I’ve been seeing a lot of posters around town advertising “The Nora Roberts Collection,” a series of Lifetime movies based on romance novels so smoldering that one of them caused it’s lead, country music singer Leanne Rhymes, to cheat on her husband with her chiseled costar. I decided to look into Roberts herself, the writer who supplied the material for this erotic controversy.
As usual I began and ended my research with Wikipedia, uncovering the following juicy tidbits:
During her sophomore year in high school, Roberts…met her first husband, Ronald Aufem-Brinke. They married, against her parents’ wishes, in 1968, as soon as she had graduated from high school.
Sounds a little bit salacious, right? Two young lovers, striking out on their own in direct defiance of their families, finding their way through the world by the light of their love. But wait, it gets better:
Roberts met her second husband, Bruce Wilder, a carpenter, when she hired him to build her bookshelves.
WTF!?! If that’s not the plot of a romance novel I don’t know what is. A lonely, recently divorced novelist…the humble but passionate carpenter she hired to build her bookselves. His calloused but gentle hands…
As a man who experienced much of his sexual awakening flipping through romance novels in grocery stores, I know a thing or two about pulpy plots.
My conclusion: Roberts is not a novelist.
She is a very skilled and prolific autobiographer who just happens to have lived the MOST ROMANTIC LIFE EVER.