Scandalous Books by Susan Lyons

I’m delighted to be today’s guest blogger. I write sexy romances for Kensington Aphrodisia – and I owe it all to two women.

Let’s start with Grace Metalious who, back in 1956, wrote a book called Peyton Place. Is anyone old enough to remember that book? Or the movie (1957, starring Lana Turner, nominated for a ton of Academy Awards) or TV show (1964-69, with Ryan O’Neal and Mia Farrow – the first primetime soap opera)?

My book club just read Peyton Place and I learned all sorts of interesting things. It sold over 10 million copies and is the 4th biggest selling novel of all time. But, more relevant to my blog today, is the fact that when it was published it was considered to be utterly scandalous. It created a whole new – and shocking – image of small-town life, rife with sex and secrets. The women of Peyton Place were the original desperate housewives, and the town harboured illegitimacy, adultery, rape, abortion and murder.

Peyton Place was a “dirty book,” but it was also an exposé of the secrets small-town America had kept buried. Grace Metalious was America’s “naughty girl” but her book had a huge popular appeal. It opened the door for commercial fiction that wasn’t “nice” and “proper.” It said, basically, that sex is an intrinsic part of normal life, and that women as well as men are sexual beings.

And remember, this was the 1950s. The days of white picket fences and Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show. The days when, if a bedroom scene was shown at all, the man and woman were husband and wife, buttoned up to the neck in PJs, and sleeping in separate twin beds. All I can say is, hurray for Grace!

Now, fast forward to the mid 1990s when a woman named Candace Bushnell wrote a column called Sex And The City, which became a book and an amazingly successful TV show. As with Grace, Candace wrote about a community – this time not a small town (or is it, in its own way?) but Manhattan. And within that community she focused on four female friends who did what young women had never done quite so openly before: experimented with sex and love, and got together to laugh, cry and dish explicitly about it. Again, a writer shattered the conventions and notched up another triumph for the liberation of women – and of female characters in fiction.

Okay, I’m no groundbreaker like either of them, but I love writing about my own Awesome Foursome, four 20-somethings who live in my own wonderful community – Vancouver, BC. These girls are at that magical but stressful age when you try to figure out who you are as a woman. They’re discovering their sexuality, figuring out whether they want sex or long-term love, learning how to separate from their parents without completely disrespecting them, working out how to balance career with personal live. And they’re doing it all as best friends, the same way Carrie Bradshaw and her friends did in Sex And The City. The fourth and final book in my series was released last week. “She’s on Top” is the story of Rina Goldberg, a woman with body-image issues who reconnects with her first love and discovers he’s turned out to be a true hottie. I’m thrilled to bits that it’s an RT Top Pick and has garnered a lot of other fabulous reviews.

I’d love it if you checked out my books (complete with trailers, excerpts, review quotes, and notes on how each originated) at my website: http://www.susanlyons.ca. If you hop on over and enter my monthly contest and say you came from Naughty & Spice, you’ll be entered in a contest to win a copy of “She’s on Top”. I’ll pick the winner on Saturday, April 5.

What I’d like to chat about with you today is: what books, movies, TV shows really rocked your world when you were young? Which were the ones that were scandalous in some fashion – that opened your eyes and made you see the world around you in a different way?