Megan Mulry’s A Royal Pain will be in
bookstores Nov. 1. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
By Ron Hayes
“What can I do while the kids are in school?”
Some women learn to play tennis. Some take up yoga.
Megan Mulry tackled a royal romance.
Her family was settled in their coastal Delray Beach home. Her husband had a successful career as a private investor. Helen, 12, and Jeb, 5, were happily enrolled in the Gulf Stream School.
“So I decided to try writing a contemporary Regency romance,” Mulry recalls. “I started researching dukes.”
She began writing in September 2010, sent a synopsis to 14 agents three months later and had a publishing contract with Sourcebooks by June 2011.
“I burst into tears when I opened the box of advance copies,” she says.
The title changed along the way.
How To Deal With A Duke became Royal Strings Attached, and then Earl Meets Girl.
You can find A Royal Pain in bookstores beginning Nov. 1.
“I want people to have an hour or two on the beach and enjoy it,” Mulry says, “and I’m thrilled that people will pay me to do it.”
What you’ll find in that hour or two is a modern Cinderella story told with a lot less Disney and a little more sex.
Bronte Talbott, a young Chicagoan newly embarked on a successful career in advertising, is recovering from her breakup with a twangy Texas boyfriend when she meets a British doctoral student named Max Heyworth in the science fiction section of a used bookstore.
Who is Max Heyworth? Ah hah! None other than Maxwell Fitzwilliam-Heyworth, next in line to become the 19th Duke of Northrop.
Yes, there’s a happy ending, eventually. This is a romance novel, after all. What’s surprising is how well-written it is.
Megan Mulry is not the sort of woman people who don’t read romance novels expect to be writing romance novels.
She has a degree in Victorian literature from Northwestern University and knows her Dickens, Trollope and Thackeray. She was Tina Brown’s assistant at The New Yorker, and the lifestyle editor at Boston magazine. She’s lived in London, working in finance.
“I’ve read serious literature,” she says, “but everybody dies in the end. With romance novels, I love the pace, the happy endings, the joyfulness. They’re life-affirming, and so entertaining. You’re reading like candy, but you’re getting a well-researched historical novel.”
The early critics seem to agree. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls A Royal Pain “a delightful love story ... worth reading again and again.”
Booklist finds that “the very human characters keep the plot fresh, funny, and engaging, with Mulry’s lavish descriptions of fashion an added bonus.”
Closer to home, her family is supportive, but cautious.
“I don’t think I’m your target audience,” Mulry’s husband, Jeff Huisinga, told her.
“Is it appropriate for me?” her daughter wondered.
“In a couple of years,” her mother decreed.
Romance isn’t what it used to be, after all, and neither are romance novels:
The first kiss he had been anticipating for the past four hours, the past six weeks. The kiss he could no longer delay. His tongue trailed tentatively across the seam of her inviting lips, then ventured into the warm welcome of her luscious mouth.
Bronte simply gave in. Her eyelids became unaccountably heavy and she emitted an unconscious mewl of pleasure ...
It goes uphill from there.
“Yes, there are some sexy parts,” Mulry promises. “The cutoff is four sex scenes. After that, it’s called erotic romance.”
Her novel has three. However, you may want to turn up the A/C before reading them.
In the meantime, the Dutch and Spanish rights have been sold, and Mulry has a three-book contract.
“I try to write Monday through Friday, 2,000 words a day,” she says. “In 50 days, you’ve got 100,000 words.”
She’s already finished six novels, one that follows the duke’s younger brother, a second his sister.
“This is not Fifty Shades of Gray,” she says with a laugh. “But I’d like 30 million readers.”
For more information, visit www.meganmulry.com.
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