Jamie Brenner is the USA Today-bestselling author of The Forever Summer, Blush, and other popular beach reads. Brenner grew up on blockbuster novels by Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins, the gothic horror of Anne Rice, and Nelson DeMille's political thrillers. She dreams of one day writing a book that combines aspects of all three. After many years in New York City, she now lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. To learn more, visit JamieBrenner.com.
When someone tells me, 'I've read all of your books,' I'm deeply grateful -- but it also makes me wonder: did they really? Because there's a part of my writing life I've kept hidden.
Long before my beach reads found their audience, I wrote a trilogy of erotic novels so explicit, I didn't publish them under my own name. At the time, 2011, it felt like the safest choice: I was just starting out. And I wasn't sure the literary world (or even my friends and colleagues) would take me seriously if I wrote openly about women and sex.
I'm not sure I believe that anymore.
I was afraid if I used my own name I'd hold back on the page. And I knew the purpose of these books was to show women being unapologetically sexual, something women of my generation were not encouraged to be. Growing up in the 1980s, I was told that if I had sex before marriage, my future husband would not respect me. (As if I'd ever marry a man who thought like this.) And I saw that my favorite female novelists, Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz, wrote explicit sex scenes only to have their bestselling books labeled as "trash" by mainstream media. Adventurous, pre-marital sex was a line that respectable women -- and novelists -- crossed at their own peril.
Still, I couldn't imagine writing a book without writing about sex. To me, sex was central to life and love. The way someone behaves in bed reveals as much about them as anything else -- their habits, their tastes, their fears. It's as telling as whether they drink coffee or tea, prefer comedy or horror, love to cook or avoid the kitchen altogether. Of course, at the time, I could barely imagine writing a book at all. It had always been a dream, but I wasn’t sure I had anything to say.
Then, a friend took me to see my first burlesque show. It was just supposed to be just a fun night out but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I never imagined that women taking off their clothes could have so much power. These women weren’t being objectified, they were controlling the audience with wit, audacity and joy. Did they have the decorum I’d been raised to exhibit? No. They had something more valuable: fearlessness.
I knew what my first book would be about: women taking charge of their lives, in the bedroom and out. I set it in the world of burlesque and built it around an ordinary woman in her twenties, pursuing a law career because it was expected of her. My heroine was a “good” girl, always playing by the rules -- until her longtime boyfriend pushes her past her limits. He opens the door to burlesque, and she never looks back. In doing so, she transforms her life and her understanding of love. My heroine owned her body and her choices.
I was proud of the book but never wavered in my decision to use a pen name: I had two young daughters and didn’t want to embarrass them. So I chose a name that was a combination of my favorite soap character, Brooke Logan, and the writers who created her, the Belle family. I became Logan Belle. My daughters knew about the Blue Angel trilogy, and about my pen name. I told them they could read them when they were “older.”
Not long after Blue Angel came out, an earthquake called Fifty Shades of Grey shook up the literary world. Suddenly, erotic romance was making headlines. The genre was officially on the map. That was the good news. The bad news, at least for me, was that the preferred route to sexual self-discovery was at the hands of a controlling, dominant man. This was less interesting to me creatively, so I started writing commercial women’s fiction under my real name. Every summer, I went on book tour promoting my work. But I never spoke about Blue Angel. In book publishing, the conventional wisdom said to pick a lane and stay in it. As a good girl, I played by the rules.
And then something shifted. After 12 books, 15 years, countless conversations with book clubs, booksellers and readers across generations, I began to see that the lines we thought were so fixed weren't real at all. The silos created by the publishing industry, and maybe even by writers like me, were starting to dissolve. "Serious" readers were just as likely to be watching Bridgerton, and teenagers and soccer moms alike were singing along to Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club," an unabashed anthem about stripping. It wasn't that audiences had suddenly changed. It was that they'd always been more open than I'd allowed myself to believe.
Something else changed: My children became adults. One of my daughters asked about the books. She said she still wants to read them but wouldn't if it would upset me. I realized it was time to stop hiding those books in the back of the bookshelf -- for my daughters, but also for my readers.
Fifteen years after the debut of Blue Angel, I decided to republish my erotic romances under my own name. I no longer believe writers need to separate themselves by genre. Readers can handle it, and now I can too.
The books I once hid now feel like the most honest thing I've ever written.