr. Ali: There are speech patterns, right. It, it’s so clearly a kind of coherent imagination. That doesn’t mean they’re all the same; the characters are actually quite different in lots of kind of ways, but the, the guiding preoccupations are fairly similar –
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Ali: – across this body of work.
Sarah: I’ve always found it fascinating that you can see pieces of other characters in earlier books? Like, I think that the hero of Born in Fire is a sort of prototype of Roarke.
Dr. Ali: Yes, a little bit. A little.
Sarah: And – yes. There’s, like, a, there’re pieces of him in there, and then Brianna, who’s the heroine of the second one, Born in Ice, there’s a lot of her character in Siobhan when they go to Ireland, the idea that keeping a home and keeping an inn and making a home welcoming for even strangers is a passion and is a vocation, and I love seeing those pieces show up, so whenever someone’s like, oh, no, it couldn’t possibly be her, oh, no, it’s totally her! Trust me!
[Laughter]
Sarah: Trust me, I’ve read a crapton of these, and there’s no mistaking it. [Laughs]
Dr. Ali: Absolutely! Absolutely, and, and one of the things that’s really interesting is the way that some of the character traits get combined in new kinds of ways –
Sarah: Yes!
Dr. Ali: – right. And it’s, it’s just so striking that there are character types who get plopped down in new places, but then because they’re in new places in different relationship configurations, you see new facets of their personalities, right, that, that come to fruition.
Sarah: Yep. And, and different stresses turn them into different characters throughout the course of the novel.
Dr. Ali: Which is, of course, what happens to all of us in our lives, right.
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Ali: I mean, we are in large part who we are because of the people in our lives and the events in our lives.
Sarah: Yes. I did a, I did an interview with some authors who wrote an anthology called Sight Unseen – that episode’s actually going to come out this week – and the, the anthology is stories that, that, none of the stories are attributed to the authors, so you know who’s included, but you don’t know who wrote, who wrote what.
Dr. Ali: Oh, wow.
Sarah: And it’s experimenting with the idea that you expect from Sherry Thomas this; can you identify Sherry Thomas’s writing in this book, or Meredith Duran –
Dr. Ali: Uh-huh.
Sarah: – or Emma Barry, and so while we were having a conversation, we ended up talking about internal conflict and external conflict and that external conflict, things happening to you, doesn’t always, in, in a novel, mean that things change of you, the, the things inside of you –
Dr. Ali: Yeah, yeah.
Sarah: – who you are change. The thing about the, the In Death books and all of her romances is that the, the characters undergo a fundamental change from book to book and story to story. There’s a –
Dr. Ali: Yes.
Sarah: – there’re issues that carry forward, and they evolve as people.
Dr. Ali: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, and, and of course, you know, so much of what Roberts does writing as Roberts is series fiction. Not everything, right.
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Ali: So there are standalone romantic suspense, romantic thriller kinds of books –
Sarah: Yep!
Dr. Ali: – but so much of the straight romance is in series that, that sometimes are just connected stories but sometimes are quest stories, right. So if you think about, you know, I, what’s even a good one. I mean, the Gallaghers of Ardmore is more, there are just a couple of stories, but then the, the most recent, Island of Glass, that trilogy, right, there’s a quest, and so you have not just three couples that come together, but you get a unit forged over the course of this series –
Sarah: Yep!
Dr. Ali: – that, you know, results in, of course, defeating supernatural evil –
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Ali: – but also results in a real change in each of the characters by virtue of having participated in this communal quest.
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Ali: And in the In Death series, right, the fact that it is a series and ongoing, it’s episodic, given the procedural format, but there’s also this kind of much longer arc of a building of a community that is engaged, not in, in quite the same kind of quest, right, because it’s not like you defeat supernatural evil in the city of New York and you just keep on going. It, it’s this much more mundane, but also really, really necessary kind of quest, and I think in some ways this is the difference between the romance books and the In Death series, which has romance but doesn’t have the structure of a romance, right, just, just the first three books that have that romance arc, right –
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Ali: – in, in Pam Regis’s sense of, you know, the eight essential elements, but it’s partly because you can’t resolve it, right. I mean, that’s part of, of this world; that’s part of Dallas’s mindset. That’s part of what Robb is saying. Unfortunately, it’s, it, this isn’t a battle you can win, but nor is it a battle you can stop fighting.
Sarah: No.
Dr. Ali: And, and so those two things really exist in tension.
Sarah: So, the one question I always ask my guests is if they have any books that they’d like to recommend. Now, I know you’re on summer break –
Dr. Ali: [Laughs]
Sarah: – so I imagine –
Dr. Ali: So many books to recommend!
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Ali: So many books to recommend! [Laughs]
Sarah: So what books would you like to recommend to, to listeners?
Dr. Ali: So, one of the best books that I read in the last year is Carol Anderson’s White Rage. It just won National Book Critics Circle award. I think – now my mind’s going blank.
Sarah: Oh, that always happens; don’t worry.
Dr. Ali: Yeah –
[Laughter]
Dr. Ali: They should read my book of course.
Sarah: Of course. That’ll be linked, fear not!
Dr. Ali: Yeah, yeah. I’m also reading right now Stéphane Gerson’s book Disaster Falls, which is a memoir about child loss, and it, it recounts an accident and family in the aftermath. It’s really terrific. Art Bird Life [Birds Art Life] by Kyo – I’m not going to remember the last name, but you can find it, because the Google [Maclear, in fact]. And, or I’ll send a link.
Sarah: No, don’t worry, I got it.
Dr. Ali: Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, is one I’ve just started, so, but I, I do recommend it. I, I’ve only read the introduction and a little bit of the first chapter, but it looks like it’s going to be terrific. It’s about networked protest, both the strength and also the fragility of that. I read Roxane Gay’s Difficult Women earlier this summer, and it was astonishingly good. I would highly recommend that to everyone. And, you know, I think everybody should read Nora Roberts’ Chesapeake Bay series.
Sarah: I do love that series.
Dr. Ali: I think that’s my favorite of the Roberts books.
Sarah: That was my other question: do you have a favorite, outside of the In Death books?
Dr. Ali: I really like the Chesapeake Bay series and, and the Born In series that you recommended.
Sarah: I love those.
Dr. Ali: I think those are really terrific. I actually reread those a few weeks ago because I’m very interested in what she does with creative careers and, and the ways in which she thinks about creative work and creative practice.
Sarah: And, and that, that creative practice as a job does not negate the existence of it as a passion, that when you make money for your art, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Dr. Ali: Just like when you make money for caring for your children at home! There’s nothing wrong –
Sarah: Exactly.
Dr. Ali: – with that, right. You know, this idea that money is somehow corrupting is –
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Ali: – is not – [laughs] – is not –
Sarah: No, it’s actually privilege and sexual violence that are corrupting. [Laughs]
Dr. Ali: Yeah, exactly! Exactly. Well, I, I will tell you one of the questions that I’ve been asked when I’ve done other podcasts, and, and you can choose whether or not to share this –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Ali: – with listeners is, what are you working on now? And I’ll tell you that I’m working on two things. One of the things is a book about women and Muslim traditions, a textbook for the undergraduate classroom, and I’ve got a draft of it into the publisher and some comments back, so I’m working on revisions to that, but the other thing that I’m working on is a book about Roberts’ romances.
Sarah: Oh, yay!
Dr. Ali: And, you know, writing Human in Death, reading all of the In Death books, and thinking about them left me with the kinds of questions about Nora Roberts’ work in romance that can really only be answered by writing about them, and –
Sarah: And reading all of them, you poor, poor thing.
Dr. Ali: Oh, I know! [Laughs] You know, this is not fifteen thousand pages; this is, like, sixty thousand pages.
Sarah: Oh, just a few pages, yeah. And, you know, while we were recording, I’m pretty sure she finished another book.
Dr. Ali: [Laughs] I think I’m going to have to cap it at, like, the end of 2016, which –
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Ali: Just, you know, thirty-five years’ worth of books, so that’s kind of –
Sarah: You can call it Sisyphus. Sisyphus Reads Romance: An Analysis of Nora Roberts’ Entire Oeuvre.
[Laughter]
Dr. Ali: Yeah, I, I think instead of, you know, tracking pages, I’ll have to count it just in linear shelf feet, right?
Sarah: Yes! Metric and imperial!
Dr. Ali: Get out my tape measure!
[Laughter]
[music]
Sarah: And that is all for this week’s episode. I want to thank Dr. Ali for taking the time to talk to me about her research and also to Dr. Ronis for suggesting her as a guest. This was so much fun. I sometimes worry that I nerd out a little too hard in certain topics of interviews, and then I hear from you guys, and you’re like, no, that was amazing! Do more of it! So I hope this was one of those episodes that you found fascinating, as I did.
And I want to reiterate, because the people at Baylor publishing, specifically David and Susanna, or Savannah, excuse me, are awesome, you have an opportunity to win a copy of the book at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast in the podcast show notes for this entry. There’ll be a Rafflecopter you can enter to win a copy of Human in Death. Open to US and Canadian residents only, must be over eighteen and ready to learn, void where prohibited, and disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer.
And if you’re thinking, I would really like to order this book, I think my library needs this book, I think I need this book, you can go to Baylor Press, baylorpress.com, and use code BSBT, and you get twenty percent off the cover price plus free shipping. Thank you again to David and Savannah and to Dr. Ali for hooking us up!
Now, three things I always have to tell you about:
First of all! This podcast was brought to you by Falling for Trouble by Sarah Title. With her signature wry wit and humor, librarian-turned-author Sarah Title is returning to delight readers with Falling for Trouble, the second book in her Librarians in Love series. This book has starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, it’s an Amazon Editors’ Pick, and it has a glowing review from the Washington Post. It is highly acclaimed, and it is just plain fun! Falling for Trouble features a librarian hero with a penchant for running in very short running shorts and a rocker heroine, and they bond over music. When the library’s funding is threatened in favor of a local sports team, Joanna and Liam have to team up to try to save the library that’s become so important to the community. Opposites attract as good-boy Liam and bad-girl Joanna just can’t help when sparks fly. Falling for Trouble by Sarah Title is on sale now wherever books are sold and on kensingtonbooks.com.
If you have had a look at our Patreon page or you’ve become a podcast patron, thank you so much. Patreon.com/SmartBitches has all of the information. We are so close to the goal for helping me commission transcripts for the seventy or so episodes that don’t have one yet. I have already started by commissioning a transcript for podcast number two. Thank you, thank you, thank you for having a look, for subscribing, for reviewing, for sharing, for telling a friend, and most of all for listening. It’s really awesome that you hang out with me each week.
Every week we have music courtesy of Sassy Outwater, who is awesome. You can find her and say thank you on Twitter @SassyOutwater. This is Caravan Palace. This track is called “Maniac.” They have a two-album set featuring Caravan Palace and Panic, two of their albums. It’s on Amazon, it’s on iTunes, you can find them on Facebook or on their website, caravanpalace.com, and of course I will have a link to the album and the song in the show notes. I really dig this two-album set, and I know a lot of you have bought it and told me how much you like it too. It is pretty great music to just have on while you’re eating or cooking or whatever.
I will also have links to all of the books that we talked about. There are some really fascinating titles in this week’s episode; I had a really interesting time finding all the links. And also, thank you to Amanda, who compiles all of the links in the database so that we can link them on the site.
So on behalf of Dr. Ali and Orville, who is trying to crawl in the sound box again, and everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have an excellent weekend. See you next week.
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This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.
I loved this podcast. I just ordered my copy of the book. Definately do more podcasts like this.
I am ready for the Five Guys Dystopia. THEIR FRIES.
Great podcast, by the way. I’ve been reading those books for 20 odd years, and yeah, this was very enjoyable for me to listen to on my first day back to regular work in two weeks.
Heads up: the cover of Secrets in Death is repeated, but the link takes you to the ‘missing’ cover (for White Rage by Carol Anderson)
As said above, excellent podcast, and fantastic topic. This book (Human in Death) will be mine, on way or another.
@azteclady: Fixed, thank you!
Thank you for this podcast. It’s great that academics are taking such a thoughtful look at popular fiction. I’ve never been a Nora Roberts fan, but I may try one of the titles mentioned.
Thanks for yet another enjoyable interview!
Great discussion.
Another Roarke prototype is Brandon Carstairs from Once More With Feeling from 1983.
And Roarke, except for his newly discovered family, appears to have left all his mates behind except for when they’re necessary to remind us of his past. He’s adopted Eve’s expanding network of family/friends. Surely he should have some business colleagues that he views as equals and friends, where are they?
+1 on great discussion. I’ve read all of the In Death books, some multiple times, and have noticed a lot of things called out here. Would love to see Robb/Roberts get a little more topical with the series. It doesn’t have to be all Issues all the time, but I do think there’s a lot that could be done with race, with gender, with disability, in the context of the In Death world.
Because Eve’s private world is quite homogenous and it doesn’t make sense that it would be. Not after coming up through the foster-care system, living in what (even in real life) is one of the most diverse cities in the world, working in what (even in real life) is one of the most diverse professions. I think it’s past time for her to accrue a recurring-character close female friend who is not another of the fifty shades of white/straight.
As to Issues: to my mind, the benefit of being topical in genre fiction – if you are a widely-read writer with a proven ability to be topical without going off the rails into preachy – you can switch someone’s perspective very subtly. You don’t have to beat people over the head.
I would much rather digress from the core plot a little to deal with Issues than to wallow in serial-killer POV. I hate that. More righteous rage, and less torture porn.
Okay, this podcast came out on the best day possible and let me explain why.
So I’m a 20 year old student at Cornell University who is staying in Ithaca for the summer. I’m a voracious romance reader (with a sprinkling of YA and SFF) and I love, love JD Robb. I read Naked in Death as a twelve year old (I started romance very young, lol, and my mom had no idea what books I was reading because these covers didn’t look romancey!) and in less three months, I read *every single book and novella* in the series (by the time I was done, the series was up to PROMISES IN DEATH). Thank god my library didn’t have long hold times. It consumed my every being and it was my very first romance novel (okay, not *exactly* a romance but considering I started to read NR afterwards, it was my introduction). And for the past eight years, I’ve religiously used my book allowance money (my mom let me have $20/month for book money up until I got a job and pretty much spend exclusively on books) to buy these books on release day. So I have a very, very special place in my heart for these books. Which is not to say that I can’t critique these books – I’m a woman of South Asian heritage and like Dr. Ali said, Robb’s WOC readers are very aware that Eve’s inner circle is white. But I think that Robb is more aware of this in recent books (ie the introduction of Dr. DeWinter and even Santiago. The wonderful thing about these books is that Eve definitely has room to expand her inner circle (ie her bullpen) and I hope Robb takes the opportunity to introduce more POC/non-heterosexual characters.
This long preamble then brings us to today. No one in my real life reads romance (trust me, I’ve tried) and I live in an isolated place where my favorite authors (Ilona Andrews, Julie James, etc) never come for signings. You would think someone in this university reads romances, but I’ve yet to find them. But after work ended today, I got on the bus to go home. That’s when I saw an older black woman (older than college aged anyway) on the bus, and she was reading a library copy of Echoes in Death (the latest book that came out in February). My excited brain totally lost sense of manners and I completely freaked her out with, “OH MY GOD. I LOVE THOSE BOOKS. WHAT PART ARE YOU ON???”. She was startled initially (she had headphones on and who talks to strangers on a bus?!?) but we started talking about our mutual adoration of the series. She told me that she owned every book in paperback at home, but had waited to check out ECHOES from the library because hardcover was too expensive. What then transpired was the most amazing conversation in my life: we gushed over our favorite scenes, the awesomeness of the holiday-set novels, our favorite side characters (mine is Mira; hers is Nadine), and even talked about the lack of WOC in the books (although she did say that she loved that Whitney/Tibble – Eve’s superiors in the NYPSD – were black). I lost track of my surroundings and missed my stop. Feeling like a total fool, I pretended that I was really going to Target (the last stop in the route) and even bought some batteries to maintain my fiction. Even though it took me an extra hour to get home (damn those infrequent bus schedules!), it was so, so worth it. Talking online is fun, but talking in person is it’s own magic.
Okay, I swear I’m getting to a point in this dissertation. Right after I got home (about 90 minutes ago), I downloaded the new podcast and YOU GUYS WERE TALKING THE IN DEATH BOOKS. I don’t believe in coincidences, but man, this was a pretty great turn of events. I loved, loved the discussion you had (and especially loved that academics write about popular fiction. I wonder if any Cornell professors here read romances!) I’m kinda broke now, but your book sounds super interesting. This has been a pretty awesome Friday evening, and now I just want to reread my favorite JD Robb books this weekend.
That was awesome. Do more of it! I faded out of these series quite some time ago but still enjoyed it.
Thanks for the great podcast.
I started the In Death series when it first came out, made it up to about book 10, and stalled. This literally happened 3 times where I reread the first books over again (because I’d forgotten too much to just pick up where I left off). I really tried to like them enough to continue, but just couldn’t. But, for some reason, I decided to try them one more time–in audio this time–last fall. That was the ticket for me and I’m now on book 23 (although I still don’t really like the first 3). The audio books are narrated by Susan Ericksen, and she’s fantastic, btw.
I have most definitely noticed the dearth of LGBT characters in the books. It stood out even with the early ones, and has become increasingly noticeable. I wondered if that would change with later books, but I guess not. As for race, IIRC, there was a mention in Naked that there had been so much intermingling of races that many people weren’t easily categorized based on appearance. That said, it’s definitely true that white is the default throughout, and especially in Eve’s inner circle of female friends. TBH, I’ve thought about disability issues in the books, but only in passing. I guess, somewhere in the back of my mind, I just assumed that medical knowledge was so advanced that they were able to treat/cure/fix most conditions. (I mean, they have off-planet colonies and the AutoChef, so why not?) But it’s true that that doesn’t jibe with McNab’s injury.
So much food for thought! I hope I have the opportunity to read Human in Death.
Oh, Divya, I live near Cornell too! If you’re on campus around noon tomorrow (Saturday), I’ll be in the Olin Library cafe with a copy of Lord of Scoundrels. Stop by if you want to talk romances.
Vasha, I’m actually going to NYC this weekend!! 🙁 🙁 But yay for Ithaca romance readers.
@Divya and @Vasha Hi, I’m a recent IC grad and avid romance reader as well!! I’m in Ithaca until the end of July if either of you would like to talk romance/exchange books/etc! 🙂 I’m here until I find a full-time job as a post grad and would love the cheery and passionate discussion only romance readers can bring. 😀
Hi John! How’s about this, I’ll make a sign saying Ithaca Romance Readers Meetup and try to be on the Commons at lunchtime any weekday it isn’t raining. Anybody from central New York is welcome.
So gratified to read these comments! @TLB, I have more thoughts about elements of Once More With Feeling, which i read for the first time last week, that made their way into In Death. And @Divya, I bet Cornell’s library has or could order a copy of Human in Death.
Vasha, email me at ds927@cornell.edu. 🙂 🙂 I do work from 9 to 5.
Dr. Ali, I ended up buying a kindle copy but I will also suggest it to my librarian.
@Divya, I hope you enjoy it.
I think the “In Death” novels may be gateway books for the romance genre. I don’t think I’ve ever been more astonished than when a 60-something man at a literary science fiction con told me that Nora Roberts was his “favorite living author,” and when I said something about JD Robb, he said no, he’d read ALL her books.
And I have to agree with the good doctor: I’ve suggested both the Chesapeake Bay series and the Born In series as good books for people who’ve never read Nora Roberts (or non-literary, i.e. not Austen or Bronte, romance at all). I also really like the Vows series, especially “Vision in White,” which fits into what you were saying about Roberts writing about people who work in the arts as professionals and also about “made” families. And unlike most of her other series, the Vows series doesn’t have a supernatural element. Unfortunately, the Vows books were the last books of hers I really enjoyed.