Guilty Pleasures

At the age of 30 I broke up with the boyfriend I’d been with since I was seventeen. The fairytale romance of my teenage years was over and I had some big questions about love. Around this time, I came across an article about the hundred-year anniversary of Harlequin Mills and Boon romance novels. I had assumed Mills & Boon was a dying institution, with a readership made up solely of elderly British women. In fact, they were publishing 50 new titles a month and exporting to 109 countries. I was clearly not the only one preoccupied by questions of love. So began an incredible two year journey into the world of Mills & Boon, which took me from mass tea-parties in Tokyo, to a colonial club in Mumbai, to speed-boating on Long Island with a top male model. Readers’ affection for Mills & Boon the world over became an enchanting way into addressing universal questions about the meaning of true love. In the end I chose to tell the stories of just a handful of the characters I’d met on my travels; three readers and their real life Romeos, one Mills & Boon writer and a cover model. Their struggles to bridge the gap between romantic fantasy and everyday reality offered up a rich canvas through which to explore our very human quest for love.