[Note from Frolic: We’re so excited to welcome author Lea Geller to the site today. She’s gossiping about, well, gossip!]
In a glorious confluence of events, I just so happened to be re-watching Gossip Girl (this time with my fourteen-year-old, who muttered “gross” every time someone over thirty kissed on-screen) at the exact same time Bridgerton dropped. I made the mistake of starting that show with the same fourteen-year-old, but BBC Pride and Prejudice it was not, and I quickly announced that Bridgerton would have to wait a few years, at least if I was going to be involved.
Still, the connection between the two shows and my own book, The Truth and Other Hidden Things jumped right out at me. In my novel, a woman, Bells Walker, moves from Manhattan to the Hudson Valley region of Dutchess County, NY when her husband gets a job at a local university. Unable to find work as a writer and feeling frustrated by the frosty welcome she receives from local women, she begins to blog anonymously about them, under the moniker the County Dutchess.
In Gossip Girl, the chatter is about secret hookups at swanky Manhattan locales, in the backs of limousines, and on Caribbean islands where French is spoken. In Bridgerton, the gossip details the brutal marriage market of the British upper classes and the surprising arrival of a glorious Duke. In my novel, the classes are not that upper and there are no swanky locales, limousines, islands or even royals, not unless you count the County Dutchess. As a parent of teenagers, the County Dutchess busies herself not with marriage markets or the monied upper classes, but with the pressures of raising children in the American suburbs and the all-consuming drive of the parents around her to land their children in the best possible college. (Oh, she also writes about stressed-out moms using task apps to hook up with their millennial fitness instructors, but I don’t want to give away too much…)
In some ways, all fiction is really just gossip. Firstly, when you write a book, some of the readers in your life will immediately assume that you’ve gone and written thinly-veiled gossip. Many writers have fielded comments and questions such as: “You really weren’t kind to your mother in that first book, were you? “If you’re going to write about me, the least you could do was make me attractive,” and, “So and so will lose her mind when she reads what you wrote about her husband.” In my experience, the characters are all made-up but the themes come from real life, and that may be where the gossip lies. I don’t know women using task apps to hook up with toothy pilates instructors, or doing any of the other things the Dutchess observes around her, but I do know plenty of parents under tremendous stress to do what they believe is right for their families, and hey, we all make mistakes, right?