152. An Interview with Lauren Willig: Two New Books, Two Time Periods, Lots of History

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Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to episode number 152 of the DBSA podcast. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me is Lauren Willig. We are going to talk about books. Lauren has two books releasing in two weeks – no big deal. We’re going to talk about multigenre books that blend mystery, romance, and historical fiction. We talk about historical gossip columns, the fashions of the ‘20s, the changes brought about by women working during World Wars I and II, and what the romance genre owes to Napoleon – spoiler alert: it’s kind of a lot. As always, we discuss a lot of books, ‘cause that’s how we roll, and in the podcast entry, also known as the show notes, I will have links to all of the books that we mention.

This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Chanel Cleeton’s Playing with Trouble, the sexy new romance in the Capital Confessions series. Download it July 21st.

And we have a podcast transcript sponsor. If you prefer to read rather than listen, this week’s podcast transcript is being brought to you by Wattpad, a community where over forty million people from around the world are reading, writing, and connecting over stories. Whatever you’re into, there is a story you’ll love on Wattpad. Maybe you’d like the New Adult novel by Alicia Michaels, V-Card, one of the most popular stories in Wattpad’s romance section this week. You can connect for free from devices that you already own into their engaging and supportive community. Join today and find your happily ever after.

I also have information on a discount code for Book Riot Live, which will be held November 7th and 8th at the Metropolitan West in New York City. Book Riot Live is a reader convention featuring fellow book lovers, a bunch of amazing authors, and the Book Riot team for a celebration of books and reading life. Please note that it is limited to attendees 18 years and older and some satellite events will be for 21 and up, but if you would like to go, you can get $20 off full registration if you are a new attendee using code TRASHYBOOKS – that’s all caps, TRASHYBOOKS, all one word. You can find out more information at bookriotlive.com.

The music you’re listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater, and I will have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is and where you can buy this music for your very, very own.

And as I mentioned, we’ve mentioned a lot of books during this episode, as well, so should you feel the need for book and music shopping, we’re here for you is what I’m saying.

And now, without further delay, on with the podcast!

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Sarah: So, which book would you like to talk about first? The Other Daughter or the Moonflower?

Lauren Willig: Yeah, whichever you think works better for the podcast. So, we can, we can do this however you want to do it.

Sarah: Well, let’s start with the one that’s coming out first, ‘cause two books – this is two books in one week, right?

Lauren: Yeah, no, so I have, it’s one book out Tuesday, July 21st, and then exactly two weeks later, the other book is out on August 4th.

Sarah: Oh, no pressure, no big deal.

Lauren: Yeah, just, just two book releases from two different publishers, two entirely different time periods and styles.

Sarah: Oh, that’s a piece of cake. Now, let’s talk about The Other Daughter. Tell me about this book.

Lauren: Okay, so The Other Daughter is my first attempt at a single narrative, single viewpoint story. It’s set in 1927 London when a young woman who’s been raised in genteel poverty and has been working as a nursery governess in France returns home and finds a piece torn out of The Tatler, a magazine she didn’t know her mother read, with a picture in it of her father who she had assumed had been dead since she was four years old, and it turns out that he’s actually alive, and he’s an earl and has another daughter. She’s completely flummoxed; everything she thought she knew about her life is a complete lie. Even her name isn’t her name. She has no idea where her mother came up with her name, and she, she can’t ask her mother; her mother is now dead. So she winds up going undercover among the Bright Young Things in an attempt to get closer to her father’s family and find out what on earth happened all those years ago.

Sarah: Oh, piece of cake!

Lauren: Absolutely, no problem, and she adopts an entirely different identity to do so. She goes, she goes from being respectable and demure Rachel Woodley to socialite Vera Merton with red-painted fingernails and a cigarette holder, so a lot of the book is her trying to manage that transformation without losing the core of herself.

Sarah: Of course. Which is a large core.

Lauren: [Laughs] Exactly. Well, a lot of this books was, for me, about how, how we, how we formulate identity. Where do we come up with our, our ideas of who we are and what we are? And so much of my heroine Rachel’s idea of who she is has been formed by externals. By the fact that her mother plays the organ in church and gave piano lessons, that she’s always been poor but respectable, that her father was a botanist who died. And all of these are facts she thought she knew about herself that shaped her idea of herself, and so when all of that is stripped away and she’s suddenly being someone completely different, she has to figure out if there’s still any there there, if there’s still some core to herself underneath it all.

Sarah: And in a way, she has three identities to manage, ‘cause she has the identity that she was brought up with, the identity that she assumes to go undercover, and then the identity that she has no idea who she is, because the things that she knew about herself aren’t true.

Lauren: That’s exactly right, and she’s triangulating with all three, because she hasn’t completely abandoned her old identity. She still has her best friend back home who she can’t, she can’t bring herself to tell her best friend, who’s a vicar’s daughter –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: – that she’s actually the illegitimate daughter of an earl, so she’s still Rachel for her best friend Alice, she’s being Vera Merton for all these society types, and she has w-, she has one partner in crime, a gossip columnist called Simon Montfort, who’s her entrée into this world, and he’s the only one who knows this double game she’s playing, and so with him she’s this odd composite character where she’s both Rachel and Vera at the same time, and she has a hard time figuring out which is which.

Sarah: So is that the, the romantic interest? ‘Cause I notice that this has a number of genres assigned to it. It’s historical fiction, it’s historical romance, it’s a mystery, and it’s al-, it’s almost a, a drama of manners in some way, if that’s a genre itself.

Lauren: Exactly. Well, you know me, Sarah; I couldn’t write one genre if I –

Sarah: No!

Lauren: And trust me, I tried!

[Laughter]

Sarah: One genre! Only one time period! No, no, no, if I’m going to stay in one time period, I need, like, nine genres.

Lauren: Right, but you know, when I sat down to write my, this, I told myself it was going to be a simple story, and I –

Sarah: Oh, sure, yeah!

Lauren: [Laughs] I should have known that that word simple was going to be misleading. It wound up taking me three times as long as any book I’ve ever written to write this simple, single narrative, single plotline story, and it wound up, as you pointed out, being all these different genres as once.

Sarah: Tell me about the romance in this book.

Lauren: Well, that was another thing that took me by surprise as I was writing it, ‘cause originally I had intended the romance – there, there were really going to be two strong romantic interests, because I grew up on old Gothics, where you always play the which one is it going to be? Which one is good and which one is evil? game, where there are always two men involved.

Sarah: Of course.

Lauren: You know, I also grew up, of course, in the romance tradition where you always know who the hero is from the beginning, and so Simon Montfort, the gossip columnist, is absolutely the hero. I’d intended it to be a tossup between him and her sister’s fiancé, John Trevannion, but the second I met Simon, it was all over. It was one of those cases where the characters really took over, and they just banter like crazy.

Sarah: Oh, lovely.

Lauren: You know, I just can’t restrain the banter. It’s horrible; they take over! But he’s a gossip columnist. He’s actually, he’s sort of an Evelyn Waugh-esque character –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: – in that he’s one of these guys who – oh, gosh, I’m trying to think how to sum up Simon. So he, actually, he’s not that Evelyn Waugh-esque, because Evelyn Waugh was a post-war character, but Simon’s one of these guys who went off young to World War I and saw his entire life fall apart around him. He was going to be a historian, but after a few years in the trenches, nothing seemed to have any point any more, and he has to earn his own living, so he goes back to London and becomes a gossip columnist, which was actually a very viable career option at the time. So everyone was running around being gossip columnists or writing novels, and so he’s from both part of this Bright Young people group and apart from it at the same time.

Sarah: And it’s a way for him to make a living that gives him a reason to go into society.

Lauren: It gives him a reason to go into society and yet at the same time claim that he’s not part of it and that he’s not enjoying himself.

Sarah: Of course.

Lauren: He gets to have his cake and eat it too. It’s classic hero behavior.

Sarah: [Laughs] He’s, he’s too cool for the room, but he has to be there anyway.

Lauren: It’s the no, no, no, I’m more aloof and tortured than you are, I know. Is there a party over there?

Sarah: [Laughs] Gee, I’m, I, I might as well try what they’re serving –

Lauren: [Laughs]

Sarah: – because what’s wrong with some alcohol, right?

Lauren: Exactly. Oh, another glass of champagne? If I have to, if I really have to.

Sarah: And there was so much to gossip about at that time, too.

Lauren: Well, and they particularly liked gossiping about each other.

[Laughter]

Lauren: This was one thing I found fascinating reading about the Bright Young Things and researching it for this book is it’s this enclosed, self-referential crowd of people who are all writing articles about each other, writing books about each other, talking about each other, and throwing parties for each other. It’s entirely self-enclosed society of a very small number of people, and yet it manages almost immediately to capture the popular imagination –

Sarah: Of course.

Lauren: – and so suddenly Bright Young Things become common parlance. You have people out in the provinces talking about those Bright Young Things.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: There are cartoons in the Spectator, everyone’s trying to pretend that they are a Bright Young Thing, the Bright Young Things are making fun of the wannabe Bright Young Things, and it’s all, it’s all a little bit Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass.

Sarah: I’m assuming that for your research you had to read historical gossip columns.

Lauren: Oh, naturally, and they make brilliant reading, and of course, you know, part of the reason to write this book was simply to have an excuse to reread all of my old Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh novels, because they were both card-carrying members of the Bright Young set, and they both wrote novels about their own people, which, which cast the groups in a not very flattering light.

Sarah: Of course. It’s a weird sort of paradox, because you have to be of the group to make fun of the group, and you have to be accurate to a certain extent, but not give yourself away as enjoying, like you said earlier.

Lauren: I, I think there’s something that the English do much better than the Americans is to mock what they love. I think we have a cultural sense that if you mock something it means you somehow disapprove of it. There is a, a sort of affectionate mockery that you find on the other side of the pond –

Sarah: Yes.

Lauren: – where they’ll make the most fun of that which they hold most dear –

Sarah: Right.

Lauren: – and you definitely see that with both Waugh and Mitford in their early books.

Sarah: So you had to read historical gossip columns. If someone was curious about reading the gossip pages from this particular time period, what should they look for?

Lauren: Well, you could find back issues of The Tatler, which was the primary gossip magazine at the time. There were also newspapers like the Daily Express. Evelyn Waugh wrote a gossip column for that one, and Nancy Mitford, a couple of years too late for me, but I decided to count it anyway for research purposes –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: – wrote a column for a magazine called The Lady – [laughs] – which is basically, if anyone’s read Mitford’s later book, U and Non-U, it’s a sort of tongue-in-cheek, for those who don’t know, here’s how those in the know behave, but there’s a snark to it. So you always wonder whether or not she’s describing accurately or deliberately leading people astray.

Sarah: Right, almost like, like Georgette Heyer implanting things that she completely made up about the Regency –

Lauren: Oh, you mean –

Sarah: – to see if other writers would copy them.

Lauren: Oh, really, don’t enact a Cheltenham tragedy!

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: Yeah, I always loved that, how she used that as a trap to catch Barbara Cartland, who, by the way, was one of my sources, not for this book, but for my previous 1920s book when I was writing The Ashford Affair, which was my first standalone –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: – and I was looking for anything I could find about life in London in 1920, because, you know, I’d started actually, for that one, researching the Bright Young Things and then realized that there’s actually a seismic gap between the 1920 setting of a portion of that book and the 1926, ’27, ’28 heyday of the Bright Young Things. It’s actually totally different groups, but while I was looking for things on specifically 1920, Barbara Cartland wrote an autobiography called something like We Danced All Night or I Could Have Danced All Night; I’m forgetting now. I can picture the cover; it’s pink with a big picture of her head on it.

Sarah: Of course it’s pink! It has to be.

Lauren: And of course it has her head, but – and she’s not headless, by the way. It’s her entire head; they didn’t crop her in any weird way.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: But so it’s her, her autobiography of her life as a debutante in 1920, and it’s absolutely hysterical reading, because it is one long run-on sentence that hops time periods every other phrase.

Sarah: Of course!

Lauren: You know, when I made my debut with Bunty Bixler – you know Bunty Bixler, he later died in an airplane crash – but not after his third wife left him after she had that distressing affair with the Italian count in 1952. And you’re there trying to unpick the threads because among all of the breathless, time-period-jumping gossip, there are some really good details about life as a debutante in 1920, but you had to sort of sit down and diagram out every sentence to try to figure out which decade that particular clause was set in.

Sarah: [Laughs] So, what is it about the ‘20s that you really enjoy? I’ve noticed a lot more books set in the ‘20s coming out, which I happen to really like. I think it makes a great sort of contrast to the Regency –

Lauren: Yes.

Sarah: – because in the ‘20s people were like, oh, my God, we survived the war! There’s, like, five men left; let’s party –

Lauren: [Laughs]

Sarah: – and we have all these great things to party with that do weird things to us. Let’s do this! And not wear bras! And wear clothing styles that I personally wish I could wear but do not work on my physical body. What is it about the ‘20s that you really enjoy?

Lauren: Well, it’s definitely not the clothing styles, because, like you, I can’t pull them off. I love that bit in Thoroughly Modern Millie where she tries to get her beads to fall the right way –

Sarah: Yes! [Laughs]

Lauren: – and she realizes she’s just, you know, her front is not flat enough.

Sarah: I, I cannot pull off an empire waist unless there’re, like, acres of fabric north of the border, and I, if, when you, when you have a dress that forms a straight line, like all the ‘20s styles do –

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – if the straightest line from the widest part of your body is, is wider than the other parts of your body, you just look bad.

Lauren: Yeah, there, there’s really no way of fixing it, and if you put on lots of fringe, it just makes it worse.

Sarah: Yeah, fringe is not everyone’s friend.

Lauren: [Laughs] Although, you know, if you put in strategic sequins, they do draw the eyes elsewhere. I mean, that was one thing; they weren’t afraid of bedazzling.

Sarah: No, no, they were not. I’m, I’m guessing that you have watched Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries.

Lauren: Oh, absolutely. I love those.

Sarah: They are so good, but then there’re the costumes. Oh, my God!

Lauren: Oh, the costumes are brilliant, and Miss Phryne Fisher always makes me think of Deanna Raybourn’s 1920s heroines, particularly Delilah from A Spear of Summer Gla­-, Spa-, I can’t speak. I need to drink more coffee. A Spear of Summer Grass, where you’ve got that same sort of devil-may-care impression, and you picture her with that short, dark hair curved right under the cheekbones.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Lauren: Oh, but as usual, we’ve wandered from your question, so –

Sarah: That’s fine! Bring it back.

Lauren: For me, the, the appeal of the 1920s was largely a matter of contraries, because I’d always said that if I left the Pink series I was going to go back in time. I was going to do a big epic set during the English Civil War, which was what I wrote my dissertation about, or I was going to go do something set in the 1770s, ‘cause I love that time period, and I had zero interest in doing anything in the twentieth century. It was too close, and it was too ugly, and by ugly I mean the World Wards. I –

Sarah: Yep.

Lauren: I have deliberately avoided unpleasantness. Although my Pink Carnation series deals with the Napoleonic wars, there are no actual battles in the books. I’ve stayed far away from battle, and I really did not want to deal with World War I or World War II, and I stumbled into working on the 1920s by accident because I had an idea for a book set around the Happy Valley crowd in Kenya in the 1920s, and I thought, I could do that without dealing with World War I, and of course, all of those people were so shaped by World War I, and so I got dragged into World War I and that whole era by accident.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: Once I had started researching it, I was fascinated, and that’s why I’ve now wound up, The Other Daughter is my second 1920s book, because once you get sucked in, it’s just such a fascinating time period. There’s so much going on. There’s this great line from Nancy Mitford where someone made some comment to her about the ‘60s and how wild it must seem to her –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: – and she looked pityingly at them and said, basically, ha! You’re not doing half of what we did!

Sarah: And it’s funny because it’s, it’s a very much unknown period of time, unless you’re paying attention.

Lauren: Exactly. It happened so quickly, it’s such a little blip, and that’s what I really discovered when I was researching The Ashford Affair, my first standalone, because there’s, everything changes so rapidly. You have that immediate post-war moment in 1920, 1921, 1922, where people are just recovering from the shock.

Sarah: Yep.

Lauren: And the world has turned upside down in so many ways. Suddenly you have soaring divorce rates, which leads to a number of social changes. You’ve had women in the workforce because of World War I, and that’s a genie you cannot put back in the bottle.

Sarah: No, and then it happened again during World War II, and I was like, did you not learn anything?

Lauren: [Laughs]

Sarah: Where have you been?!

Lauren: Really interesting, I’m researching a new standalone right now which is partially set, partially set during World War I in France and partially set during World War II in France, largely ‘cause I swore I would never write about World War II, so of course I am.

Sarah: Of course.

Lauren: But I’ve been reading about French women and the war effort in World War I, and it’s just so interesting to me the way they square the circle, and it’s, culturally have to deal with the idea of wom-, women working, and yet they claim they’re not working. It’s like, oh, no, no, they’re not working ‘cause they want to work; they’re just helping the war effort.

Sarah: Right.

Lauren: They’re really still womenly, womanly women.

Sarah: Right, any minute now they’re just going to put down that jackhammer and go back into the, into the sitting room.

Lauren: Exactly, and they’re look-, don’t worry, they’re looking feminine while they jackhammer.

Sarah: [Laughs] Yes, of course. You have to have the right lipstick on while you’re jackhammering.

Lauren: And it’s, culturally, I find that very interesting, and according to my sources on the women during, French women during World War I, there’s less pushback in America and in the UK, but of course, there is still pushback.

Sarah: Of course.

Lauren: And there is the sense that women are stealing men’s jobs, and it’s at the same time period, one of my secret projects for the future – which now, of course, you know, someone else can go and run with, ‘cause goodness only knows when I’ll get to it – is writing about the first female solicitors in the UK, who were –

Sarah: Oh!

Lauren: Yeah, the first women solicitors were admitted to the bar in the 1920s, and I just find that absolutely fascinating.

Sarah: It is!

Lauren: Just what they must have had to deal with, the, the trails they were blazing there, and you wonder what, what their personal lives were like in reaction to that. What sort of flack did they have to put up with? Was it –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: I mean, one of my favorite books is Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy Night, which is, I guess, her third Harriet Vane mystery, when Harriet goes back to Oxford for her college reunion, and you really, she really plays out that debate about women and women working and women having lives and careers outside the home so brilliantly in that book, and that book was written in the early ‘30s if I remember correctly, and it’s still an open issue then.

Sarah: And so, of course, your heroine is genteel poverty, but sort of working.

Lauren: Well, this is one of the issues for her as a character is that, you know, she, she is a New Woman – well, not, not a New Woman in the sense that she views herself as progressive, but she is that later generation. She’s that generation that came of age just during the war. She was a teenager during the war, and so it’s perfectly natural to her and her friends that women go out and they take typing courses, and they become secretaries, and they work in offices, whereas for her mother, who is fundamentally Edwardian, this idea is horrifying, and so part of my heroine’s issue when she discovers that her father is actually not the man she thought he was is that her mother has always put her into this little box of what young, well-bred young ladies do and well-bred young ladies don’t do, and her mother would not let her go and take a typing course and become a secretary, because her mother felt very firmly that there were only certain respectable careers open to women –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: – and one of those is nursery governessing, and you know, this, this, she was an interesting heroine for me to write in a number of ways. She’s not academically ambitious. She had no desire to go to Somerville College –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: – Oxford, and become a don. She, she’s not intellectual in that sense, but she’s a doer. She’s someone who wants a hands-on job where she will work and do things, and so being compressed into nursery governessing, for her, it, it was a hard compromise, and it was something that she did because she wasn’t going to defy her mother, and so to find out then that her mother had, that she’s illegitimate is a double betrayal for her.

Sarah: Right. Because she’s been told, you know, this is what’s acceptable, and this wasn’t acceptable, and here she is. Her entire existence is on the unacceptable side.

Lauren: Exactly. And I think sort of going back to the earlier thread, this is part of what makes the ‘20s so interesting is you have this ongoing culture clash between the older generation and their expectations –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: – of the way that the world should work, the way that the world had worked for them until very recently, and the younger generation where all the rules have changed. Where young women, unmarried, were going to nightclubs with men, and that’s okay. That when you look, for example, at Rachel’s, my heroine’s party-going crowd –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: – in The Other Daughter, you have people like Lady Pansy Pakenham who is sharing a room with the woman Evelyn Waugh later marries whose name is also Evelyn, and I’m blanking out on her maiden name for a moment, but they are two well-bred young women who are sharing a flat together in London, and that’s okay, and all of a sudden you also, you have debutantes working at dress shops, write-, well, Barbara Cartland writes novels, but you have them, suddenly they’re dabbling in work, and that’s also considered okay, and you get these snide jokes about how the ones who aren’t dabbling in work feel left out.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: Where suddenly work for women isn’t, it’s, it’s not a stigma, it’s a fashion accessory for that particular crowd.

Sarah: Of course, and it, and it’s, it’s doing something. There is, there’s pride in that.

Lauren: Exactly, but I think the way they square the circle – I never really thought this out before – is by treating it as fundamentally frivolous. That because it’s just, it’s a hobby –

Sarah: Oh, I don’t have to do this.

Lauren: Yes, exactly. I’m just dabbling in that little hat design company. A large number of them do actually have to do this. Like, one of the books that I find most poignant about this era is Robert Graves’s World War I memoir Goodbye to All That, and he talks about how post war, he and his – I can’t remember if she’s his wife at the time or if they get married shortly thereafter – but they scramble to make a living, and they try all sorts of different things, including shop keeping, because they actually, the economy has suffered a hit, too, and a lot of people who really never thought about having to make a living suddenly have to make a living, and they’re not really trained to it.

Sarah: Nope.

Lauren: And of course shell shock, for many of them, makes it a lot harder to hold down a job.

Sarah: But that’s not necessarily a weakness that they can talk about.

Lauren: Exactly. I mean, they didn’t have, there wasn’t really a discussion about PTSD the way –

Sarah: Nope.

Lauren: – the way we have it. You do see it – I, I found one of the most useful things for me in researching this book was reading period mystery novels, because they have a lot of what’s called, what an old history professor of mine used to call accidental evidence. Evidence that’s dropped in there unintentionally, so it’s not doctored, it’s not, it’s not slanted; these are just pieces of everyday life that are incidental to the main story, and the Peter Wimsey novels were really helpful to me, because of course Lord Peter is suffering from shell shock, and you get a lot of discussion, particularly in her earlier books like The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, about people who have returned from the war and can’t hold down jobs. Who were gassed, and now they have dodgy lungs, and they just, they have these periodic meltdowns, and it’s embarrassing for them, it’s embarrassing for their families, but they just can’t cope.

Sarah: And there’s, and, and much like women entering the workforce, there’s very little support on either side.

Lauren: Exactly. They’re looked down on as – the older generation, who experienced very different sorts of wars –

Sarah: Right.

Lauren: – still, still view war as a, a manly and formative pursuit, and there’s this idea that they, that the men who came back shell shocked from the trenches are just not manning up.

Sarah: Yes, they’re, what’s wrong with these people?

Lauren: Exactly, really! This was supposed to be, it’s like fox hunting on a large scale! What are they whinging about? So they don’t get much sympathy there, and you also have in the, the mid to late ‘20s, and particularly in this Bright Young people crowd, you have a group of, I guess you would call them pacifists, but people who are very pointedly anti-war who look down on those who fought because they, they view them as complicit in something that was inherently wrong –

Sarah: Right.

Lauren: – and so these poor people are getting squeezed from both sides.

Sarah: Yep! Which is odd, because that still happens every time there’s a major world conflict. That still happens now.

Lauren: Mm-hmm. Yeah, the people who are actually suffering get very little sympathy.

Sarah: Yep. So, let’s talk about The Lure of the Moonflower, the, the final Pink Carnation book. Are you sad?

Lauren: I am wiping away a tear as we speak.

Sarah: [Laughs] Except for the part where it’s two weeks after the release of another book, so you’re probably very tired. Are you excited and sort of bewildered by this?

Lauren: I think I could go with bewildered here.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: More bewildered than excited. I have to say, I was excited, I, I think I was more excited before I actually wrote the book because in some ways the idea of having this series done and having a clear field where I could write anything I liked was incredibly exciting when I was under multiple book deadline pressure. It was like, wow! When I’m down to writing one book a year I’ll feel so free!

[Laughter]

Lauren: What I hadn’t anticipated was the incredible sense of loss I would feel leaving that world, and the sense of security that writing a Pink book a year, knowing that I was always going to go back to those people, provided.

Sarah: And it’s, and it’s a nice world that you’ve created, because there’s so much going on, there’s more story to tell.

Lauren: I, I wish I could take credit for that, but really, it’s all Napoleon, because by conquering so many different places, he provided me with so much room for a series. It was really very considerate of him to, to prompt such a long, involved war.

Sarah: Have we, have we as a community really discussed what the romance genre owes to Napoleon? Like, I think we’re in debt.

Lauren: We really are in debt, because we wouldn’t have had the Regency as we know it, even the extended Regency, without Napoleon doing what he was doing across the Channel. Everything is shaped by, by that. I mean, all those men in red coats you see hanging around in Pride and Prejudice – thank you, Napoleon! Thank you for Wickham!

[Laughter]

Lauren: Napoleon, meanwhile, is turning over in his grave, saying, that wasn’t my point!

Sarah: That was not what I wanted to do, you idiots!

Lauren: Napoleon did like romantic literature. Basically, Napoleon read the Nicholas Sparks of his day.

Sarah: Oh, no!

[Laughter]

Sarah: Very true. [Laughs] So, what can you tell people – I don’t want to give too much away – it’s really hard to ask questions about a book that hasn’t come out yet that I’m sort of familiar with, ‘cause I’m always like, so talk about that one thing – wait! Oh, wait, that’s a spoiler.

Lauren: We’ll have to have that conversation off the record.

Sarah: Yes, exactly. Tell me, tell me some things about this book. Is this sort of a, a book that’s very much for people who have been following the series, or can you sort of jump into the series with this one and then go back and read the rest?

Lauren: Well, I try to, to write every single book as a, as a potential standalone? I wanted every book to be able to stand on its own two feet, or its own 400 pages, as the case may be.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: Whether I succeed or not, I don’t know. I’ve, I have been told by people that they’ve been able to jump into the books mid-series, and that while they get more out of them reading them in order, they’ve been able to read them as complete books out of order, which makes me happy. This one was particularly hard because there’s just so much backstory, and it’s, it’s an interesting balance, because on the one hand, this book is entirely removed from the world of the previous books in that it’s set in Portugal?

Sarah: I was going to say, they’re all in Portugal. You haven’t been there before.

Lauren: I haven’t been there before. I was so excited, ‘cause I’ve known from the beginning that the Pink Carnation’s book needed to be set during the Peninsular war in Portugal, and I found the absolute perfect historical event, the flight of the royal family from Portugal to Brazil, and there’s this great bit where – in real life – where Queen Maria, the mad old queen, is being transported down to the docks in a closed carriage, days before the French are about to march in, shouting, not so fast! We don’t want people to think we’re running away.

Sarah: [Laughs] Whoa.

Lauren: Whether she actually said that or not is up for debate, because she was completely ‘round the bend. One speculation is that she had what George III had, which is porphyria, or at least that’s what historians think, although with Queen Maria, goodness only knows, her family, the Braganzas, were insanely inbred. Her family tree needs a family tree.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: She was married to her uncle, and her son marries his aunt, just for starters.

Sarah: Oh, oh, oh boy.

Lauren: And they’re deeply intermarried with the Spanish Bourbons, who are themselves so deeply inbred. I mean, that, you get that, well, actually it’s the Habsburg jaw, but they’re all –

Sarah: Habsburg jaw, yes.

Lauren: Yes, and you’ve seen that, that heavy jaw, but so – anyway, so she’s completely bonkers, so goodness only knows whether she actually said that or whether that was just propaganda, but it got me thinking, that and the closed carriage, what if the queen didn’t leave Portugal with the rest of the court? Who would know, and wouldn’t she be a great prize for the French to lay their hands on? And so the, the plot of The Lure of the Moonflower is based on the idea that Queen Maria was spirited away by a loyalist group who wants to use her as a focal point for rebellion against their French invaders, and the Pink Carnation, a.k.a. Jane Wooliston, has been sent to find her and retrieve her and send her to Brazil before the French can get her, because the French hold on Portugal is very tenuous, but if they can say, look, we have your anointed queen, suddenly their position becomes a lot stronger. But the Pink Carnation has a problem: she speaks no Portuguese, she doesn’t know the territory at all, and she’s really not used to roughing it. She’s an urban creature. All her previous missions have been in cities, in London, in Paris, in Dublin, in Venice. She’s, she’s not accustomed to rough terrain, and so she has to team up with the agent on the spot, the Moonflower, who, as it turns out, was a previous double agent and someone against whom Jane has a personal grudge.

Sarah: That always works well.

Lauren: That always works well, especially since the Moonflower has no idea that he has had any impact on Jane’s life whatsoever. He’s going into this point, he’s just pissed off that he’s stuck being courtier – ah, cour-, courtier – courtier and courier for someone he sees as an effete city type, and so basically, this, as I was writing it, turned into something of a road-trip romance, because you’ve got the Han Solo type and the, basically, the woman he perceives as a prissy debutante on the road together.

Sarah: So it’s a road trip and a spy story.

Lauren: It’s a road trip and a spy story because they have to find that missing queen before the French do, and naturally, since every good spy needs complications –

Sarah: Of course:

Lauren: – they run smack into Jane’s old nemesis and lover, the master French spy known as the Gardener, who also has a checkered history with Jack, the Moonflower, so you have a game of cat and mouse going on – well, multiple games of cat and mouse – as all parties are looking for the queen, and Jane and Jack are trying to hide from the Gardener.

Sarah: Of course. Did you always have this character in mind for Jane?

Lauren: You know, I knew from very early on that Jane’s book was going to be the last book in the series and that her hero was going to be a soldier of fortune type. I had – and, and that it was going to be set in Portugal during the Peninsular war, and I just had this image of a campfire and a very sort of brown and orange landscape with a man wearing a battered old hat sitting by a campfire, and Jane, looking like she walked out of a bandbox, would step up, and he’d look at her and say, who the hell are you?

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: And she would say, I’m your contact, and it would go from there. And I, I had no idea who this guy was. This was, gosh, this would have been back in, like, 2005 when I had this, this image. I thought maybe his name was Lucien, but I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that he looked a lot like Harrison Ford.

Sarah: [Laughs] I, I completely support that idea that he looks like Harrison Ford.

Lauren: Yeah, this is definitely, this is my Harrison Ford tribute novel, because basically, Jack’s character was a composite of Indiana Jones and Han Solo. But anyway, so fast-forward several years: it was the summer of 2008, I was writing the sixth Pink book, The Betrayal of the Blood Lily, which is the book set in India, and the hero, all of the characters are a little obsessed with the hero’s brother, Jack, who’s off stage for most of the book, and, but he’s, he’s a French agent, and he’s had this very troubled past. He’s half Indian and half, oh, gosh, I almost said English for shorthand, but his father, Colonel Reid, is actually Scoto-American but working for the East India Company’s army in India.

Sarah: Whoa.

Lauren: Yeah, exactly. So, how do you, he’s, so he’s Scoto-American-Indian? [Laughs]

Sarah: My gosh.

Lauren: Yeah, ‘cause Colonel Reid, Jack’s father, had this checkered romantic history where he has two legitimate children and then three illegitimate children by different mothers of whom Jack is one, but unfortunately, based on laws passed in the 1790s, any kid who had an, a European father and a, as they put it, a non-European mother was barred from most forms of employment and advancement. He couldn’t serve in the East India Company’s army; he couldn’t serve in their diplomatic service. Basically, any job with any prospects was barred, and so of course in Jack’s case, his older, legitimate brother Alex is able to be a diplomat for the East India Company – ‘cause by that point the East India Company is running large swathes of India in a governmental sense – but, and his father is in the Madras Cavalry, and he can’t do either of these things, simply because his mother was a Rajput, and so he winds up as a mercenary soldier because, you know, what else is open to him? But he’s deeply bitter about the fact that he’s been barred from employment in his father’s company, and so this really shapes Jack’s character. But anyway, so during The Betrayal of the Blood Lily, all of these characters are obsessed by Jack, who’s gone and is working for an agent, as an agent for the French, because to someone like Jack, the idea of liberty, fraternity, and equality is really attractive.

Sarah: [Laughs] You don’t say!

Lauren: Exactly, and so he’s working for a Maratha leader named Scindia who had hired a Frenchman, Peron, to lead his army, and Peron is a big revolutionary type and very sort of in with the revolutionary crowd back in France, and so Jack is part of that whole crowd, and all of the characters in Blood Lily spent a lot of time talking about Jack. And at the very end of the book, Jack steps in, and I was like, oh, my God, that’s the guy at the campfire, and all of a sudden I knew who Jane’s hero was and why all of these people had been so obsessed with Jack throughout the book, ‘cause my subconscious is so much brighter than I am.

Sarah: I was going to say, do you ever, do you ever sort of look at your imagination and go, okay, seriously, what the hell?

Lauren: Yeah, exactly, ‘cause, you know, what I like to believe, it’s like Michelangelo had a great poem he wrote about sculpting, you know, back in the sixteenth century – or fifteenth? Gosh, I was a Renaissance phase major; I’m supposed to know these things – but anyway. But anyway, he had this great line he, he wrote about how he didn’t, he didn’t create the sculptures; he simply freed them from the block of marble. They were already in there just waiting to be uncovered, and I feel that way about all of my books, that these people exist already somewhere. I’m just trying to find them and to hear their stories. That there is actually, on some level, a right way and a wrong way to tell the story, because they exist. They exist somewhere, and it’s not just them, it’s a whole interwoven world.

Sarah: Of course.

Lauren: Sometimes in writing a book, I’ll stumble on a bit of that world, and I won’t know why it’s important right away, and then, you know, a few chapters or even a few books later something will happen, and I’ll be like, oh, my God, that’s why you were there!

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: And I realize it’s kind of ridiculous, but it’s very reassuring to think that you’re not so much pulling the stuff out of a hat, that it was always there.

Sarah: But you just didn’t see the pattern until it was done.

Lauren: Exactly. So either these people do exist on some level or my subconscious is a lot brighter than I am. It could go either way.

Sarah: I have had that experience where I’ve looked at something and gone, oh, oh! Past Sarah’s brain! Nice job! Wow! That was pretty cool! But I almost never recognize it when it happens; it’s only much later where I go, oh! And I never recognize my own writing either, so I’ll read something and be like, that’s – oh, I wrote that. Well, I can’t really compliment myself that overtly, that would make me douche-y. [Laughs]

Lauren: – that happens, ‘cause everything I write, while I’m writing it, it sounds like there’s been, you know, a monkey, and a not-very-bright monkey, jumping around on the keyboard, and I’ll hand it in because I have to hand it in because, well, deadlines, and then years later I’ll look back and be like, oh! That wasn’t so bad after all. Which is why I’ve always felt very strongly that it’s better to just get something done and hand it in, because you’re never going to like it at the time.

Sarah: It’s absolutely true. You, you can’t really judge something until it’s sat for a while.

Lauren: Exactly, and you can only write any specific thing at any given moment in time. That, something I’ve come to terms with is that every work is a product of its moment –

Sarah: Yes.

Lauren: – and you could not write that same book, or that same blog post, a year later. That they, they’re, they’re a product of their time. They are fundamentally ephemera.

Sarah: And you can’t recreate what is happening at the, at the present moment where you’re writing something. You can go back and make it better, but you can’t, you can’t adjust or change what’s happening at that moment, which is really a very big struggle if you like to have lots of control over things.

Lauren: Well, it’s also been very interesting in terms of seeing older books reissued, where people have tried to change older works to make them fit the current times, and I’m not sure it’s altogether successful. Cara Elliott and I had an interesting experience. We were teaching a class on, well – you know, you came and spoke at the class! – we were teaching a class about the rise of the Regency romance novel at Yale, and one of the books we taught was Judith McNaught’s Whitney, My Love.

Sarah: I remember this.

Lauren: And that class was hysterical, because Cara and I are sitting there saying, so, how do you feel about the whipping scene? And they’re like, oh, not a big deal, blah blah. Cara and I are looking at each other like, wow, clearly students have changed since our day. They, they have much more sang-froid than we did. What happened? And then finally it came out that we were actually reading different editions.

Sarah: Yep, that it had been edited.

Lauren: Right, and then their version, instead of whipping her – and then of course she gets on a horse and goes to a picnic, because clearly no pain – instead of whipping her, he almost whips her, but thinks better of it and flings the riding crop away in a fit of remorse.

Sarah: Wow.

Lauren: Yeah.

Sarah: So of course you’re reading completely different characters as a result of that one scene.

Lauren: Exactly. And it was, we were having a conversation at cross purposes, and there have been so many debates about whether or not you update these things or not, and I tend to lean heavily on the side of books are historical artifacts. They are a product of the moment in which they were written, and you kind of need to read them in that context, and I would rather read an un-, an unadulterated Judith McNaught than an updated Judith McNaught.

Sarah: I, I don’t know if you know this, but I have a favorite Judith McNaught story. Did you ever hear about the time that she went on a news program, on a radio program, and they were making fun of her writing, and she – ?

Lauren: No!

Sarah: Okay. This, this is my favorite thing that I know about Judith McNaught, ‘cause I was doing some research about her and Jude, Jude Deveraux and Julie Garwood, who I call the holy trinity of J?

Lauren: Yes, be still my beating heart.

Sarah: Right, exactly! You put the three of them, and it’s like, ahhh, whoa.

Lauren: When I wrote my first book, I came so close to coming up with a J pen name –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: Just because all of my favorite authors had J names.

Sarah: Js! Js are very popular.

Lauren: Okay, so story!

Sarah: So, she went on a radio program, and as is very frequent, the host started reading a sex scene from her latest book out loud in this very derogatory term and dismissed it as trash, and she had come prepared, because clearly, she has been through this before, and she had a sex scene that she read aloud and said, well, what do you think of this? And he goes, well, that’s trash too, and it was Song of Songs from the Bible rewritten in the third person.

Lauren: [Laughs] That is brilliant!

Sarah: So she rewrote Song of Songs, put it in the third person, and this guy was like, well, that’s trash, and then she had to say, well, I’m sorry, you, you know, that’s from the Bible.

Lauren: Props to her. I –

Sarah: I love that so much! [Laughs]

Lauren: Brilliant! Susanna Kearsley, who’s one of my favorite people ever, does this thing periodically on her website where she has excerpts from different books, and she has people guess which are literary fiction and which are Harlequin romances? And people invariably guess wrong.

Sarah: Of course! Because your concept of what a particular kind of book is and what it sounds like is very rarely correct if you don’t know anything about that genre.

Lauren: Exactly. And there is so much bad sex in literary fiction.

Sarah: Oh, dear God.

Lauren: I know. I mean, I, I love that the British do the bad sex awards.

Sarah: Ohhh. And, and, and yet, they never manage to give props to the fact that writing good sex is really difficult!

Lauren: Oh, yes.

Sarah: You almost didn’t do it, and then we made you write sexy times for poor Turnip!

Lauren: [Laughs] Exactly! And you know, I’m so glad I did. I had so much fun with that, writing that scene, although to be fair, I felt like I got to have my cake and eat it too with that one, because that’s the book, The Mischief of the Mistletoe, when every, whenever anyone asks me if any of my books are safe for their thirteen-year-old granddaughter?

Sarah: That’s the one!

Lauren: That’s the one, and then, of course, if the thirteen-year-old granddaughter wants to, she can always go online and find the followup scene. But –

Sarah: Of course.

Lauren: – the book itself is clean for those people who prefer a clean read.

Sarah: It’s, it’s a challenge, though, for an author, isn’t it, to, to decide whether or not to include sex.

Lauren: You know, it, it is. It is, definitely, and I think because I fall in that weird, mushy, cross, cross-genre area, it’s been harder for me because there is no clear path. My first three books I really thought I was writing as romance novels, and so I included sex scenes, and along that time I, well, the books were published and my publisher kept telling me over and over again that I was writing historical fiction, not romance, and so I decided that, okay, sex scenes were optional, and so since then I’ve followed a policy of there will be a sex scene if I feel the plot demands it, but if the plot doesn’t demand it, I don’t put one in. And this has led to some interesting reader reactions. I –

Sarah: Really!

Lauren: Oh, yes. I feel, I – sociologically, I find this stuff so fascinating. Like, I, I wound up one morning having two emails in my inbox right next to each other, one from a reader complaining that there were not enough sexytimes in the recent books, and another from a reader bitterly complaining because there had been sex in The Betrayal of the Blood Lily, and she did not understand why I would pollute an otherwise good book, and I just want to cross send those emails and tell them, please, you two, talk to each other.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: Because my guiding principle for sex scenes in the books right now is does it further the plot? And so with the Pink Carnation series, it’s really varied wildly. Some of the books have very detailed sex scenes. Others have nothing more than an illicit smooch. The Lure of the Moonflower has a sex scene because that was absolutely necessary for plot and character development. Some of the other books don’t. You know, I think actually the best advice I ever read on sex scenes was from Jude Deveraux.

Sarah: Really!

Lauren: It, this was, okay, I was the nerdiest teenager. I had a Writer’s Digest subscription, and Jude Deveraux wrote an article for Writer’s Digest on writing sex scenes.

Sarah: Wow!

Lauren: This was the ultimate fangirl moment for me, because of course I was a huge Jude Deveraux reader, and there she was, in my favorite magazine! And she said, don’t forget that your characters are still your characters when they’re having sex, that there has to be some plot-related purpose for that sex scene. It cannot be sex for the sake of sex, and that –

Sarah: That’s a really good piece of advice!

Lauren: Yeah, and for me, I found actually what, what’s really useful for keeping my sex scenes grounded is dialogue. What the characters are saying or not saying while they’re having sex is incredibly important.

Sarah: That’s absolutely true. I also heard Lisa Kleypas at one point that a good sex scene solves as many problems as it does create new ones.

Lauren: That’s a really interesting way of looking at it.

Sarah: Because you know the sex scene is going to resolve some of the tension, but you can’t have that tension come to an end if that scene is not at the end of the book. You have, like more book to deal with. And I confess I get very bummed out when the romance is resolved too early in the book, and then it’s just these two people with a perfectly happy, functional relationship solving whatever other problems they have for the next four chapters. I heard a really interesting theory when I was at a writers’ conference in, in Vancouver, the Surrey Writers’ Conference, and Mary Robinette Kowal gave a presentation which is her perspective of a theory that I believe originates with Orson Scott Card, which is that you open a problem, and then another problem, and then another problem, and those problems have to be resolved in reverse sequential order, and so how Mary Robinette Kowal described it is almost like writing web code. If you are writing HTML code, you can’t make something italic and then bold and then close the italic code before the bold code. It has to be, it has to be opened and then closed in reverse sequential order. So if you open, like, an A problem, a B problem, and a C problem, then the problems must be resolved in the order C, B, A, and that’s what makes a more satisfying conflict resolution. Now, I don’t know if that’s actually true, because I keep thinking, all right, I’m going to read a book, and I’m going to –

Lauren: [Laughs]

Sarah: – I’m going to see if it’s true, and then because it’s a book, I get into it, and I forgot, I stop paying attention to the mechanics and I just enjoy the book, and then I’m like, well, I, I guess that was what happened. I wasn’t really watching because it was a book, and I was, I was reading it, ‘cause that’s what I do.

Lauren: [Laughs] And like so many things, you don’t notice the scaffolding if it’s –

Sarah: No.

Lauren: – well. You only notice it when it goes wrong, and there is a, a book I read – my goodness, this must have been six or seven years ago, maybe more, and you can tell it stuck in my head – it’s a book by an author who I used to love back in the eighties and who had a comeback, and in this book she had a big misunderstanding that popped up in the middle of the book, and then she never resolved it. Everything else get, got resolved, but that big misunderstanding was never addressed, and by the, the Kowal theory, which makes perfect sense to me, that should have been addressed almost immediately thereafter so the larger problems could then close.

Sarah: Exactly!

Lauren: But it still annoys me that this big misunderstanding was never solved.

Sarah: Oh, I, it makes me nuts when I read something that isn’t solved, and it’s weird because my brain doesn’t always serve up what it is that’s bugging me, so I’ll finish a book and I’ll be like, something wasn’t, something’s not – oh, right! Well, how did she know that that was happening? Because she thought it was this character who was, who was spying on her, but it wasn’t this guy; it was this other guy! But she never finds out who it was that gave away her location. Well, who was it?

Lauren: And these are the plot holes that editors are supposed to find and fix, because authors sometimes get, we get so deep into our own stories that sometimes we forget what we’ve actually put on the page and what we haven’t? And particularly when you’re dealing with different drafts of a story, sometimes you delete things, and you forget that you haven’t replaced them with anything? And that’s where you really need someone to call you to task and say, wait, wait, how come X was never mentioned? Or, how in the hell did she know that he was sleeping with her sister?

Sarah: I have benefited so much from having really, really good editors?

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – Especially because I was writing a non-fiction, and I write on the web, and I don’t have a, a space limit or, or a word limit or any kind of limit, ‘cause it’s the internet. Having someone edit me and say, you know, you used this phrase, like, five times? That’s a wonderful experience.

Lauren: It really is, ‘cause we all do that. It’s a sort of –

Sarah: Oh, yeah.

Lauren: – a writer’s stutter, where I found that you –

Sarah: Yes, that’s exactly it.

Lauren: have one word, and use it nowhere else in the manuscript, but ten spots on the same page.

Sarah: Yep. And I’ve noticed my, my word habits that I have to, that I have to, to, to train myself out of. It’s almost like guiding yourself through a verbal stutter. You have to guide yourself out of your writing stutters, too.

Lauren: Exactly. Since I have McNaught on the brain, I remember as a young reader noticing that almost all her characters had pagan kisses. It was always a pagan kiss –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: – and the heroines were always drawn to the heroes’ frame.

Sarah: You mean, his tongue is, like, is his tongue like Stonehenge? Is that what that means?

Lauren: [Laughs] Which is apparently larger than it seems!

Sarah: Yeah.

Lauren: Right, yeah, I thought, of course I mock with love, ‘cause I, I adore Judith McNaught’s books, but it is funny that you, you do come across these quirks with every author. I –

Sarah: Oh, yes.

Lauren: – I just co-wrote a book with Beatriz Williams and Karen White, and we’re, each of us wrote, it’s a multi-time-period novel.

Sarah: This is the secret room?

Lauren: The Forgotten Room.

Sarah: The Forgotten Room, I’m sorry.

Lauren: That’s okay. I –

Sarah: I know it’s white with gold scrollwork on the cover. I could describe the image to you, no problem. Words? Not so much.

Lauren: Yeah. Thing is, this is when, when I took my general exams, I remember being told, the one piece of advice I got was please do not refer to any book by the color of its cover.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lauren: Sometimes that’s all you can remember –

Sarah: Yeah.

Lauren: – and I do it all the time. Oh, but anyway, but so, the point was, we each wrote a different section. There’s an 1890s section, 1920s section, 1944 section, they’re all interwoven because we all write multiple time period novels and this is a multi-time-period novel with each of us doing a different voice, but we’re very deliberately keeping quite which voice each of us wrote, and I’m very curious to see if any readers will be able to figure it out based on our verbal tics. ‘Cause –

Sarah: Oh, that’s interesting.

Lauren: – our writing styles are similar enough that actually our editor got two of us mixed up and thought that each of us had written the other one’s section, so I, I will be curious to see if anyone can unpick it and guess who did what.

Sarah: Oh, that, that is a fun challenge. Because I, I probably would not be able to tell unless I had just read something of one of yours immediately prior. I, I have this – and I’m still, and it’s been, I think it’s been four or five years since I was on this panel, but I was on a panel with an agent who said that, in her opinion, it is unfair to mainline the books of an author when those books are released a year or so apart, because you’re going to wear out your enchantment with that person’s voice, and those books aren’t meant to be read in that order. And I, I agree and I disagree with her on that, and I’m still thinking about it, but the one thing it definitely does for me, because I’m the type of person who notices patterns, if I mainline an author’s books, I start to see their verbal, their verbal habits.

Lauren: Yes, and it’s, and you’re right, it’s a, it’s a push and pull, because on the one hand, I love reading these books one after the other. I came to Susan Elizabeth Phillips very late, and I read her books one after the other. I think Natural Born Charmer had just come out, so I read everything up to there, and recently I just discovered Laura Resnick’s Esther Diamond series, and when I say discovered I mean my college roommate put in it a box, sent it to me, and said, read this now.

Sarah: [Laughs] Those are, those are, those are good roommates.

Lauren: Oh, I love them! They, it’s exactly what you’re saying, because at the same time, you’re simultaneously charmed with the voice, but you also start noticing patterns that you otherwise wouldn’t have noticed in the book, ‘cause every author has their own phrases that they use –

Sarah: Yes.

Lauren: – their own scenarios that reappear, and also underlying preoccupations. This was when we were going through copyedits in The Forgotten Room recently, and I realized that in my section, there are a lot of, there are a lot of elements that are thematically similar to elements in my other books because whether we realize it or not, we’re all writing, to a greater or lesser extent, variants of the same story over and over and over again.

Sarah: Yep.

Lauren: I think some authors own up to it better than others. You get Robin McKinley, who’s one of my favorite authors, who did first Beauty and then Rose Daughter, which are both retellings of Beauty and the Beast, but I think most of us do it on a sneakier level, or we don’t even realize it ourselves.

Sarah: It’s true. I, I agree with you there. So I have one last question for you. Is there anything that you have read recently that you really recommend to people?

Lauren: Oh, goodness, that’s always a tough one. Well, I have been adoring Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London books. That’s another one which I have just been reading one after the other and which also appeared in a box from my college roommate who I –

Sarah: I, I think we all need to meet your college roommate. Nice!

Lauren: She, she is the best book recommender of all time. So the Ben Aaronovitch books definitely – they’re basically paranormal police procedurals set in modern London, so for anyone like me who adores British mysteries, particularly British police procedurals, these are great. And I also highly recommend Simone St. James’s ghost stories.

Sarah: Oh, she writes creepy stories.

Lauren: Really good. They are, basically, they are old school, hair tingling on the back of your neck ghost stories, and particularly for those who like the 1920s, they’re all 1920s set, and she does a beautiful job with that setting, but it’s like, I grew up loving E. F. Benson’s classic ghost stories and the ghost stories of Edith Wharton, and it’s that incredibly subtle chill.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: You look over your shoulder – like some of the Barbara Michaels, like The Crying Child, where you just feel that little bit of unease. There’s nothing blatant or gory, but there’s that wonderful spine-tingling nervousness.

Sarah: Yep. And the, the sense that you haven’t been told everything, but there’s information that you need and you don’t have it.

Lauren: Yes. And you know that somehow it’s going to get resolved in a safe way.

Sarah: Yes, but you’re not there yet, and until then, it’s creepy as hell.

Lauren: And you really don’t want to make the mistake of reading these alone while your husband is on a business trip.

Sarah: No, not ever. That, that, that’s, that’s right up there with the first time I read the Anita Blake series, I was in a pine forest in upstate New York with very little electricity and scared the crap out of myself.

Lauren: Ooh, I, my, my equivalent of that would be John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer, which I read when I was moving out of my old apartment, so everything is disassembled, my, my entire life is in boxes around me, so my apartment’s this weird obstacle course. I had already taken down a, a lot of the lamps were in boxes, so it’s flickering, uncertain light, ‘cause this was a pre-War apartment, so not every room has an overhead light fixture –

Sarah: Of course not.

Lauren: – and I’m reading The Ghost Writer.

Sarah: Ha ha ha ha.

Lauren: Ha ha ha ha.

Sarah: Yeah, and did you, did you, did you sleep well at all?

Lauren: I do not think I slept that night.

Sarah: [Laughter]

Lauren: Maybe by exhaustion, and, you know, sort of around dawn. But that is one seriously creepy book, in the best possible way.

[music]

Sarah: And that is all for this week’s episode. I hope you enjoyed our conversation, and I want to thank Lauren Willig for writing a whole bunch of books and then sitting down to talk to me about them.

If you have questions or comments or suggestions, you can email us at [email protected]. We appreciate hearing from you, ‘cause you’re all awesome. And if you happen to be on the treadmill right now, keep going! You’re doing very well.

This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Chanel Cleeton’s Playing with Trouble, the sexy new romance in the Capital Confessions series. Download it on July 21st.

And as I mentioned, we have a podcast transcript sponsor. This week’s podcast transcript is brought to you by Wattpad, a community of over forty million people from around the world reading, writing, and connecting over stories. Whatever you’re into, there’s a story you’ll love on Wattpad, perhaps the New Adult novel by Alicia Michaels, V-Card, one of the most popular stories on Wattpad in the romance section this week. You can connect free from devices you already own and find out more at Wattpad.com.

The music you’re listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater. This is called “Rivertown,” and it is by a musician named Michelle Sell from her album Secret Harbor. According to Sassy, Michelle is a San Francisco based harpist, and she’s not released new music recently, but she has some really beautiful older music. Sassy says this is one of her favorite songs to write to, and she says that if you are a California listener and you dream of a harp at your wedding – and who doesn’t? – Michelle does take bookings. You can find her on iTunes or on her website or at Amazon.com.

Future podcasts will feature me, also Jane, and several other very interesting people talking about romance novels, because that is how we roll here.

But in the meantime, on behalf of Lauren Willig and Jane and myself, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a great weekend.

[lovely harp music]