The article below appeared in Suburban Essex Magazine, April 2004. Reprinted with permission.
By Kathy Gilligan
What if you had it all, or thought you did, then lost it all? Could you successfully pull your life together and once again enjoy it? Or suppose you had an illness that no one believed was real? How would that affect your mind and your everyday life, and could you find the strength to rise above it to live a fulfilling life? Tough questions, to be sure—but who would think of such things?
The ‘who’ is Glen Ridge novelist Nancy Herkness, and in her work she not only asks, but answers these tough questions, and much to the delight of readers. With novels that pose such questions, some may be surprised to learn the nature of this author’s genre and her passion: Herkness writes romance novels.
“My grandmother gave me my first Georgette Heyer romance novel in high school,” the author recalls. Although raised on literary classics, the high schooler was immediately hooked. “Heyer’s books were wonderful, witty and well written.” With a developing love of romance novels, and a longstanding passion for literature, Herkness attended Princeton University and studied creative writing, concentrating on poetry. “Writing poetry was great training for prose writing, and especially for commercial writing,” she says. “You learn to choose the best word to say what you mean—in commercial writing, you want to get into the story quickly and communicate clearly.”
Even with this background, Herkness never imagined she would become a writer, much less a novelist. “It wasn’t my goal in life,” she says. “Writers have a very hard time making a living.” Instead she worked in marketing for a time, in retail, as a systems analyst, and also married and had two children.
Still, Herkness believes that her life prepared her to become a novelist. “Whatever my job, I always wrote—sales, technical manuals, newsletters—so I was always practicing these skills,” she says. And in her life as a suburban “soccer mom,” she found much of the inspiration for her first novel, A Bridge to Love, that she began writing just a few years ago, published by Berkley Sensation in August of 2003. “The protagonist has a comfortable, secure life as a suburban mother—much like my life—until her husband dies, and she finds out her best friend betrayed her. The book came out of wondering, if these things happened, how someone could rebuild a life from there.”
Along with her own experience, Herkness does a lot of research to add authenticity and new angles to her work. “I walked the George Washington Bridge to I could make it real when one of my characters walks that bridge,” she says. Her second novel, Shower of Stars, expected to be published in July, involves a meteor hunter, and some of the author’s research involved going to a meteorite museum in Washington, DC, and learning about this little-known profession. For a third novel, she is researching fibromyalgia, an often misdiagnosed and misunderstood illness. “I’m very meticulous about research,” she says. “Readers can’t wait to find mistakes—romance novels are an amazing and demanding genre.”
Even if it is demanding, the genre has many elements that this author, and her readers, appreciate and enjoy. “Romances can be realistic, historical, or science fiction-based and are so popular that 2,000 titles are published every year,” Herkness says. Whatever form they take, she adds, they are also upbeat—no one dies and characters often overcome. “The characters live through the ‘what ifs’, work through a lot, alone and with a romantic interest, and eventually, both form some kind of commitment,” Herkness explains. And that, she notes not only makes good reading, but offers a kind of hopefulness and optimism that readers embrace.