So you married young. Is this when you started to read romance novels?
I had always read. But when I had kids, my reading time was carved down. And I discovered category romance novels, Harlequins, because I could read one while the kids were napping. I could take an hour or two, just for me, and read.
There’s this seminal story about how you started writing. It’s almost cinematic: You’re at a kitchen table, there’s a blizzard, sleeping children. …
That was in February of 1979. We had a blizzard. And we lived down a back lane, about a quarter of a mile. I didn’t have four-wheel drive at that time, so I was stuck. My oldest son was in kindergarten, or maybe pre-K, and the radio would announce every day, “No morning kindergarten.” It was about 10 days before things got back to normal. So there were endless games of Candy Land and that sort of thing, until I thought I would go out of my mind. And so when they were napping, I decided I would just write one of these stories in my head. I’d just write it down. It wasn’t very good, but I did it. And by the time I finished, I had a beginning, middle and an end. And I had characters, a plot, so to speak. And I fell in love.
The book you started writing that night didn’t get published, but in 1981, a few years later, your first book came out in print. And a couple of years after that, you and your first husband divorced. Eventually you became extremely well known for your female characters. A Nora Roberts book featured women with jobs — maybe a regular job like a graphic designer — whose loves and lives are worthy of a novel. All of a sudden, the characters didn’t have to be pirates or duchesses.
Absolutely nothing wrong with a pirate, but yes, you could be a gym teacher, or a secretary. But hopefully you were the C.E.O. You could be divorced, you could be widowed, you could have kids, you could not have kids.
