Shirley Conran

And kind of your scare quotes, bodice rippers were not quite so big.

We were there participating more with the Bonk Buster, which is something I with Amy Burge have written a book about, which I think of authors like Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper, Shirley Conran, Judith Krantz.

Several of these were also big in the US, but I think these are perhaps more foundational for the genre outsider America, where we have perhaps sometimes more of a comic tone and occasionally, uh, we flirt a little bit more with irony.

Uh, But when we think about the kind of classic 70s, 80s, 90s, I think 70s and 80s are kind of one thing, and then we start to see this shift in the kind of late 80s, particularly into the mid-90s, into the 2000s.

Can you give some examples of Bonkbusters, maybe some of your favorites that you've studied throughout your research?

Yeah, absolutely.

So probably the kind of classic bonk buster, and we did a book club on this with some of the participants in our research, is Lace by Shirley Conran, which is the story of four women who grow up at Swiss boarding school.

One of them gets pregnant, we don't know who, and the book begins with the daughter gathering these four women who are now in their forties together and uttering the iconic line, which one of you bitches is my mother? and so we kind of get the history of these four women who all you know go on to be kind of high powered in their various fields and have a lot of uh messy sex and love affairs as well as lily the daughter who has it's quite a bleak story poor old lily this book is otherwise most famous for having a very upsetting sex scene involving a goldfish um oh gosh okay yeah You don't want to know where the goldfish goes.

But not only that, I was able to track down, I'm standing here at my bookshelf right now, uh, I'm trying to find it.

I bought the two books by, uh, so the, that series, uh, was named, was based on the book series, and there were two books, um, by Shirley Conran, and, um, yeah, called Laced.

And it's a, it's romance novel is what it is.

Yeah.