Last summer, Sarah Wendell, an editor of the Web site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, posed a question to her readers: "So what line of dialogue from a romance has rocked your socks to the point that, long after those socks were lost in the dryer, you still remember it?" Jane Austen got a few votes ("You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope"). There were nods to Georgette Heyer ("I remember every word you have spoken to me") and Connie Brockway ("You are my country, Desdemona .... My Egypt. My hot, harrowing desert and my cool, verdant Nile, infinitely lovely and unfathomable and sustaining"). The runaway winner was Nora Roberts-La Nora, the Queen, or, simply, NR. One reader nominated "Carnal Innocence," in which the plantation heir Tucker Longstreet is questioned by an F.B.I. agent about the murder of an ex-lover who turns up dead in a local pond:
BURNS: I'm informed that you and the deceased had a relationship.
TUCKER: What we had was sex.
Another chose 'The Heart's Victory," as Lance Matthews, a race-car driver, walks in on Cynthia (Foxy) Fox taking a bath:
Foxy: I've decided to hate you.
LANCE: Oh? Again?
In "Sea Swept," the first book in Roberts's Chesapeake series, the Quinns are a trio of foster kids raised as brothers on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Their adoptive father, Ray, dies suddenly, leaving a younger boy, Seth DeLauter, in their care. Carn (a peripatetic speedboat racer), Phillip (an advertising executive), and Ethan (a commercial fisherman) are forced to move back into the house in which they grew up. Together, they drive to the mall to get some shoes for Seth:
CAM: You can't buy decent socks for twenty these days.
ETHAN: You can if you don't have to have some fancy designer label on them. This ain't Paris.
CAM: You haven't bought decent shoes in ten years. And if you don't pull up that frigging seat, I'm going to-
PHILLIP: Cut it out! Cut it out right now or I swear I'm going to pull over and knock your heads together .... I'll dump the bodies in the mall parking lot and drive to Mexico. I'll learn how to weave mats and sell them on the beach at Cozumel. ... I'll change my name to Raoul, and no one will know I was ever related to a bunch of fools.
SETH: Does he always talk like that?
CAM: Yeah, mostly. Sometimes he's going to be Pierre and live in a garret in Paris, but it's the same thing.
The first time she read it, Wendell wrote, she laughed so hard that she fell out of her beach chair. One reader, a court reporter, confessed that she planned to "feign sickness for the next three to six days so I can lay in bed and reread all my NR yet again."
As a Quinn brother might say, it had better be one hell of a cold. Roberts, who, as J. D. Robb, also writes futuristic police procedurals, has written a hundred and eighty-two novels, in addition to short stories and novellas. In a typical year, she publishes five "new Noras": two installments of a paperback original trilogy; two J. D. Robb books; and, each summer, what her editor, Leslie Gelbman, refers to as the "big Nora"-a hardcover stand-alone romance novel. To keep track of Roberts's output, Amy Berkower, her agent, maintains a dry-erase board in her office, along with a running catalogue of factoids. Twenty-seven Nora Roberts books are sold every minute. There are enough Nora Roberts books in print to fill Giants Stadium four thousand times. Since 2004, the cover of each Roberts release has featured a monogram in the upper-right corner-the official Nora Roberts seal guarantees that this is a new work by Nora Roberts." Her books outnumber her intimates. Only one J. D. Robb novel features a dedication-to a friend whose brother is a priest, and who promised, in exchange for the mention, to get him to grant Roberts perpetual absolution.
According to Publishers Weekly, Roberts wrote three of the ten best-selling mass-market paperbacks of 2008: "The Hollow," the second book of the "Sign of Seven" trilogy (three blood brothers find love and fight a demon); "High Noon," a reprint of her hardcover romance from 2007 (a hostage negotiator in Savannah meets a cute sports-bar owner while talking down a suicidal bartender); and ''The Pagan Stone," the third book of her "Sign of Seven" trilogy. "The Hollow" sold 1,912,349 copies, exceeded only by "The Appeal," by John Grisham. Penguin, Roberts's publisher, shipped six hundred and thirty-seven thousand copies of last year's hardback release alone, for a total of more than eight million books in 2008. In addition, Roberts sold five and a half million copies of backlist titles, and J. D. Robb sold four and a half million books.
Roberts grosses sixty million dollars a year, Forbes estimated in 2004, more than Grisham or Stephen King, who is, incidentally, a Roberts admirer. "Nora Roberts is cool," King said, on the jacket blurb for ''Tribute,'' last year's big Nora. Antoinette Ercolano, a vice-president of trade-book buying at Barnes & Noble, said recently that Roberts is the bookseller's top romance writer. (The chain's top mystery writer, after Janet Evanovich, is J. D. Robb.) Diane Pershing, the president of the Romance Writers of America, told me, on the subject of Roberts, "You know that movie 'Amadeus,' where Salieri was jealous because Mozalt seemed to be taking dictation from God?"
One morning in December, Roberts was at Vesta, a pizzeria that her older son, Dan, runs with his wife in Boonsboro, Maryland. She had driven into town from nearby Keedysville, where she lives with her husband, Bruce Wilder. Once she had taken off a pair of fleece gloves and a purple sequinned beret, she advanced a philosophy of her profession. "You know, writing's creative and all this, certainly, but you don't just wander around dreaming," she said. ''That's not what you're getting paid for." Roberts scoffs at the notion of inspiration, divine or otherwise. She continued, "People go, 'Oh, you work six or eight hours a day, oh my God.' Well, yeah, how many hours do you work?' Well, yeah, but .. .' But nothing. I think this is my job. And I think people who -she hesitated for a moment-"have more of an artistic bent, they're just not as productive, and their writing is probably not any better than mine at the end of the day." According to my calculations, it takes Roberts, on average, forty-five workdays to write a book.
In March, as the publishing industry withered, Harlequin, the Canadian romance house, posted profits of $18.4 million, up thirty per cent from that time last year. Romance is not a genre that suffers slow, or abstracted, authors, and Roberts, who has red hair, hooded green eyes, and a pursed half smile, is what used to be called a tough broad. Among her friends, she is known as N.F.R.-Nora Fucking Roberts. According to the writer Patricia Gaffney, "She sets high professional and personal standards for herself and the people around her, and the ones who can't live up to them don't always get a lot of sympathy." Roberts is not a hugger, or a crier. She has a dirty mouth, a smoker’s voice, and a closet full of Armani. Shopping is her main form of self-indulgence -she once ordered a Land Rover over the telephone when it was "snowy and crappy" and her Z had stalled out-but you will not find her in bedroom mules or a marabou boa. Her sense of humor can be wicked. “I hope to write the first romantic suspense time-travel paranormal thriller set in Mongolia dealing with Siamese twins who tragically fall in love with the same woman who may or may not be Annie Oakley," she once joked. At Vesta, she said that she has one key commandment of writing: "Ass in the chair."
Roberts and Wilder own several businesses in Boonsboro, including Turn the Page, a bookstore that Wilder, a sweet and lanky former carpenter, manages. On the day we met, Turn the Page was hosting a Roberts signing. There were Nora T-shirts, Nora water bottles, Nora stadium cushions, and, as door prizes, some Nora audio-books that Nora had signed. It was a Roberts reader's Lourdes. Her devotees amass collections as much as libraries. "The Official Nora Roberts Companion," published in 2003, includes a two-hundred-and-six-page concordance featuring the plotlines and cover images from "Affaire Royale" to "Witness in Death." Roberts, who is fifty-eight, once told USA Today, "I want to die at age one hundred and twenty at my keyboard after having great sex."
The signing began at noon. Roberts, who had dressed up for the event, in a pumpkin-colored boiled-wool jacket and olive slacks, was seated at a card table. A woman in a police-department sweatshirt approached, holding a copy of 'The Pagan Stone."
"It was awesome," she said. "My kids were like, 'Can we have breakfast?' I was like, 'No eating until I'm done!' "
Roberts took a swig from a can of Diet Pepsi. Someone passed around a plate of homemade oatmeal cookies. Listening to the give-and-take between Roberts and her fans was like eavesdropping on the collective unconscious of American women: bichons frises, migraines, Christmas shopping, marital problems.
A woman in her twenties handed Roberts a copy of "Morrigan's Cross," from 2006. "I usually read these as soon as they come out, but I have a six-month-old," she said.
An older woman chimed in, "You've got to learn to rock him and read."
''Yes, or read to him," Roberts said. "'Cause they really can't understand those parts."
"My five didn't!" the older woman said.
A girl approached carrying a souvenir tote bag. "Everybody's reading Nora," it said.
'J.D. is offended, but I'm not," Roberts said. She added, in a stage whisper, "She's a bitch, anyway."
"Does your hand hurt from all that writing?" someone asked, as Roberts, wearing a Celtic thumb ring (she also has a Celtic tattoo on her ankle), scrawled her autograph.
Roberts replied, "I'm going to treat it with alcohol internally later."
Smart-alecks make bad pupils but excellent students of human nature:
Roberts is good at what she does not only because she is prolific but also because she can write zingy dialogue and portray scrappy but sincere characters. She is known for her particularly believable heroes-according to Wendell, "100% real dudes." Her female characters frequently possess an entrepreneurial streak, and they are more independent than many of their peers, and certainly their predecessors, even if some among them still have a propensity for crumpling like tissues at the sight of bodily fluids. " 'Oh. Oh my,' was all she managed before her eyes rolled back," Roberts writes, of Faith Lavelle, who, in "Carolina Moon," has agreed to help the bachelor veterinarian Wade Mooney perform an operation on an injured sheepdog. Roberts's colloquial style can be inelegant, but it deflates the more vaporous of her scenes-Wade revives Faith, and, in a few sentences, they are back to talking about "dog poop."
A self-taught writer, and an irreverent one, Roberts was not, at first, an easy sell. Amy Berkower said, "I remember Nancy"-Nancy Jackson, the editor who acquired Roberts's first novel, in 1980-"standing on her head to get Nora's books because they didn't follow the formula as strictly as others." In violation of Lubbock's Law, a genre convention stating that, for reasons of reader identification, romances should be written from only the heroine's point of view, Roberts sometimes adopted the hero's perspective. As she and her peers evolved, so did the genre, away from the so-called "fight 'em and fuck 'em" romances of the seventies toward a more contemporary, American style that portrayed increasingly, if not entirely, companionate relationships. "The classic British romances focused on the war between the sexes," Isabel Swift, who edited Roberts for years at Harlequin, said. 'With Nora, it was more of a challenge than a real battle of wills." Reading a Roberts novel is like watching a game of tennis between two very good players: it is not so much the outcome of the match but the back-and-forth between commensurate opponents that elicits the spectator's pleasure. Robert has never depicted a male virgin- least not that she can remember-or an abortion, but Parker Brown, the heroine of "Happy Ever After," which will come out next year, is a wedding planner, "of the Connecticut Browns," and her love interest is a mechanic.
Roberts's predominance is a feat of marketing as much as of style. At one point, Roberts had delivered a trilogy to Penguin, the installments of which were scheduled to run a year apart. "I went nuts," Berkower recalled. "They said they didn't want to overexpose Nora. And I said, Well, she's not Mickey Mouse yet.' " The parties compromised on a book every six months, a publishing schedule that they have adhered to since. Berkower and Roberts conceived of J. D. Robb in 1995, as a way to capitalize upon Roberts's rate of production. The effect of the ploy was not only to turn up the pace of the treadmill for the publishing industry but also to conjoin the genres of romance and crime, along with their readerships. John Lennard, a professor of literature at the University of the West Indies, wrote, in an essay on Roberts, "Roberts has in some ways done for Romance what the hyper-celebrity of Harry Potter has done for Children's Literature, making it acceptable fare for reading adults in general." To project mainstream appeal, Roberts's books typically feature her name, in big letters, and some sort of inanimate, totemic object (cattails, a lighthouse, a shrimp trawler), rather than what she has called "nursing mother" covers-"when she's falling out of her dress, and he has his mouth on her tit."
The Times Book Review-Roberts has spent more than seven hundred weeks on the paper's best-seller list-has reviewed her once. "They're keeping the lights on late for the promise of heaving bosoms and consciousness-altering orgasms," a reviewer wrote of "Northern Lights," a 2004 romantic thriller set in the Alaskan bush. Roberts is as uninterested in the literary establishment as she is unloved by it. "She didn't go to college, much less major in English, or take courses at the Iowa Writers' Workshop or Bread Loaf," Patricia Gaffney told me. "She's indifferent to what critics say are the rules for proper fiction writing."
Toward the end of the signing, a woman said, "Do you know, Nora, that my goal is to read every book you've ever written?"
'Well, if I've written them, you can read them," Roberts replied. "It takes me longer."
Every romance requires two elements: a love story and a happy ending. "Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded," Samuel Richardson's tale of a naive servant girl who is courted by her employer, Mr. B., is considered by many scholars to be the first romance novel. Published in 1740, it was an instant best-seller, spawning merchandise (teacups, fans) and, as romance novels always have, highbrow derision (in Henry Fielding's "Shamela," the heroine is a wily strumpet who marries Booby for his money). Pamela Regis, a professor of English at McDaniel College, in her book "A Natural History of the Romance Novel," charts the course of the genre from Richardson to Austen to Bronte to Forster. E. M. Hull's "The Sheik"-the tale of an aristocratic Englishwoman who, travelling through the Algerian desert, is captured and raped by a libidinous chieftain, and, despite "the sickening reek of his clothes," eventually falls in love with him-was published in 1919. The "ur-romance novel of the twentieth century," according to Regis, it marked the emergence of the swashbuckling tale of high sexual adventure against an exotic backdrop as an "enormously popular" form.
By the nineteen-fifties, the English house Mills & Boon was publishing what would evolve into category romances-short, branded series books, later sold in grocery stores and at newsstands and by subscription. Led by such bodice-rippers as Kathleen E. Woodiwiss's "The Flame and the Flower" and Rosemary Rogers's "Sweet Savage Love," romance experienced a boom, in popularity and in profits, beginning in the seventies. In 1971, Harlequin bought Mills & Boon. The Romance Writers of America issued its first RITA awards in 1981. Roberts has won nineteen of them, and has been inducted into the R.W.A. Hall of Fame three times. Regis writes, "The five writers who belong in any list of canonical twentieth-century romance writers are Georgette Heyer, Mary Stewart, Janet Dailey before her self-admitted plagiarism, Jayne Ann Krentz, and Nora Roberts." Roberts is perhaps doubly canonical: Dailey, with whom Roberts was friendly, plagiarized from a number of her books, an experience that Roberts has likened to "mind rape." (Roberts sued for copyright infringement in 1997, and the case was settled out of court.)
Romance was, in a sense, user-generated content before user-generated content existed-from the outset, its publishers assumed that readers would want to write, providing tip sheets for prospective authors and accepting their manuscripts over the transom. The opening spread of Roberts's first book, "Irish Thoroughbred" (1981), featured this message from the publisher: "Dear Reader ... you play an important part in our future plans for Silhouette Romances. We welcome any suggestions or comments on our books and I invite you to write to us at the address below." Early in her career, Roberts embarked on a grassroots promotion tour. At a nursing home, a man with a walker shuffled up to the meeting room and read a sign on the door. "Nora Roberts?" he said, disgustedly. "I thought it was Oral Roberts."
Loyalty means much to Roberts - Berkower has been her agent for her entire career-and it endears her greatly to the romance community that, even after her crossover success, she continued, until failing to come to terms with Harlequin, in 2005, to write category romances. For twenty-eight years, she has attended the R.W.A. convention. Every year, on a Sunday night, she and the writer Ruth Ryan Langan throw a pajama party. 'We just giggle and kick off our shoes," Langan said. "I think last year, in San Francisco, we ordered popcorn and champagt1~." Roberts does impressions. According to the writer Mary Kay McComas, "She is a magnificent Scottish Highlander-except that they sometimes sound exactly like her Ohio River riffraff from a Western novel."
When the Internet took off, Roberts, who loathes flying, seized upon it as a way to interact with her readers. Amy Berkower recalled, "I remember I was on vacation in Costa Rica, and I ran into a guy who was the editorial director of AOL at the time. He said, 'I wish other authors were more like Nora.' And I said, Why?' He said, Well, apparently, she goes into chat rooms on, like, New Year's Eve.'''
In 1997, a group of Roberts fans- Noraholics-established a site called ADWOFF, in honor of a comment that Roberts had made on an AOL message board:
Barb, how can one live without French fries. Not well, I say. In fact, I've been known to say a day without fries is like a day without an orgasm.
Roberts mastered viral marketing early. Sue Noyes, who runs ADWOFF, was turned on to Nora by Nora. "I was looking for a new author, and so I went on AOL and said, 'Convince me, people, why you think I should read Nora Roberts instead of Patricia Cornwell,' " Noyes, a grocery-store manager in Scranton, recalled. "Nora came in and said, Well, if you give me a try, let me know what you think.' "
ADWOFF maintains a first-generation feel. Its participants go by names like Puppy Princess of Peanut Butter and Birthdays, and Countess Coffee of the Caffeinated Canines. On one message board, "Stooooopid Questions!," readers can quiz Roberts about whatever they please: "Hi, Nora! This is really random, but do you like salmon?" (A. "Actually, salmon is my least favorite of the fishies"), "Have you ever dropped anything important or of value in the toilet?" (A. ''I'm a big believer in not just keeping the seat down, but keeping the lid down for just that reason"), "Nora, in the grand scheme of things, what is better ... a glue stick or a glue gun?" (A. "A glue stick's more portable, right?"). Roberts has been asked, at least twice, if she likes "Riverdance," and why cargo is called cargo if it's sent by ship.
Roberts's persona is nurturing-for hiccups, "Drink water out of a clear glass, watching your finger while you draw a circle around the bottom as you drink"; for an ice pack, use frozen peas-but never vulnerable. Her readers crave her attention more than she craves theirs, and the power differential, which has widened over the years, affords the occasional awkward moment. "As there always seems to be at least one photojournalist in every family, is BW ... the one who currently takes photos at every family gathering [and] maintains them in photo or scrap books?" Ocean-devotion wrote, of Bruce Wilder. "BW’s usually too busy at gatherings to take too many photos. Nobody around here scrapbooks," Roberts wrote back.
Sentimentality cloaked in snappiness-whether in imitation of Roberts or by proximity to her-is the site's prevailing register. Roberts's witticisms can sometimes seem facile, as if she were reading from a needlepoint pillow. "And the day Jesse Cooke, ex-Marine, let a woman outwit him was the day they'd eat cherry Popsicles in hell," she writes, in "Montana Sky." But her fans, tellers of riddles and doers of Sudoku, value cleverness. "If every clock in the house is set to a different time, what time is it?" one reader inquired. Roberts's response: "Hopefully, it's Happy Hour Time."
When Roberts writes a book, she assembles a community piece by piece, a train-set village of her own invention. In "Tribute," Cilla McGowan, a former child star, moves from Los Angeles to the Shenandoah Valley, to renovate a farmhouse that belonged to her grandmother. Roberts narrates Cilla's seduction-by the place, and by Ford Sawyer, a graphic novelist who lives across the road-in a plainspoken but moving aria on the joys of rural living: "In this world, Cilla discovered, people ate homemade lasagna and apple cobbler, and treated a meal as food rather than a performance. And a guest or family ... was given a plate of each covered in tinfoil to take home for leftovers. If the guest/family was driving, she was offered a single glass of wine with dinner, then plied with coffee afterward."
Roberts would have made a keen satirist, were she not without condescension, or cruelty. In "Montana Sky," she pokes fun at the pace of life on a cattle ranch:
"Ham blew out smoke, watched it drift to the ceiling. Willa imagined cities being built, leveled, new stars being born, novas." She does great busybodies and wacky relations. In "Carolina Moon," Tory Bodeen, back in Progress, South Carolina, after many years, steps into the local real-estate office (downtown, near the Flower Basket, Hair Today, and Rollins Paint & Hardware) and runs into Lissy Harlowe, the most popular girl from high school. "Now, you just tell me everything you've been up to," Lissy says.
Rosie Sikes LaRue Decater Smith is the aunt of the man Tory ends up falling in love with: "She wore a wig, at least Tory assumed it was a wig, of platinum blond, a flowing floor-length dress striped like a red-and-white awning, and enough jewelry to topple a lesser woman." Rosie, a compulsive shopper, arrives at the gift shop that Tory has just opened:
"Now what the blue hell is this thing?"
She picked up a polished wooden stand with a hole in it.
"It's a wine rest."
"Don't that beat all? Why anybody'd want to give a decent bottle of wine time to rest is beyond me. Wrap me up two of those. Lucy Talbott!"
Roberts's characters fill up their tanks at the Qwik Mart, buy Nutter Butters and Little Debbies, and bitch about the "goddamn go-coffee from Sheetz." They eat bagels while battling the forces of evil. Their parents, and often their grandparents, are present in the narrative. Hers are not Carrie Bradshaw fantasies.
Born Eleanor Marie Robertson in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1950, Roberts writes what she knows, in a general sense-hardworking people who would kill for their kids but who otherwise don't take themselves too seriously. Her father, Bernard, was a stagehand and projectionist who eventually opened a lighting business. Her mother, Eleanor, was a homemaker and later a partner in the business. They met as teen-agers in northeastern Washington, D.C., after Eleanor had just broken up with one of Bernard's brothers, and their relationship figures prominently in Roberts's mythology of romantic love. "My father always walked with his hands in his back pockets, and he's kind of swaggering and he says to his brother, 'Leave her alone.' My mother asked her mother if she could go out with him. And my grandmother said, 'You mean Bessie's bad Bernie?'" They were married, Roberts mentions frequently, for sixty-three years.
Roberts was the youngest of five children, and the only girl. The Robertsons were traditional Irish Catholics. (Roberts, who is interested in Wicca and other spiritual practices, calls herself  "very lapsed.") Nora was expected to make her brothers' beds. Her father often took her with him to the movie theatre. "I remember this double feature--I sat all day in the theatre and it was 'Peter Pan' and 'The King and I,' " she recalled. "When they did the 'Shall We Dance?' number, I was just swept away. Later, I realized there's such restrained sexuality in that dance, but as a child I just knew there was something really important and exciting going on, besides the music." Roberts attended an all-girl parochial school until ninth grade, when a nun named Sister Alice Maureen became Mother Superior. She made participation mandatory in a game called Paul Revere, in which each girl had to carry one of her classmates on her back and run the length of the gym. "I was this bone-skinny runt, and I could not do it," Roberts recalled. "My mother finally let me go to Blair-'Boys!' "
At Montgomery Blair High School, Roberts dated a classmate named Ronnald Aufdem-Brinke, whom she married upon graduation, at the age of seventeen. The couple settled in Keedysville, in an out-of-the-way ranch house in which Roberts continues to live. In 1972, Dan was born. Three years later, another son, Jason, arrived. Aufdem-Brinke worked for a sheet-metal manufacturer; Roberts was briefly a legal secretary, before quitting to stay home. She refers to those years as her "Earth Mother" period. "I baked bread, canned, sewed, macramed, embroidered, grew vegetables," she once told an interviewer. "I was obviously looking for a creative outlet."
In February of 1979, a now legendary snowstorm hit. Roberts, trapped in the house "with a three- and a six-year-old ... and a dwindling supply of chocolate," picked up a legal pad and scratched out her first manuscript. It featured a Spanish hero and a heroine with a sprained ankle, and was, Roberts asserted later, "simply dreadful." Roberts kept writing. In 1980, Silhouette accepted "Irish Thoroughbred," which was pretty dreadful, too ("You impudent little wench!" "You great thundering blackguard!"), but possessed flashes of the spiritedness and humor that would define her success.
In Boonsboro, which is known for it cantaloupes, Roberts is a prominent but elusive citizen. She contributes handsomely to local causes (the fire department, the library) but sometimes, she told me, does not leave her house for three weeks. In the past year, she has been more visible than usual, transforming a dilapidated historic building on the town's main square into a small boutique hotel called Inn BoonsBoro. Robelts owns buildings on three of the four corners in the middle of town, which some locals refer to as Nora Square. 'We're just so proud to say we have Nora in Boonsboro," Debra Smith, the town manager, told me.
The inn, which opened earlier this year, has seven themed rooms, all dedicated to pairs of literary lovers. There is heather-scented hand lotion in the Jane and Rochester Room. The Eve and Roarke Room-named for the protagonists of the J. D. Robb books-is furnished with a mod orange chair. On the morning of February 22,2008, as the renovation neared completion, a liquid-propane tank ignited and set fire to the inn and several adjacent buildings. By nightfall, only the original masonry remained. Within days, Roberts had announced that  I she would rebuild. The saga of the inn played out like something from a Nora Roberts novel about tragedy, pettiness, grace, and, ultimately, resilience in a small town. ("I was just reading about the fire in Boonsboro-Nora Roberts, Nora Roberts, Nora Roberts," an anonymous reader wrote to the Hagerstown Herald-Mail.) "Blue Smoke," the big Nora from 2005, contains an eerily prescient passage, in which the heroine, Reena Hale, on the day she gets her first period, watches the family pizzeria go up in flames: "She would never forget it, not for all of her life, standing with her family while Sirico's burned .... She could feel it inside her belly, the fire, like the cramping. The wonder and horror, the awful beauty of it, pulsed there."
“Blue Smoke" takes place in Baltimore. Roberts's readers identify not only with her settings but also with her protagonists-fundamentally kind, optimistic people who talk about cars ("You pop the clutch and drive around at ninety, you're going to be stacking up tickets like cordwood"), wear grungy clothes ("Her own Arctic-blue eyes [were] shaded by the bill of a Rock the House ball cap"), and, even with a serial killer on the loose, think such positive thoughts as "A friendly screen door should squeak, and it should squeal." In her choice of milieu, if nothing else, Roberts is the Raymond Carver of romance. Her characters thirst for cold beers on the porch, not Daiquiris by the pool. Occasionally, she can make you yearn for Tahiti-one of the Quinn brothers, in "Sea Swept," fantasizes about a "hot-looking C.P.A"
The idea that readers turn to romance to escape their drab, loveless lives is, in Roberts's opinion, a canard. Her view is borne out by the market: according to the R.W.A., romance generated nearly $1.4 billion in sales in 2007, more than science fiction and fantasy combined (seven hundred million dollars), mystery (six hundred and fifty million), or literary fiction (four hundred and sixty-six million). Of people who read books, one in five read a romance. The engine of the genre, according to Roberts, is not escapism but identification. "For the kind of books I write, character is key," she said. "Character is plot. Make them accessible to the reader. They may be a billionaire or they may be a half demon or they may be a gym teacher, but something about them has to relate so the reader can say, 'I understand them.' " Like campfire stories, Roberts's books rely on verve and familiarity rather than on any particular polish or originality. One of Roberts's editors once received some feedback from a romance readers' focus group: "My life is 'Moby-Dick.' I don't need to read it."
At dinner with Roberts and Wilder one night, I mentioned a scene in her novel "Birthright," in which the heroine, Callie Dunbrook, receives a coffee-table book about Pompeii from a man who mayor may not be her father, who confesses to once having made the mistake of selecting an automotive accessory as an anniversary gift for his wife.
"You'll never live it down," Roberts said to Wilder, who was engrossed in a large platter of eggplant parmigiana.
She turned to me. "He doesn't even know what I'm talking about!"
Roberts continued, "First Christmas! What did you give me our first Christmas?"
"I don't remember," Wilder replied.
"I do. Car mats."
Many romances begin with a "cute meet," in which the hero and the heroine are introduced to each other in some novel manner. Nora Roberts met Bruce Wilder in 1983, when he came to her house to build some bookshelves.
Newly divorced, she was not looking for a relationship. "'Men? I spit on men,' " Roberts recalled, of her mind-set. When Wilder called to ask her over for dinner, she was surprised. "I hadn't dated since high school, since I got married straight out," she said. "But I thought, Well, if he was an axe murderer or a serial rapist, I've been here alone with him at the house, so I'd already be dead." Wilder cooked spaghetti. His house was tidy. Roberts likes to say she married him so that she didn't have to pay for the bookshelves.
Roberts calls her house the Fortress of Solitude. Over the years, she has made additions, and it is a rambling, log-cabinish affair, with an indoor pool and a porch painted turquoise. The walls are decorated with postcards from Galway and with lace crocheted by Roberts's mother. A pub-like basement features two pinball machines, a pachinko game, and a "dirty dartboard" ("Touch with Ice," "Kiss My Ear"). In the study, near a pair of leather recliners, is a large portrait depicting Bruce and Nora as Rick and Ilsa from "Casablanca." Dan, Roberts's son, and his family live a few houses down. When he and Jason were young, and Roberts went on book tours, a set of neighbor triplets, one of whom is now Boonsboro's mail carrier, would babysit. One day in February, Roberts, explaining why she lives where she does, said, "There's a word in Irish-comhar-which in the vernacular of the rural West counties means a sense of community and neighbor helping neighbor." As we pulled to the end of the long gravel drive leading up to the house, a statue of Merlin stood sentry at her back door. "It's burlwood chain-saw art," Roberts said. "I saw him in California, and I had him shipped out. He's too cool."
Initially, Roberts wrote wherever she could: in the car-pool line, at the dentist's office. As her career took off, she began to establish boundaries: "Don't bother me unless it's blood or fire. And, as they grew more responsible, arterial blood and active fire." At the end of the day, she would pay the kids ten cents a page to feed paper into her Wang word processor. Now she works at home, in a third-floor office overlooking acres of oaks, poplars, and tulip trees. A mobile in the shape of a fire-breathing dragon hangs from a skylight. Her desk is covered in bobble-heads and tchotchkes: Alfred E. Neuman, Mulder and Scully, Spike from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," a pop-up nun.
Routine is vital to Roberts. Unlike most people who come into a great deal of money, she has used hers to maintain her life, rather than to refashion it. (Her main concession to her income, besides the shopping, is to charter a private jet when she travels.) On a typical day, she gets up at around six, works out in the basement, and is sitting down at her computer by eight o'clock. She limbers up with a game of Gem Drop or Jewel Quest Solitaire, checks the blogs, and writes for six to eight hours, fuelling herself with Winston Filter 100s, Cheez-Its, and Diet Pepsi from a litre bottle. Around five o'clock each afternoon, she goes downstairs to prepare dinner. For years, people have been telling her to hire a cook. She has no assistant or research aide. 'Why would you want people in your house?" she said. "Then you have to talk to them." Every January, she and Wilder go to a spa in the Pennsylvania hills. Ruth Ryan Langan and her husband usually visit in November. Langan said, "On our first night, Nora usually has pasta with red sauce and a green salad with shredded carrots."
Roberts may be the most intuitive writer since Noel (Hot Lead) Loomis, who wrote several dozen Westerns straight onto a Linotype machine he kept in his house. She doesn't keep bios on her characters. She never makes an outline, and she does most of her research on Google. Before she wrote "Montana Sky," her editor suggested that she go to Montana. 'Why would I want to go to Montana?" Roberts said. To start, Roberts has said, “I’ll vomit out the first draft." She typically goes through twice more and sends "the best book I can write at that time" to her editor. Roberts hates it when people ask her where she gets her ideas. 'It's not like I go out, pluck them off the Idea Bush or pick up a few at the Idea Store," she has said. She told me she has never quit on a manuscript: '1 will beat it. I will wrestle it to the ground. It will not defeat me." (She has, however, disowned one book: "Promise Me Tomorrow," a 1984 novel with an unhappy ending that Roberts says "was full of clichés," and is now for sale for a hundred dollars on Amazon.) The months following the discovery of Janet Dailey's plagiarism were the only time in her career that she has felt blocked. Roberts is still heated about it. "Don't push an Irishwoman into a corner," Roberts told me. "Then she's going to come out, and she's going to have your blood in her throat."
Roberts's influences are myriad and mostly popular. She assesses books and movies summarily, like an emperor deciding the fate of a gladiator. She likes "Catch-22" (so many layers),  “The Stand” ('Just a precious jewel'), Robert Parker, Baz Luhrmann's "Australia," and Larry McMurtry ("until the sad parts"). She has not seen or read "Revolutionary Road," but she dislikes it anyway ("I don't want to be brought down like that"). She is proud of her knowledge of pop culture and is impatient with eggheads. "Copy-editors? You want me to start on copy-eds?" she wrote, on a Web site. "The ones who neglect to correct lie to lay, then tell me Suellen isn't a character from Gone With the Wind, but from the TV show Dallas?" One day, as we were talking, I mentioned, guiltily, that I never read Proust. "I don't particularly want to," Roberts said. "I do not feel obliged in my reading. I read to be entertained and to relax, and to go into another world, not because it's good for me." She paused, nostrils flared, and said, "I don't eat broccoli, either."
Most writers have worked out the kinks in their writing by the time they are published, but in romance many writers develop on the job. Roberts's writing, by her own estimation, has improved markedly since her early novels, which featured a lot of passive constructions and thesaurus words. Compared with Nora Roberts, J. D. Robb is slightly more staccato and noirish, but Roberts says that the voices are essentially the same. In both incarnations, she is spare, catchy, and impressionistic. Her sentences are often clipped, and she has a habit of turning adjectives and nouns into verbs ("two canine forms bulleted out" the door). Her figurative language can be clever ("Dobby's face reminded Cilia of a piece of thin brown paper that had been balled tight, then carelessly smoothed out") or it can be clumsy ("They meshed like butter on popcorn, both lively and entertaining").
Almost everyone I spoke with praised Roberts's storytelling, her incantatory ability to engage the reader. "Storytelling" also suggests a quasi-extemporaneous quality, the privileging of the thrust of a narrative over its details, and while Roberts's narratives have momentum, they are not always painstakingly crafted. In "The Pagan Stone," she interrupts what is supposed to be a climactic and scary fight scene with a digression involving the B-52s song "Love Shack." It might be a funny set piece, with some of the body-dropping camp of the James Bond movies, if we weren't supposed to take the song seriously, as a "battle cry' that" as so in-your-face, so utterly and humanly defiant." Her plotting can be erratic. In 'Tribute," Matt and Josie's son is called Sam on page 274. By page 392, his name has become Ethan. The head medical examiner's name is Morse in some of the J. D. Robb books; in others, it is Morris. To immediately justify a character's psychology, Roberts may supply him or her with a flimsy backstory. In "Glory in Death," the police psychologist Dr. Charlotte Mira says that, as a child, she was raped by her stepfather-who, in ''Purity in Death," is semi-retired and living in Connecticut. "It's sort of embarrassing," Roberts told me, of her occasional bloopers. "You just feel like an idiot."
Another pitfall, when you've written almost two hundred books, is repetitiveness. "I feel like I've met Cilia in other Nora books," a reader wrote in a generally positive review of 'Tribute" on ADWOFF. "I have nothing against self assured not prissy, comfy, but 'I spruce up nice' girls [but] the female characters have just been very similar." The spunky-heroine voice that Roberts favors is winning, but it can seem like a fallback. Would a twenty-four-year-old say, "I thought he waited for you at the side door every night, then walked you back at dawn because you were holding a secret canasta tournament"? At other times, her characters, grousing about "sons of bitches" and vowing to "welsh on" their enemies, seem to hail from the Nixon era.
"You cannot write with the reader over your shoulder," Roberts told me. But she is keenly attuned to the demands of the market. At Harlequin's request for a "Batman-type character," she once created a hero who could walk through walls. The producer Peter Guber has adapted a number of Roberts' s books into Lifetime movies, four of which aired on Saturday nights this spring. (New York rated the ad campaign, a series of pastel- heavy posters that colonized the city's subways and buses, as "lowbrow" and "despicable," but the movies are Lifetime's most-watched programs this year.) "She's not a pain in the ass," Guber told me. "You have to listen to her, but, at the same time, she was completely like, 'You want to blend those two secondary characters together? Great. Not a problem.'" Roberts's readers value consistency, not experimentation or risk-taking. "Except for some of the early category romances, I really haven't found a bad Nora read," Sue Noyes, of ADWOFF, said. It would be nice if every book was Roberts's dream house, but she will build to spec.
Roberts has a riff about the sort of romance novel that was popular at the beginning of her career:
He was often a Greek tycoon; she was often orphaned and raised by an aunt. She's on her way to a new job, working for the richest man in the free world. In the airport, she's rushing through with her battered suitcase. She runs into this man and the suitcase falls open, revealing a pitiful wardrobe-it's all neat and well-mended but sad. And he calls her a clumsy fool and helps her stuff her clothes back into the suitcase and storms off, and the next day she goes into the offices of the richest man in the free world and who should be there but the man she ran into in the airport?
Its class and the sexual dynamics have progressed, but romance, which Roberts has said holds a "watery mirror" up to its times, is still a genre. Pamela Regis identified its eight essential elements, which Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, in their new book "Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels," have condensed to four: "Boy meets girl. Holy crap, shit happens! Eventually, the boy gets the girl back. They live Happily Ever After." (In a 1981 survey, the literature professor Jannice A. Radway found that the romance readers in her sample group considered the depiction of rape only slightly less objectionable than a sad ending.) Chapter 19 of  “Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies" offers a list of familiar plot elements: Marriage of Convenience, Stranded with a Stranger, Runaway Bride, Woman in Jeopardy, Back from the Dead, Mistaken Identity, Secret Baby, Reunion Romance, the Dad Next Door. (Roberts's rule of thumb: "one cliché per story.") "Heroes from Germany, Scandinavia, and the former Soviet Union and its current descendant states have all proven a difficult sell," it warns. According to industry legend, a book tanked when its publisher omitted from its cover the single light that customarily shines from an upper window of a grays-tone castle.
Even the sexual content of romance novels is highly codified. The Arabesque Romance guidelines "strongly discourage having the characters live together as a couple," although "some story lines do allow for premarital conception, as long as the couple eventually marries." In the Steeple Hill Love Inspired line, authors should "avoid any mention of nudity." (The characters should also be North American, and they should not take "the Lord's name in vain" or use "euphemisms for curses"-"heck, darn, gosh.") The Black Lace erotic-fiction line, published in the U.K., allows for clitoral piercings but "no animals, lasting physical damage, parent/child incest or misery."
There is a kitchen-table quality to sex in romance novels which distinguishes them from pornography. Gay critics have pointed out that you could substitute "she" for every "he" in many sex scenes, and they would still work. "She smelled like the woods, he thought," Roberts writes, in "The Pagan Stone." "Autumn woods. Nothing fragile and pastel like spring, but rich and vivid, with just a hint of smoke." Probably no man has ever thought this, but it's effective stuff. In the same way that women dress for other women, romance novels stem from, and speak to, the female imagination. Fine, strapping fellows as the men are, they might not always be recognizable to their human counterparts.
In Roberts's early books, the sex could be rough and spastic. Travis Grant says to Adelia Cunnane in "Irish Thoroughbred," "You'll come to Kentucky because it suits me to have you there, and I'm accustomed to having what suits me." Roberts continues:
His smile spread in a rapid change of mood as her head snapped up with fresh anger. His hands claimed her waist, then trailed slowly upward, resting on the sides of her firm young breasts as her anger faded into confusion .... Her lips parted, but she found no strength to protest against the unfamiliar intimacy .... She felt herself rising from the ground, and her hands went to his shoulders automatically to compensate for the loss of gravity.
Later, Adelia's hand finds its way to Travis's shoulder "of its own accord." One day, I brought up Roberts's old habit of inventing mechanical justifications for female participation in sex. "Oh, yes-'As if by its own volition, her hand stroked his cheek,'" Roberts said, smiling. "It was a learning process."
Many romance authors hate talking about their sex scenes as much as their fans look forward to reading them, but Roberts is not prickly about the subject. "Sex is important in the books because, without it, it would be like eating a rice cake instead of a cupcake," she told me. She is amused by the frequent assumption that her own life is unusually amorous. ("Did people ever ask Agatha Christie if she was homicidal?") In reality, she is a deeply pragmatic romantic. In an essay included in "The Official Nora Roberts Companion," she admitted that her idea of true passion was the kiss that AI Gore planted on Tipper during the Democratic Convention in 2000. ''You go, Al," she wrote.
Still, Agatha Christie, over the years, probably picked up on a few things about forensics. I asked Roberts how far she would go in writing sex scenes. ''I'm not going to write about stuff that you might read about in some erotica-you know, blood play," she said. "And I'm probably not going to do S &M. I'm not going to do any harsh sex that involves pain." Whether or not her characters use condoms depends, she said, on the circumstances: "I'm not a public-service announcement. I'm not going to screw up the mood just so I can be politically correct." She continued, "My favorite use of condoms was in 'Montana Sky,' when Tess goes to seduce Nate at his desk and he's kind of like, ‘Well, you know, I'm not prepared,' and she pulls out like twenty of them, and he doesn't know whether to be flattered or afraid." When Roberts doesn't mention birth control, she said, it is an artistic omission, and the reader can assume that the characters took care of it.
The hallmark of Roberts's sex scenes is narrative continuity-the hero and the heroine sleep together, and they don't suddenly turn into wildly different people. "It's not deliberately provocative, it's not because somebody whipped out a clown with a camera and a donkey and some jello," Sarah Wendell said. Roberts's characters are less repressed now, but their forwardness can seem as artificial as their modesty used to. "I m thinking of the movie as a vehicle for popcorn and necking," Ford Sawyer says, in “Tribute," by way of asking Cilia McGowan on a date. At their best, Roberts's sex scenes contain some of her most imaginative, least workmanlike writing. In "The Pagan Stone," she writes, 'They lay flat on their backs, side by side on the bed. He felt as if he'd been kicked off a cliff, doing the tumble down through screaming air to land in a hot river."
Toward the end of the signing at Turn the Page, a woman approached Roberts. "This is for my twenty-year-old son, who is a major fan," she said, clutching a copy of a J. D. Robb book. "But he skips all the sex scenes. So I would like you to sign it, 'Chris: Read the sex scenes! Nora Roberts.'''
Roberts picked up her pen and asked, "Should I write, 'Your wife would appreciate it'?" •
NEWYORKER.COM
Lauren Collins talks about Nora Roberts.