My Secret Life as a Rogue Romance Writer

I thought penning steamy books about sex-crazed werewolves was the dumbest job ever. With a little subversion and a huge thesaurus, I learned to love it.

Illustrations by Yifan Wu

I read my first romance novel at age 14 in a sweaty office at my summer internship. I was working at a production company and had been tasked with reading the novel, then doing a quick write-up on its salient features to determine whether or not it was ripe for adaptation. I remember with uncomfortably piercing clarity that it was an e-book based on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which to the uninitiated, was basically the tattered, dime-store bodice ripper that your grandmother and her friends used to circulate back in their own school days. The vividly graphic e-book made me blush to the roots of my pubic hair. I hid under my small gray desk and tore through it during lunch. Even as I hurried through the book, clicking to each new page as though it were a race against the clock, I mocked every line. What was this trite, trivial garbage? And more to the point, why was it dampening the back of the poorly patterned T.J.Maxx work dress I’d purchased just for this inte…