Jane Heller

New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author

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"Princess Charming" Gets Its Own Sale

May 30, 2013

It’s summer and what better time for a beach read than right now? To celebrate, we’re giving Princess Charming, my novel that takes place on a seven-day Caribbean cruise, the special sale treatment. From June 3-9, the ebook edition, normally $4.99, will be available at all e-tailers for 99 cents – a very sweet deal if you ask me!

Princess Charming is about three best friends (the “three blonde mice,” they call themselves), all divorced, who take vacations together every year. This time they decide to take a week-long cruise aboard the Princess Charming, a ship not unlike Carnival or Royal Caribbean. (I’d love to give the book to all those poor passengers that were stranded in the recent cruise ship disasters. They probably need a good laugh.)

The plot thickens when the heroine, Elaine, overhears a ship-to-shore conversation between two men. The connection is full of static and it breaks up toward the end, but she does find out that somebody’s ex has hired a hit man to kill one of the blonde mice on the ship. Elaine’s a little neurotic to begin with, but this news nearly puts her over the edge – literally. Which of the women is about to be murdered and which of the men on the ship has been hired to do the deed? It couldn’t be Simon, the hot guy she’s fallen for, could it?

Michael and I took a seven-day cruise on Royal Caribbean’s Sovereign of the Seas in order to research Princess Charming, and while I’ll never be a “cruise person,” I did get lots of juicy material for the book. I hope it’s as much fun to read as it was to write.

 

Filed Under: Confessions of a She-Fan Tagged With: chick lit, cruise ships, Jane Heller, Princess Charming, romantic comedy novels

A Q&A With Me on the "Read in a Single Sitting" Blog

October 22, 2012

jane2012a 210x300 Interview: There will always be stories about women finding their way in the world, says author Jane Heller

(Check out the Read in a Single Sitting blog or read the copy-and-paste job here.)

“When my first novel (Clean Sweep, formerly titled Cha Cha Cha) was published in 1994, the term ‘chick lit’ hadn’t even been invented,” says bestselling author Jane Heller.

At the time she was told that she was writing “contemporary women’s fiction”. It was a categorisation she assumed was used strictly for booksellers so they’d know how to market the book.

Having worked as a publicist for several of the large NYC publishing houses in the decade before becoming a writer, she knew that the sales forces and their accounts needed marketing designations to work with.

“But then it dawned on me that men’s fiction was never labeled ‘contemporary men’s fiction’. And when the term ‘chick lit’ came along, there was no such thing as ‘guy lit.’ I found it sexist.”

She still does, but is painfully aware that stories by and about women have always been “ghettoised”, and not only in publishing.

“In Hollywood, classic movies starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were known as ‘women’s weepers.’ And in television, put a bunch of actresses in a series and it’s called a soap opera, not a drama.”

Heller says that she’s not a fan of labels in general, but is willing to allow one exception.

“If stamping my novels with the term ‘chick lit’ allows a female reader to feel more comfortable–that she has a better idea of what she’s getting if she’s never read my books before–then it’s okay with me.”

Genre gluts and “dead” genres

Though the chick lit genre has been enormously successful, it seems as though we’ve come full circle. Chick lit seems to be on the wane, with many chick lit authors being repositioned as contemporary or women’s fiction authors.

“Whenever a genre is successful there’s bound to be a glut. Look at how Fifty Shades of Grey is producing knock-offs. It’s a publishing truism. The conventional wisdom will say, ‘Oh, this genre doesn’t sell.’ And then the minute a book breaks out in that genre, suddenly it’s ‘Let’s acquire books just like that one.’”

Chick lit books may be repackaged and marketed according to current trends, but Heller doesn’t think that there will ever truly be an “end” to the genre.

“There will always be stories told about women finding their way in the world – and finding love in the process. It all comes down to what’s on the page. Is the story well told? Is the heroine someone we relate to in any way? Does the plot keep us engaged? The good novels–no matter what the genre–will always rise to the top and the mediocre ones will fall by the wayside.”

What does the market really want?

That said, authors still find themselves facing pressure to conform to ideas about what it is that the reading public wants.

One issue we’ve touched on several times in our interview features is publishers’ concerns over the marketability of a book featuring an older female protagonist. This appears to be an ongoing issue for authors working within contemporary women’s fiction and chick lit.

“Oh, I could do a half hour on this subject!” says Heller. “It drives me crazy when publishing people say nobody wants to read about older heroines. I’m a baby boomer and I represent the biggest demographic there is–a book-buying demographic, I might add. “

In several of Heller’s novels the heroine and her friends are in their 40s. This is the case with Princess Charming, which was received well at the time of its release, and has been her biggest seller overseas.

“But lately? I’ve been told not to write about a woman my age because it would eliminate the younger audience. Do I want to read about seniors at the assisted living facility? No. But a novel about a woman who’s just ended a long marriage and is living on her own for the first time, as an empty nester, would interest me. Why not? Millions of women have been there.”

Bold beginnings: fresh starts in chick lit

Heller’s touching on the “fresh start” theme is interesting, as it’s one that’s often found in the chick lit genre. In fact, it seems the case that many such novels begin with a “bang”, and I can’t help but wonder how readers might respond to a quieter novel.

“What an interesting question. I’m probably not the best person to ask, because my novels are very high-concept and the opposite of ‘quiet’. That’s probably why so many of them have been optioned for film and television!”

Heller says that when starting a book, it’s the “setup” or “what if” that comes to her first.

“I don’t need a ‘fresh start,’ per se, but something has to happen to the heroine to set her on a journey that will change the course of her life.”

There’s more to life than love

Life changing events certainly abound in Heller’s work. Her heroines are empowered and multifaceted, and despite common perceptions of the genre, aren’t just out to find love.

“My novels are not about how to get a guy. They’re not about dating. They’re not about sex. The romantic relationship is central to the story, but the heroine only finds love in the course of trying to accomplish something else.”

In two of Heller’s novels, The Club and The Secret Ingredient, the heroine is married. Both stories involve the frustrations and disappointments that come with marriage, and feature marriages that become stronger because of some dramatic event.

“In virtually every one of my novels, the heroine finds love as a result of pursuing some other goal–from solving a murder and getting revenge on an ex-husband to struggling to get and keep a job. I love writing about men and women falling in love. Just love it. I’m a romantic and I’m a sucker for happy endings, but I like a story with other elements too.”

Filed Under: Confessions of a She-Fan Tagged With: chick lit, Jane Heller, Read in a Single Sitting blog

I'm in USA Today…Today

October 8, 2012

 

USA Today has a “Happily Ever After” blog that covers, well, novels with happy endings. I was asked to write a blog post answering the question, “Is chick lit dead?” and I obliged. Check it out.

Filed Under: Confessions of a She-Fan Tagged With: chick lit, Happily Ever After blog, Jane Heller ebooks, USA Today

A Rave Review For A Chick Lit Novel In The NYT?

February 5, 2011

I was nonplussed the other day when I read Times‘ book critic Michiko Kakutani’s review of the new novel by “I Don’t Know How She Does It” author Allison Pearson. I liked Pearson’s first novel – very smart and witty in a British, Bridget Jones sort of way – so I’m not surprised that her latest is entertaining. What surprised me was that Kakutani thought so. Take a look.

Just as Allison Pearson’s 2002 best seller, “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” proved she had perfect pitch for channeling a stressed-out working mom in hedge-fund-crazy London, so her new novel, “I Think I Love You,” shows she has the same gift for channeling an insecure 13-year-old in 1974 with a mad crush on the pop star David Cassidy. You know, David Cassidy of “The Partridge Family” — he with the Bambi eyes and feathered mop top, who was the love object of millions of young girls in that era of bell-bottom pants, platform shoes and Mary Quant eye shadow.

A romantic comedy tailor-made for the movies, “I Think I Love You” is a sort of witty mash-up of “Mean Girls,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and one of Nancy Meyers’s fairy tales for the middle aged, with a little nod along the way to “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Though we know after two dozen pages or so exactly where this novel is headed, Ms. Pearson writes with such humor and affection for her characters that we’re perfectly happy to sit back and see how she steers her people toward that happy ending. It’s a novel that’s as light and sugary as a pop song, but if its plot is a little too predictable and jerry-built, the book still easily transcends the chick-lit genre. It showcases its author’s skills as an observer and her uncanny ability to render on the page exactly what it’s like to be a teenage girl, trying to navigate the merciless social hierarchy at school, while pouring all her yearnings into the impossible dream of somehow, someday becoming Mrs. David Cassidy and moving to Los Angeles.

In the first half of the book, Ms. Pearson — a staff writer for The Daily Telegraph in London, who, as the book’s afterword makes clear, once had a teenage crush on David Cassidy herself — allows her heroine, Petra, to talk to us directly. Petra, who lives in a small town in Wales, tells us about sending a poem to David, and taking more time choosing the right color note paper than writing the actual poem:

“I settled on yellow, because it seemed more mature than pink. I thought all the other girls would choose pink, and part of loving him was finding better ways to please him, so he would know how much more I cared.”

Petra tells us how she hated smutty jokes about David: “I suppose they were an unwelcome reminder that he was common property. Stupid, really. I don’t know how you can get the idea that someone who has the biggest fan club in history, bigger than Elvis’s or the Beatles’, is yours and yours alone, but you can, you really can.”

Petra also tells us how she felt his song “I Am a Clown” was full of secret coded messages that she alone could decipher: “David felt lonely and trapped in his pop-star life, and only I could hear him. And you’d never have guessed it, but being able to feel a bit sorry for him was even better than thinking he was perfect.”

Intercut with Petra’s lovelorn reminiscences are chapters about a decent but somewhat hapless young fellow named Bill — a recent college grad, who has the job of ghost-writing letters from David to his fans, which appear in a publication called The Essential David Cassidy Magazine. Bill loathes his job, and lives in fear that his girlfriend, Ruth — who thinks he is a serious rock journalist — will discover his secret.

Needless to say, Petra and Bill are placed on a collision course. They will not only cross paths at a big Cassidy concert in London — an insanely chaotic event at which a girl dies in the crush of fans — but, as these things go in this sort of romantic comedy, they will also meet again as adults, many years and emotional miles later. Petra, by then, is 38, with a 13-year-old daughter who’s got her own teenage crush (on Leonardo DiCaprio); Petra’s husband has recently left her for a younger woman. As for Bill, he oversees a large stable of magazines and is conveniently divorced and melancholy about finding anything like true love.

Clunky as this plot machinery might be, Ms. Pearson does a winning job of making Petra and Bill, and Petra’s best friend and fellow David worshipper — the sunny, good-hearted and slightly ditsy Sharon — as funny and incisive as characters created by, say, Nick Hornby or Stephen Fry, though with considerably more tenderness and felt emotion. Her portraits somehow manage to combine effervescence with earnestness, a finely tuned sense of absurdity with nostalgia, satiric wit with genuine warmth.

Ms. Pearson captures the awful weight of groupthink that can make high school miserable for teenage girls (and the unforgiving notions of beauty and cool, which determine the pecking order there) with the same authority that she brought to bear on office politics and the politics of motherhood in “I Don’t Know How She Does It.”

She shows how Petra’s crush on David Cassidy is really a kind of rehearsal for the love and passion she wants to one day lavish on a real boy in real life, and how those youthful emotions both endure — and are transformed — as the years and decades tick by. And somehow, along the way, she also manages to reinvent the clichés of the midlife crisis novel, recounting how both Petra and David find a way to alter the trajectories of their lives, which they thought had stalled or plateaued for good. In doing so, Ms. Pearson has written a groovy little novel whose charms easily erase any objections the reader might have to the prepackaged and heavily borrowed plot.

Not only do I intend to buy the book after reading the review, but I will go back to work on my own fiction with renewed optimism. This review is good news for those of us who write novels for and about women, it really is.

Filed Under: Confessions of a She-Fan Tagged With: Allison Pearson, chick lit, I Don't Know How She Does It, I Think I Love You, Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, women's fiction

Twitter: A Writer's Friend Or Foe?

January 28, 2011

(courtesy: intomobile.com)

I remember when people started telling me, “You have to be on Twitter,” and I said, “No, I really don’t.” I resisted, in other words. It’s hard enough to write a book without yet another distraction. “But you could be reaching so many more people by tweeting” was the argument I kept getting. “Yeah? Tweet this” was my belligerent answer.

One day I ventured onto Twitter for no good reason and found myself sucked in by it. It was not only fun to connect with those of similar interests/passions but it was actually good discipline to have to confine my thoughts to 140 characters. Talk about learning how to edit. Plus, I “met” other writers – like right away. There’s nothing lonelier than sitting in front of a computer screen trying to create characters and plots out of thin air, but, thanks to Twitter, I have a whole new network of writers with whom I can bitch and moan.

Take today. I was at my desk working when my email informed me that I had a new follower – an L.A.-based chick lit author named Margo Candela.

(courtesy: margocandela.com)

I wasn’t aware of her books, but now I am. Here’s one.

We tweeted about our love for (and our lack of shame about loving) romantic comedies. We DM-ed each other. We emailed each other. We even graduated to a phone call during which we talked about collaborating on a chick flick.

My point is that I wouldn’t have known Margo existed if not for Twitter, because I’m too burrowed into my own little writing cave to keep track of what everybody else in the business is up to.

So now I know. Can’t wait to see what tomorrow’s Twitter feed brings.

Filed Under: Confessions of a She-Fan Tagged With: chick lit, Margo Candela, Twitter

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About Jane Heller

Jane Heller is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. Her fourteen breezy, witty novels of romantic comedy and suspense are now entertaining millions of readers around the world, along with her two books of nonfiction.

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