For Nicole Cliffe and Jasmine Guillory, it was love at first tweet. The Slate columnist and the romance novelist bonded over a love of the royals and similar social media sensibilities. Over time, their friendship progressed along a very 2019 trajectory—they went from Twitter DMs to text. Along with another friend, Samantha Powell, they formed a “Royals Group Chat,” where they dissect, celebrate, and challenge anything and everything related to the British Royal Family. (The group is so serious about their subject that they met up IRL for a weekend away to watch Meghan and Harry’s wedding.)
As Guillory began to research and write her latest novel, Royal Holiday—a Doria Ragland-inspired love story where a 50-something black woman falls for one of the Royal’s private secretaries—she called upon Cliffe and Powell for help. They brainstormed cottage names, swapped royal insight, and served as Guillory’s soundboard. So when Glamour asked Guillory to participate in our “Bodice Rippers,” series (an exploration of the $1 billion romance novel industry) we couldn’t think of anyone better to speak with her than Cliffe. Read on for their conversation about fully-formed heroines, royal research, and why so many romance novelists are lawyers.
Nicole Cliffe: Something I’ve always loved about your books is that your characters are such adults. They have jobs and friends and familial responsibilities, none of which they can just throw overboard when they meet a new romantic interest. In Royal Holiday, we get to enjoy a 50-something heroine. Why was it so important for you to portray women with rich, full lives?
Jasmine Guillory: I love writing slightly older characters, partly because they have more life experience to draw on, and partly because they’re more set in their ways. So it’s fun for me to see what and who will break them out of their patterns, and to see what they really care about. For me, the more well-rounded and complex a character is, the more interesting they are—and the more there is for someone to love about them. When I start writing a book, I usually start with one or two elements of each main character, but one of the things I think about a lot is what would make each character fall in love with someone, and so I add layers to each of them until I figure out why these two specific people would fall in love with each other. I loved writing Vivian, because she has a lot of life experience, but she’s also figured out a lot about what really matters in life, versus what she doesn’t need to bother worrying about. I need to take more lessons from her!
