Posted July 10, 2009 to Digital, Media Appearances, Print
On 10 July 2009 there was positive press about romance – and I was so happy to be included. Deirdre Donahue did a bang-up job on her article Scholarly Writers Empower Romance Genre revealing some of the smart women who write romance, including Julia Quinn and Eloisa James.
My favorite part: where we’re described as more “Borat than Barbara Cartland.”
Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan have the answer: It’s ye olde “boy meets girl … eventually, the boy gets the girl back. They live Happily Ever After.”
Meet “the smart bitches,” the two hottest names in romance fiction not writing love stories.
Back in 2005, Wendell, 34, and Tan, 31 — both unabashed romance readers — created their irreverent blog, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, which today gets 3 million to 6 million hits a month.
Their tone is more Borat than virginal Barbara Cartland, accompanied by a bracing jolt of 21st-century feminist chutzpah: Who are you to judge what we read?
And yes, they’re smart.
This spring, Wendell and Tan published Beyond Heaving Bosoms:The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels (Fireside, $15), an affectionate, often screamingly funny history of the romance genre. Topics include “just how many billionaires can have secret love babies and why the men on the covers always have mullets and those odd, waxed chests,” says Wendell.