The girl lurks furtively outside the building, looking first one way and then another. Satisfied that the coast is clear, she opens the side door and goes in. Within a few seconds, she emerges back into the daylight, clutching something against her, trying to look inconspicuous as she boots across during a lull in traffic. She hurries down a side street and disappears.

Well, sure, that might have been a scene from either Nine and a Half Weeks or from Traffic, but it was just me, stealing in and out of the library as fast as I could. I didn’t want to be caught dead with this book. I’m not averse to fluffy reading and own up to a sick addiction to OK and Us Weekly. But this? I’ve only ever read a small handful of romance genre novels, and that was when my 14-year old sister and I came across a gold mine of five-cent harlequins at a yard sale in North Bay about 25 years ago. This one is at least a hardcover, giving it a slight distinction. But it’s covered in flowers with a  necessarily-posed heroine, head back, hand against his rippling chest, eyes closed, hair cascading into a tumultuous heaven of roses and butterflies. It’s just so not me.

From my lengthy career in various facets of bookselling, I know that the romance genre is the biggest-selling genre of all. Despite my disdain for formulaic drivel, we might all give a nod to this part of the industry, which basically earns the bread that lets obscure poets and dead professors give their two cents worth. It’s my job as a writer to be amusing, and to give my ‘professional opinion” on literature, but my back went up every time some guy rolled his eyes and told his wife to save her money and her mind from ‘that crap.’

I wasn’t allowed, of course, to say it then, but I’ll say it now, to every man who hoisted up his armload of history and science tomes and frowned as he fetched his wife from the bodice ripper aisle. Not only is your wife’s particular blend of un-fillfillment and loneliness funding these intellectual borefests you’re taking home, but she’s not the one blowing the paycheque on porn. You can’t criticize a woman for her banal but literate fantasy life when you are buying porn, the biggest industry on earth. I don’t want to ever hear again about the academic wasteland of your wife’s reading habits until something without pictures can sustain your attention.

The parallel is absolutely founded: fantasy is different for men and women consumers, but the romance novel and porn are really very much the same. Men fantasize about no-strings attached sexual variety, and women fantasize about someone who is passionate about them and who does not expect her to be a long-haired, perfectly pedicured hardbody with giant tits when he’s got back hair, poor hygiene and a seven-year old undershirt on.

Now that that’s off my chest, I have to go back into that very bookstore and confess to some poorly informed snobbery of my own. I mean, it seemed obvious and rumours often insidiously inform our consciousness as if they were fact, so I forgive myself, but here’s some shocking news: Danielle Steel writes her own books!

If you subscribed to that “Caroline Keene” idea that different authors flesh out formulaic plots like all those Grosset and Dunlap series books, or the Steel Farm theory that has Danielle, in skintight riding pants with a crop at her secretary’s back, admonishing some poor peasant from the community college writing course to pump them out, you’re not alone. The idea that Steel’s impossible numbers of annual books are ghost written by groups of underpaid slaves while Danielle parades around with her billions is widespread. And false.

You just can’t judge a book by its cover.

It’s my theory that this idea was born because the sheer quantity of production seemed impossible, juxtaposed with Danielle’s reclusive refusal to give press since her earlier years. That led unimpressed booksellers everywhere to assume there was little to say for Steel herself, when the truth is so much juicier.

And the truth is this: Danielle Steel, and that’s her real name, is a madwoman who has furiously penned 65 published novels all by herself. She is the most popular writer in the world. Her books are available in about two dozen languages in nearly fifty countries. She is focused, driven, and obsessed; the woman is a machine. She is an eccentric who never sleeps, and besides staying up half the night to pump out novel after novel, stuff she works on two to five at a time, she has also pumped out nine children and gone through a handful of husbands.

Barely taller than five feet, this diminutive beauty (if you like that slick, cheesy, “tastefully’ dripping money look), Danielle Steel is quite mad. Many romance novelists write their victim and rescue fantasies for escape or money. They fully understand that their art is unrealistic, the same way a speculative writer imagines a world out of this world. But Danielle Steel is writing life- her life.

Yep, that’s right- all those rich socialite girls with lonely childhoods and sickly dispositions falling in love with unlikely heroin addicted heroes….umm, yep, real life.

The reclusive Steel doesn’t give interviews because it’s all right there on the paper. Nor is she a fool- it’s the age of paparazzi and she gives them nothing. In a sense, as long as I’m writing this without her comments, it’s my own fantasy and the private life of Danielle Steel is still private.

Still, the known facts, assembled together, form a fascinating portrait. Anybody this interesting has my respect, and anyone with nine kids who finds time to write 65 books is a person who makes no excuses. Sure, all that loneliness and turmoil that I relate to quite strongly may have been easier to swallow with endless riches. Maybe. I’d like to know if a few million would have made my private sorrows less sorrowful, give that a test run.  But I think I know the answer:  perhaps, but only marginally.

A person whose real name is Danielle Steel is destined for larger than life joys and pains, for undeniable strength and fortitude, for pedigree dogs and stiletto shoes, for several distinctive eccentricities (like typing on her 1946 typewriter). She is also destined to be born into money, by parents who don’t pay her too much attention. Perhaps she is even born to be the one permanent fixture on the bestseller’s list, a list that she has seldom fallen from, even for a few weeks.

Steel was born a socialite, raised with decent education and manners. But her childhood was sick and lonely. She battled polio, and at the tender age of 16, ovarian cancer. At 18, she married a millionaire banker, but took off for San Francisco with their daughter when she felt unfulfilled. She had plenty of money, born into some, and some from alimony, so don’t worry how she looked after the baby. She was young and precocious, but loved her role of mother from the get-go, just like any good little romantic novel’s heroine should. She was writing magazine articles and press releases for a firm called Supergirls, and met up with a few encouraging publishers who were happy to look over her manuscripts, which she produced consistently. They encouraged her to write books.

One day she was doing some writing research at a hospital, when she fell in love with Danny, who was actually a prison inmate who was hospitalized at the time.  She surprised the convict by penning him letters daily, sometimes as many as 17! He was a big bad bank robber and she married him in the prison where he was incarcerated. (I never dreamed I would describe Canadian literati Susan Musgrave’s madcap love affair with infamous bank robber Stephen Reid, whom she married while he was incarcerated, as ‘in the tradition of Danielle Steel.”)

Though initially it was whirlwind passion- Danny crassly told Steel’s biographers of one occasion that he had to take her to the hospital because they had done it too much and she swelling and in pain- the marriage was problematic to say the least. Danny bragged to the same biographers of cheating on Danielle with a bunch of hos and a pimp he’d met at the airport, all eager to get with him and give him free blow. (Looks like we’re now veering from bodice ripper to the other zipper- this reads like classic porn, but hey, maybe it really happened to this man!) Though Danny maintains his innocence in the matter, he was later incarcerated again for rape. The day after their divorce was finalized, Danielle wed the next in line, Billy. She had suffered several miscarriages while with Danny, but was pregnant with Billy’s child when they wed. Oh, yeah, and Billy was a heroin addict.

Sounds torrentially hot- yeah, marrying an addict is pretty damn hot but the heartbreak that damages you beyond repair- not so much. That child, Nick, who was credited to husband four- or was it five- later, was allegedly Billy’s kid, and he grew up a bipolar drug addict who committed suicide by heroin overdose at age 19. Danielle had more kids than the von Trapps- nine in total- but that couldn’t salve her open wounds. She penned His Bright Light, a nonfiction memoir of Nick’s painful depressions, in hopes of contributing knowledge and cash to the cause. Steel stepped into the spotlight temporarily through advocacy of kids’ mental health and drug abuse awareness. And despite this harrowing setback for a devoted mother, she continued on doing what she does best: writing about broken hearts finding happiness. Oh, she did also open an art gallery and launch a perfume campaign- but let’s forgive that particular slice of fromage-   everybody’s doing it. 

And so, with this bare bones sketch, it becomes clear that this woman’s life is stranger than fiction, or at least just as strange. And as a woman with my own share of drama, marketable or otherwise, and with the desire to learn from the masters, it was high time I picked up a few of the legendary books and checked them out. It’s hard to comment when you haven’t read them, though I was happy to do so in the past. For shame.

And that brings us back to the book with the roses on the cover. That was Danielle’s first novel, Going Home. Hmm. “Gillian must choose between two very different men- one who is wise, gentle and loving: the other, unfaithful, the father of her unborn child, a man who sends her heart racing like no other…” reads the dust jacket blurb. I’m okay with the book, for what it is, but still don’t really get the big deal. Still, millions disagree and treasure these stories. So I proceed to Crossings, which she once described as her most powerful book. It’s also okay, for what it is. It’s not that I don’t read pulp for pleasure: I do, but my favourite ‘easy reads’ usually feature ghosts or serial killers, guess I’m just sick that way.

In the end, I conclude that these stories just aren’t for me. My fantasies are not so grandiose and seldom about love- I fantasize the opposite, that perhaps love won’t swoop me up and complicate my life with its madness. I do tend to fall, like Danielle, for tortured artist/convict types, and I relate to her methods of exorcism of pain- I also write to siphon off the well of sorrow that piles up along with life’s complications. I would guess that this is one reason why most writers write. I might do well to take note of her methods, however, if I wish to make any serious money from my work: any businessperson need only look to “Steel Enterprises” for the magic trick- focus, and produce. Easier said then done, for most of us, but for Steel, easier done than said. I give Danielle her due, for focusing and producing are the missing elements in many not-yet-success stories. If I learn from her of persistence, I stand half a chance to make it.

But aside from the brazen business woman who pounds the typewriter until dawn, filling ashtrays as she lays open a soul that seems solid but is just as broken as everyone else’s and a whole lot more, I take away more than a lesson in business success. I take away the affirming of my rather more fluffy beliefs in the mystique of fate. Anne Rice’s vampires were born after her five year old died of leukemia, as a way or resurrecting the dead and explaining the bloodthirstiness of the beyond. Rice’s fate was clear: she lived in New Orleans, populated with vampires, she was driven to write, and fate came together to make stories only she could. Not every woman who lost a child became this. It was what she was born to be, however cruel, however merciful. And being full of ghosts and sexy bloodsuckers, I’m way more drawn to Rice’s exquisitely detailed sagas then I’ll ever be to Steelian romance novels. Only now I have a huge respect for Steel’s particular madness and the healing touch her syrup is for her minions who down it with hunger and thirst. She is a woman who lived wildly and met her fate head on, while I’m still terrified of mine, and what it might bring.

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