She leaned across the table, the cut of her expensive white suit offering the slightest but nonetheless tantalizing glimpse of alabaster skin. The stars on her jacket sparkled in the subterranean light of the saloon, a famous hangout for writers, mercenaries, supermodels and international financiers.
The man waited for an answer to his question, an answer that would determine the course of the rest of this day–and, just perhaps, the rest of his life.
“A cheeseburger?” Catherine Lanigan repeated, after what seemed an eternity. “No, no. It’s a little early for me, thank you very much. I’ll probably just have whatever they are having on the plane.”
So, she was leaving. That’s the way it was. The man, steeling himself, pressed on.
“So you call yourself a romance novelist,” he said.
“No, that’s not what I call myself at all,” said Lanigan. “I write books in which romance plays an important part.”
She was prepared for the question.
She had confronted them before and often, these hostile questions coming from interviewers, waiting in ambush and ready to write yet another nasty, condescending story about romance fiction–poking fun at the heaving bosoms, burning passions and Fabio-like (Fabio himself) creatures on the book covers.
“It’s so easy for people to stigmatize romances and their readers,” she said. “Reviewers and newspaper interviewers seem to get nervous because of the romantic nature of the stories and the writers who write them. I think they expect us to be dummies.”
Lanigan is no dummy and “women’s fiction” is no joke. It is a $750 million-a-year gold mine, accounting for nearly 50 percent of mass-market paperback sales. Fifty million women in North America regularly read romances.
And romances are no longer exclusively packaged behind covers featuring muscled heroes and swooning heroines. Romances by established authors–Lanigan has written 20 books–are beginning to appear in sedate, plain covers–and in hardback. The romance genre also is beginning to be examined in a more serious manner, on university campuses and on bookstore shelves.
“And it’s about time,” said Diane Moggy, senior editor for Mira, a new division of romance giant Harlequin, which has published Lanigan’s last two novels. “The same critics who slam romances for being formulaic are often respectful of mystery fiction, most of which is equally predictable.”
Romance novels, often published in series form by such paperback outfits as Harlequin and Silhouette, are those in which, Moggy said, “a romance between a man and a woman is the central focus and there is always a happy ending.”
The more encompassing women’s fiction category features novels intended to appeal to a female audience but in which, Moggy said, “a male-female romance is not the focus.”
“It’s a semantic difference, perhaps, but an important one,” said Lanigan. “All I would say is that I would like to think that each woman who picks up one of my books will find something in there to help guide her through life’s rough spots, through the turmoil. I like to think of my books as providing a firm push in the right direction. It’s about empowerment.”
But the stigma remains.
“It is a problem,” she said. “You have no idea how many interviews begin with the reporter saying, `So tell me about this soft-core porn that you write. . . .’ It’s shameful and insulting.
“Writing is liberating. It is not easy but I attempt to take on big issues,” she said. “And I also get to stick in all these references to Chicago. I just adore this town. It’s always had an independent spirit.”
She wasn’t joking. Her affection for the city is genuine. Chicago landmarks and settings pepper each of her books and, standing near Buckingham Fountain, one of her favorite sites, she began to rhapsodize.
“This fountain is like something out of a fairy tale,” she said. “Right out of Cinderella.”
Lanigan was born and raised in LaPorte, Ind., the daughter of an attorney and a mother who was often ill and to whom Catherine would tell stories of her own design. Hers is a family of serious achievers (one brother is a Lake Forest-based vice president for J.P. Morgan & Co. and another is the head of the plastic surgery department at Michigan State University; a sister runs a corporate gift business in LaPorte).
Windy City memories
Lanigan first visited Chicago when she was 3 and the memory is firm: “It was Dec. 11. I wore a blue velvet suit and we went to Marshall Field’s to see Santa.”
She visited the city often, enrolling in modeling school here during high school and appearing on runway shows at various charity events and department stores.
“The most I ever made modeling was $25,” she says. “I was offered a chance to go to New York and try to make it in the big time. But New York gives me a headache.”
She went to Nazareth College in Kalamazoo, Mich., “an all-girls school so Catholic it was almost a nunnery,” she says. She was majoring in history and English and dreamed of writing. But during her sophomore year, a creative-writing professor told her that she was a painfully bad writer. He also said that he would give her a passing grade for the class if she promised never to write again.
“I was devastated,” she says. “I now realize that this man was playing some bizarre power game with me. But it paralyzed my pen for more than 14 years.”
At 23 she married. He was a business executive. That’s all she’ll say about him. They moved around a lot. A son, Ryan, was born in 1972.
“I was well on my way to becoming a Martha Stewart-like creature: the do-everything-perfect housekeeper, cook and corporate wife,” says Lanigan, who often includes recipes in her novels.
On a business trip with her husband to San Antonio, she approached a table of journalists who were in town covering the murder of a judge by a pack of bikers and said, “I just want to tell you that what you do is the most important thing in the world: You write the truth.”
How did they react?
“They laughed like crazy,” she says. “But one of them began talking to me about writing and, after hearing my story of the professor who said I couldn’t write, said something to the effect of, `Oh, to hell with him. If you want to be a writer, start writing.’ “
A few months later she did, sitting down at the kitchen table with a pad of paper and a few pencils. In two months she had finished 400 pages. Her first book, “Romancing the Stone,” has sold nearly 1.5 million copies.
But her marriage was growing sour.
“There are a lot of con men out there preying on women,” she says. “Men who are after a woman’s fire, want part of your soul so that they can control you. The women most easily conned are those who have just gotten divorced.”
In 1981 Lanigan joined that crowd.
“And I was shark bait,” she says.
Same old story
She remarried. A Houston business executive. That’s all she’ll say. Like her first marriage, this one lasted 10 years.
Throughout, she kept writing. “Jewel of the Nile” was a best seller and, like “Romancing the Stone,” was made into a hit film. Other titles include “Seduced,” “Reckless Love,” “Elusive Love” and “Bound by Love.”
Her latest concerns three women–Mary Grace, Alicia and Michelle–whose lives are entangled with a fellow named Richard Bartlow. He is described on the book jacket as sexy, ambitious, charming and dangerous. Lanigan calls him “the Antichrist.”
But he sure can kiss, as captured in a steamy section on Page 96: “His tongue prodded her lips apart, then plunged into the interior of her mouth. . . . She felt as though her blood had turned to lava as it surged through her body. Tingling chills spread across her breasts, and for the first time in her life, she ached to have them touched and caressed.”
“Catherine is extremely bright,” says Moggy. “She values her editors’ input and is terribly dedicated to her readers.”
Lanigan writes for eight hours every day in her Houston home. She is, she says, “48 and proud of every gray hair,” though none are apparent in her stylishly messy, dark mane. She is tall and statuesque and her eyes are often hidden behind sunglasses, but not to lend an air of celebrity or mystery. Her eyes are painfully sensitive to sunlight.
So the light of the subterranean saloon suits her as she says she divorced husband No. 2 after 10 years in 1993 and is now in a “committed relationship.” He is a lawyer. That’s all she’ll say about him.
“Do men I have known make it into my books?” she asks, rhetorically. “Most of my life is in the pages–the bad and the good.
“You know, if I’m typecast now, that’s OK. With each book I grow as a writer.”
She will tell you that she admires the work of such contemporary authors as Jeffrey Archer, Sidney Sheldon and Ken Follett while citing as major influences that all-American trio of Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway.
“I want to one day write a novel about about a man trying to deal with a heterosexual-homosexual conflict,” she says. “I have the title, `Who Broke the Moon?’ Do you like that?”
The man said nothing and so Catherine Lanigan, sensing the end of this affair, rose and walked across the saloon and out the door. The only thing that remained was the aroma of her perfume, hanging in the room–a sweet smell in the otherwise stale air.
WHERE PASSION BLOOMS IN LANIGAN’S CHICAGO
Catherine Lanigan is in love with Chicago. In most of her books you’ll find one or more of these local landmarks, and here are some reasons.
– Buckingham Fountain
“It’s out of a fairy tale.”
– Marshall Field’s State Street store
“For the great memories I haveof standing in there when I was 3, waiting to see Santa.”
– Water Tower Place
“Perfectly glitzy.”
– Oak Street Beach
“In the fall and winterit is a perfect placeto find solitude.”
– Lake Shore Drive
“Especially near the museums. I feel like I’ve been transported back to the Columbian Exposition in 1893.”
