The Blizzard and What It Made
In February of 1979, three feet of snow buried Keedysville, Maryland, and a twenty-eight-year-old woman who had macraméd two hammocks, canned her own vegetables, embroidered overalls with little flies on them for her sons, and baked more loaves of bread than she cared to count found herself trapped inside a ranch house with a three-year-old, a six-year-old, no morning kindergarten, and a dwindling supply of chocolate. She had, by her own later estimation, tried every craft known to man. She was, by her own later admission, "going nuts." Murder-suicide, she would joke decades later, was not off the table. Instead of reaching for the Candyland box again, she picked up a pencil and a spiral notebook and began writing down one of the stories that had been playing in her head for as long as she could remember—stories she had assumed everyone invented, silently, the way everyone breathes. "The minute I started the process of writing," she said, "I fell in love with it."
What emerged was a romance yarn stuffed with every cliché available to the genre in 1979: the heroine had long red fingernails, the hero was vaguely Latin, and the prose was, by the author's unsparing assessment, "simply dreadful." She called it Melodies of Love. No one would publish it, or the half-dozen manuscripts that followed. She submitted to Harlequin, the Canadian publisher that dominated the romance market, and received what she would later call her "favorite rejection of all time"—a polite note explaining that the work showed promise but that the publisher already had its American writer. That American writer was Janet Dailey. Dailey would, in time, be caught stealing from the very woman Harlequin had turned away.
The woman kept writing. By the summer of 1980, a rival imprint called Silhouette had accepted a manuscript called Irish Thoroughbred—the story of a girl from the Emerald Isle who travels to Maryland and falls for a horse-farm owner whose eyes soften at the birth of a foal. It was pretty dreadful, too. ("You impudent little wench!" "You great thundering blackguard!") But there were flashes in it—a spiritedness, a wry humor, a sense that the heroine might talk back—that distinguished it from the soft-focus romances crowding the grocery-store racks. "Was better than sex," Roberts recalled of the moment the book was accepted for publication. She received an advance of three thousand dollars.
That woman, born Eleanor Marie Robertson in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1950, has since written more than 250 novels. Over 500 million copies of her books are in print. She has spent more than 1,325 weeks—over twenty-five consecutive years—on the
New York Times bestseller list. Every title she has released since 1999 has hit that list. Eighty-two of her books have debuted at number one. She grosses, by
Forbes's reckoning, somewhere around sixty million dollars a year, which is more than John Grisham, more than
Stephen King—who is, incidentally, a Roberts admirer ("Nora Roberts is cool," he blurbed)—and is surpassed among authors only by the stratospheric earnings of
J.K. Rowling. She writes under two names. Under her own, she publishes romantic suspense, fantasy trilogies, and stand-alone novels. Under the pseudonym J.D. Robb—the initials taken from her sons Jason and Daniel, the surname a truncation of Roberts—she writes futuristic police procedurals set in 2058 New York, a series now sixty-one books deep and still accelerating. The
New Yorker called her "America's favorite novelist." The Romance Writers of America renamed its lifetime achievement award after her. She has been inducted into the organization's Hall of Fame three times—the first inductee, in 1986, and the most celebrated ever since.
And she still lives in the same house in Keedysville where she picked up that pencil in the snow.
By the Numbers
The Roberts Empire
257Books published (through The Final Target, 2026)
500M+Copies in print worldwide
1,325+Weeks on the New York Times bestseller list
82Books debuting at #1 on NYT bestseller list
~$60MEstimated annual gross earnings (Forbes, 2004)
$390MEstimated net worth (Forbes)
45Average workdays to complete a novel
The Fortress of Solitude
There is a word in Irish—comhar—which in the vernacular of the rural West counties means a sense of community, neighbor helping neighbor. Roberts invokes it when explaining why she has spent more than fifty years in an out-of-the-way corner of Washington County, Maryland, an hour and a half from the capital, where people decorate their porches with American flags and watch high school football on chilly Friday nights. But she also calls her house the Fortress of Solitude, and on some weeks she does not leave it for twenty-one days running.
Over the years, she and Bruce Wilder, her second husband—a sweet and lanky former carpenter who arrived one day to build bookshelves and stayed—have expanded the original ranch into a rambling, log-cabin-ish affair with an indoor pool, a porch painted turquoise, and a publike basement featuring two pinball machines, a pachinko game, and a "dirty dartboard" whose scoring zones include "Touch with Ice" and "Kiss My Ear." The walls upstairs are decorated with postcards from Galway and with lace crocheted by Roberts's mother. Near a pair of leather recliners in the study hangs a large portrait depicting Bruce and Nora as Rick and Ilsa from Casablanca. At the end of the long gravel drive, a statue of Merlin carved with a chain saw from burlwood stands sentry at the back door. "I saw him in California," Roberts once explained, "and I had him shipped out. He's too cool."
She works on the third floor, in an 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 bobbleheads and tchotchkes: Alfred E. Neuman, Mulder and Scully, Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a pop-up nun. On a typical day, she rises at six, works out in the basement, and is sitting at her computer by eight. She limbers up with a game of Gem Drop or Jewel Quest Solitaire, checks the blogs, then writes for six to eight hours, fuelling herself with Winston Filter 100s, Cheez-Its, and Diet Pepsi from a litre bottle. Around five, she goes downstairs to make dinner. She has no assistant, no research aide, no cook. "Why would you want people in your house?" she once said. "Then you have to talk to them."
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 refashion it. Her main concession to her income, besides shopping—she once ordered a Land Rover over the telephone when it was "snowy and crappy" and her Z had stalled out—is chartering a private jet when she travels. Every January, she and Wilder go to a spa in the Pennsylvania hills. Ruth Ryan Langan and her husband visit in November. "On our first night," Langan has said, "Nora usually has pasta with red sauce and a green salad with shredded carrots."
The discipline, Roberts has said, comes from the nuns. "Guilt and discipline—combine those and you'll be pretty productive." She was educated at a Catholic school, and though she calls herself "very lapsed," interested in Wicca and other spiritual practices, the rigor never left. "I don't believe in inspiration," she told Forbes in 2004, in the husky voice of a chain smoker. "I was educated by the nuns. They are a lot tougher than any muse."
I don't let myself believe in writer's block. I feel very strongly writing is a habit as much as an art or a craft. If you write crap, you're still writing—and you can fix that. But if you walk away, then you've broken the habit.
Bessie's Bad Bernie
The Robertsons were traditional Irish Catholics, and Eleanor Marie was the youngest of five children—and the only girl. Her father, Bernard, was a stagehand and projectionist who eventually opened a lighting business. Her mother, also named Eleanor, was a homemaker and later a partner in that business. They met as teenagers in northeastern Washington, D.C., after Eleanor had just broken up with one of Bernard's brothers. "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,'" Roberts recalled. "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. The relationship figures prominently in her mythology of romantic love—the swagger, the protectiveness, the familial disapproval overcome—as though everything she would later write about the architecture of desire had its origin in a boy telling his brother to back off.
Nora was expected to make her brothers' beds. Her father often took her to the movie theatre where he worked. "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." There were always books all over the house. "And my dad was a real Irish storyteller."
She 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, she dated a classmate named Ronald Aufdem-Brinke, whom she married upon graduation, at the age of seventeen. Her mother was not enthusiastic, despite having herself married young. The couple settled in Keedysville, in the ranch house that would become the Fortress of Solitude. In 1972, their first son, Dan, was born. Three years later, Jason arrived. Aufdem-Brinke worked for a sheet-metal manufacturer; Roberts was briefly a legal secretary, a position at which she was, by her own estimation, spectacularly bad. "I could type fast but couldn't spell," she has said. "I was the worst legal secretary ever." She quit to stay home. She refers to those years as her "Earth Mother" period—a phrase whose affection barely conceals its claustrophobia. "I baked bread, canned, sewed, macraméd, embroidered, grew vegetables. I was obviously looking for a creative outlet."
She found it in the blizzard. Or the blizzard found it in her.
The Machine and Its Maker
The numbers are so extravagant they resist comprehension. Twenty-seven Nora Roberts books sold every minute. Enough copies in print to fill Giants Stadium four thousand times. A book every forty-five workdays, on average, sustained for more than four decades. Five or six releases in a good year—two installments of a paperback trilogy, two J.D. Robb novels, and what her editor Leslie Gelbman calls the "big Nora," a hardcover stand-alone. In 2008 alone, her publisher Penguin shipped more than eight million books under the Roberts name and four and a half million under J.D. Robb. In 2012, she published her 200th novel, The Witness. By 2026, the count had reached 257.
The question that shadows any consideration of Roberts's career is whether this volume of production is compatible with quality—whether anyone writing at this pace can produce anything more than product. Roberts's answer, delivered with the blunt confidence of someone who has been fielding the question for decades, is that the question itself is a form of snobbery. "You know, writing's creative and all this, certainly, but you don't just wander around dreaming," she told the New Yorker's Ian Parker. "That's not what you're getting paid for." She paused and then went further, with a hesitation that suggested she knew what she was about to say would offend: "I think people who 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."
Her process is defiantly unromantic. She doesn't keep bios on her characters. She never makes an outline. She does most of her research on Google. Before she wrote Montana Sky, her editor suggested she go to Montana. "Why would I want to go to Montana?" Roberts replied. She has said that to start a book, "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. She hates it when people ask 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 never quit on a manuscript: "I will beat it. I will wrestle it to the ground. It will not defeat me."
She 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. Her working method—instinctual, fast, solitary—produces occasional bloopers that she acknowledges with a wince rather than alarm. In Tribute, a character's son is called Sam on page 274 and Ethan by page 392. The head medical examiner in the J.D. Robb books is Morse in some volumes and Morris in others. "It's sort of embarrassing," she has said. "You just feel like an idiot." But these are the costs of velocity, and Roberts has calculated that the trade-off is worth it. She would rather be prolific than precious.
You know that movie 'Amadeus,' where Salieri was jealous because
Mozart seemed to be taking dictation from God?
The Genre That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Romance was, in a sense, user-generated content before user-generated content existed. From the outset, publishers assumed readers would want to write, providing tip sheets for prospective authors and accepting manuscripts over the transom. The genre's origins are ancient—scholars trace a lineage from Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) through Austen through Brontë through E.M. Hull's The Sheik (1919), the "ur-romance novel of the twentieth century," in which an aristocratic Englishwoman is captured and raped by a libidinous Algerian chieftain and, despite "the sickening reek of his clothes," eventually falls in love with him. By the nineteen-fifties, the English house Mills & Boon was publishing what would evolve into category romances—short, branded series books sold in grocery stores and at newsstands. Harlequin bought Mills & Boon in 1971. Led by bodice-rippers like Kathleen E. Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower and Rosemary Rogers's Sweet Savage Love, romance experienced a boom beginning in the seventies that never quite receded.
The money is staggering and largely invisible. In 2007, romance generated nearly $1.4 billion in sales—more than science fiction and fantasy combined ($700 million), more than mystery ($650 million), more than literary fiction ($466 million). Of people who read books, one in five reads a romance. And yet the genre remains, in Roberts's memorable phrase, "the big R"—scorned by literary types, lower on the prestige ladder than crime, horror, even science fiction. The New York Times Book Review has reviewed Roberts once in her entire career. "They're keeping the lights on late for the promise of heaving bosoms and consciousness-altering orgasms," the reviewer wrote of Northern Lights, a 2004 romantic thriller set in the Alaskan bush.
Roberts is as uninterested in the literary establishment as it is in her. "She didn't go to college, much less major in English, or take courses at the Iowa Writers' Workshop or Bread Loaf," Patricia Gaffney, a fellow novelist and friend, has observed. "She's indifferent to what critics say are the rules for proper fiction writing." Roberts 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, and Larry McMurtry ("until the sad parts"). She has not seen or read Revolutionary Road but dislikes it anyway: "I don't want to be brought down like that." When an interviewer confessed, guiltily, that he'd never read Proust, Roberts was serene. "I don't particularly want to. 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. "I don't eat broccoli, either."
The gendered dimension of this cultural disdain is something Roberts has noted with dry precision. A man writes a love story and "they call it something else. And it gets reviewed and made into a movie." She doesn't say the words "David Nicholls" or One Day, but they hover in the air. "A woman writes it and it's just one of those. I mean, how long are you going to fight that battle?"
Breaking Lubbock's Law
A self-taught writer and an irreverent one, Roberts was not, at first, an easy sell. Nancy Jackson, the editor who acquired Irish Thoroughbred, had to stand on her head, according to agent Amy Berkower, "to get Nora's books because they didn't follow the formula as strictly as others." Roberts's earliest heresy was violating what's known as Lubbock's Law—a genre convention stating that, for reasons of reader identification, romances should be written only from the heroine's point of view. Roberts sometimes adopted the hero's perspective. Later, more consequentially, she helped steer the genre away from what she calls the "fight 'em and fuck 'em" romances of the seventies toward a more contemporary, American style that portrayed increasingly—if not entirely—companionate relationships.
Isabel Swift, who edited Roberts for years at Harlequin, described the shift: "The classic British romances focussed on the war between the sexes. With Nora, it was more of a challenge than a real battle of wills." Reading a Roberts novel, as the New Yorker observed, is like watching a game of tennis between two very good players: the pleasure comes not from the outcome but from the back-and-forth between commensurate opponents. Her heroines possess an entrepreneurial streak. They are more independent than many of their peers and certainly their predecessors, even if some among them still crumple at the sight of bodily fluids. (" 'Oh. Oh my,' was all she managed before her eyes rolled back," Roberts writes of a character who has agreed to help a veterinarian perform surgery.) But the colloquial style deflates the vaporous—within sentences, the fainting heroine is back to talking about dog poop.
Roberts has a riff about the sort of romance novel 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 in 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?
Roberts didn't obliterate this template so much as humanize it. Her 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. These are not Carrie Bradshaw fantasies. They are stories about people who thirst for cold beers on the porch, not Daiquiris by the pool. Roberts is, in her choice of milieu if nothing else, the Raymond Carver of romance.
The idea that readers turn to romance to escape their drab, loveless lives is, in Roberts's opinion, a canard. The engine of the genre is not escapism but identification. "For the kind of books I write, character is key. 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.'" One of her editors once received feedback from a romance readers' focus group that captures this perfectly: "My life is Moby-Dick. I don't need to read it."
The Pepsi Doctrine
Roberts's predominance is a feat of marketing as much as of style. At one point, she had delivered a trilogy to Penguin, the installments of which were scheduled to run a year apart. Berkower, her agent—who maintains a dry-erase board in her office to track Roberts's output, along with a running catalogue of factoids—went ballistic. "I went nuts. They said they didn't want to overexpose Nora. And I said, 'Well, she's not Mickey Mouse yet.'" The compromise: a book every six months, a schedule they have adhered to since.
Amy Berkower—born into the literary agency world, at Writers House since its earliest days—has been Roberts's agent for the entirety of her career, a loyalty Roberts prizes above almost anything else in professional life. In 1995, Berkower and Roberts conceived the J.D. Robb pseudonym as a way to capitalize on Roberts's rate of production. Roberts resisted at first. She didn't like the idea of hiding behind another name until Berkower delivered the line that changed her mind: "Nora, there's Pepsi, there's Diet Pepsi, and there's caffeine-free Pepsi." It hit home. "I drink Diet Pepsi," Roberts later said, "and I realized it's marketing and I could be two brands."
The Pepsi doctrine did more than double Roberts's output. It conjoined the genres of romance and crime, along with their readerships, creating an audience that moved fluidly between the two names. The J.D. Robb books—futuristic police procedurals set in 2058 New York, centered on homicide lieutenant Eve Dallas and her enigmatic billionaire husband Roarke—were published quietly, without tie-in to the Roberts brand. "I wanted to try something a little different," Roberts explained. "The near-future setting allowed me to more or less create a world." By the twelfth book, in 2001, the open secret was acknowledged, and the series' popularity had built to a point where J.D. Robb was, on her own, one of Barnes & Noble's top mystery writers. Eve and Roarke have now sustained sixty-one novels without having children—a deliberate choice. "Children change everything," Roberts has said. "How are they going to be out there in the middle of the night chasing bad guys or working on a case or having that crazy sex?"
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." The books feature her name in large letters and some sort of inanimate, totemic object—cattails, a lighthouse, a shrimp trawler—rather than what she calls "nursing mother" covers. "You know, where she's falling out of her dress and he has his mouth on her tit."
John Lennard, a professor of literature at the University of the West Indies, has written that "Roberts has in some ways done for Romance what the hypercelebrity of Harry Potter has done for Children's Literature, making it acceptable fare for reading adults in general." This may overstate the respectability she has conferred, but it captures the scale of her commercial ambition—and achievement.
The Train-Set Village
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."
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, Rosie Sikes LaRue Decater Smith, the aunt of the man the heroine ends up falling in love with, arrives at a gift shop: "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, picks up a polished wooden stand with a hole in it:
"Now what the blue hell is this thing?"
"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."
Her characters are known, among her readers, as "100% real dudes"—a tribute to the fact that her heroes are neither cartoonish alphas nor neutered sensitives but something closer to the men her female readers actually know. Roberts credits a lifetime of being outnumbered. Born into a family of four brothers, she raised two sons. "Having spent her life surrounded by men," her website notes, "Ms. Roberts has a fairly good view of the workings of the male mind, which is a constant delight to her readers. It was, she's been quoted as saying, a choice between figuring men out or running away screaming."
The sex in her novels—kitchen-table sex, critics have called it, to distinguish it from pornography—evolved markedly over the years. In her early books, female participation required mechanical justification: "Her lips parted, but she found no strength to protest against the unfamiliar intimacy." A hand would find its way to a shoulder "of its own accord." Roberts is knowing about these early evasions: "Oh, yes—'As if by its own volition, her hand stroked his cheek,'" she has said, smiling. "It was a learning process." Now her characters are less repressed, and at their best, the sex scenes contain some of her most imaginative writing: "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."
Sex is important in the books because, without it, it would be like eating a rice cake instead of a cupcake.
Mind Rape
The five writers who belong in any list of canonical twentieth-century romance authors, according to Pamela Regis of McDaniel College, 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."
Janet Dailey—a romance superstar in her own right, the very writer Harlequin had once preferred to Roberts—confessed in 1997 to systematically stealing passages from Roberts's work. The discovery sent Roberts into the only creative block of her career. She sued for copyright infringement; the case was settled out of court. But the emotional wound never fully closed. "Don't push an Irishwoman into a corner," Roberts said, more than a decade later, her voice still hot. "Then she's going to come out, and she's going to have your blood in her throat."
The Dailey scandal transformed Roberts into the romance genre's most vocal defender of intellectual property. When a Brazilian writer later plagiarized the work of more than forty romance novelists, Roberts pursued legal action again. On her blog, she has written with unmistakable fury:
Plagiarism is theft of intellectual property. Full stop. It cannot be excused or justified. Any writer who thinks plagiarism is no big deal earns my disgust.
The episode also hardened Roberts's views on ghostwriting, a practice she considers legitimate in some forms—memoirs, work-for-hire—but deplorable in others, particularly the cottage industry of self-published authors paying writers a few hundred dollars to produce books under a fabricated byline. "This practice is a cheat for everyone but the client," she has written. "It dilutes the craft, the art, the science, the WORK of writing a story."
Her fierceness about authorship extends to artificial intelligence. In 2023, Roberts was among thousands of authors who signed the Authors Guild letter demanding that AI companies stop scraping writers' work without permission or compensation. It was, for Roberts, a natural extension of the same principle she had been defending since 1997—that the name on a book should mean exactly what it says.
Noraville
In Boonsboro, Maryland—population 3,400, known for its cantaloupes—Roberts is a prominent but elusive citizen. She contributes handsomely to local causes: the fire department, the library, the Nora Roberts Foundation at McDaniel College, which supports literacy and the writing of romance novels. But the scale of her investment in the town goes far beyond charity. The mayor of Boonsboro calls it Noraville.
On Main Street, there is Inn BoonsBoro, a seven-room boutique hotel in a building dating to the 1790s that Roberts and Wilder meticulously restored. Each room is dedicated to pairs of literary lovers: there is heather-scented hand lotion in the Jane and Rochester Room, a mod orange chair in the Eve and Roarke Room. Across the street: Turn the Page Bookstore, which Wilder manages, where 350 women from as far away as Ohio have lined up for Roberts to add her looping signature to their books. There are her son Dan's restaurants—Vesta, a pizza shop, and Dan's Restaurant & Tap House. Around the corner, Fit in BoonsBoro, the gym Roberts built. Roberts and her family own eight properties in town with an assessed value of $3.2 million. Their businesses employ about a hundred people. "Without Nora, our town square would be like a blight on our town," Mayor Charles "Skip" Kauffman Jr. has said. "With her, it's the focal point."
On the morning of February 22, 2008, as the inn's renovation neared completion, a liquid-propane tank ignited and set fire to the building and several adjacent structures. By nightfall, only the original masonry remained. Within days, Roberts had announced she would rebuild. The saga played out like something from a Nora Roberts novel about tragedy, pettiness, grace, and resilience in a small town. In Blue Smoke, the big Nora from 2005, an eerily prescient passage describes the heroine Reena Hale watching the family pizzeria burn on the day she gets her first period: "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."
The inn was rebuilt. The bookstore survives. The trilogy Roberts set there—beginning with
The Next Always—became a bestseller, and its fans visit Boonsboro to see the buildings that inspired the fiction that was inspired by the buildings. The circularity is total. Roberts's characters live in the kinds of places Roberts has built; Roberts has built the kinds of places her characters live in. "This is my home," she said simply. "I'm fond of home."
N.F.R.
Among her friends, she is known as N.F.R.—Nora Fucking Roberts. Patricia Gaffney, a fellow novelist: "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.
Does she tweet? "I'd rather stab myself in the eye with a flaming stick." What does she think of the claim that romantic fiction gives women unrealistic expectations? "Because women aren't supposed to have expectations, right? We're pretty smart. I think we know the difference between reality and fiction. I don't think that people read Agatha Christie, and then think: I know, I'll go and murder someone."
She was one of the first authors to use the internet to communicate with her readers, launching her site in 1996. When the web took off, Roberts—who loathes flying—seized upon it as a substitute for the grass-roots promotional tours she'd been doing since the early eighties. (At one 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.") She mastered viral marketing before the term existed. Amy Berkower recalled running into an AOL editorial director on vacation in Costa Rica: "He said, 'I wish other authors were more like Nora.' 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, named for a comment 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.
Sue Noyes, who runs ADWOFF—a grocery-store manager in Scranton—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 recalled. "Nora came in and said, 'Well, if you give me a try, let me know what you think.'"
For twenty-eight years, Roberts attended the Romance Writers of America convention. Every year, on a Sunday night, she and Ruth Ryan Langan threw a pajama party—popcorn and champagne, impressions, kicking off shoes. 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." Roberts's relationship with the RWA would eventually grow more complicated. She was a founding member but departed and spoke out against the organization for its restrictive, heteronormative definition of romance in the early 2000s, and again in 2019 over its treatment of author Courtney Milan. The same ferocity she brought to plagiarism—the insistence on principle over collegiality—surfaced here, too. Loyalty means much to Roberts, but not more than what she considers right.
The Cute Meet at the End of the Story
Many romances begin with a "cute meet," in which the hero and heroine are introduced in some novel manner. Nora Roberts met Bruce Wilder in 1983, when he came to her house to build some bookshelves. She was newly divorced from Aufdem-Brinke—the split happened in January of 1985, the second marriage in July of the same year, both dates suggesting a woman who does not linger—and not looking for a relationship. "'Men? I spit on men,'" she 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. 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.
She considers herself a deeply pragmatic romantic. In an essay, she admitted that her idea of true passion was the kiss that Al Gore planted on Tipper during the Democratic Convention in 2000. "You go, Al," she wrote. On a dinner out, an interviewer mentioned a scene in Birthright in which a character confesses to once having given 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 the interviewer. "He doesn't even know what I'm talking about!"
"First Christmas! What did you give me our first Christmas?"
"I don't remember," Wilder replied.
"I do. Car mats."
Roberts once told USA Today, "I want to die at age one hundred and twenty at my keyboard after having great sex." She was asked recently about the romance genre's evolution and where she sees herself in its pantheon. "I don't at all," she said. "My roots are in romance and I have a lot of respect. But I don't write romance anymore. I do write relationships." She paused. "I write novels. It's that simple—suspense, thrillers, fantasy."
The answer is characteristic: a refusal to be confined, even by the category that made her. After more than four decades, she has outlived the genre as she found it, outlasted the conventions she once broke, and outgrown the label that the industry still insists on applying. Somewhere in the Fortress of Solitude, on the third floor, beneath the fire-breathing dragon mobile, surrounded by bobbleheads and ashtrays and the accumulated evidence of a life spent in the same chair doing the same extraordinary thing, a woman who was taught by nuns and raised among men and trapped by a blizzard into discovering what she was for sits down at her computer in the morning, limbers up with a game of Jewel Quest Solitaire, and starts the next one.
There is no day off between books. Sometimes the house has to be shoveled out. But not usually longer than that.
