Memoirs Are Made of This

Author’s Note

Venus was on a roll, and the U.K. publisher of My Three Husbands wanted a sequel to call their own. In other words, they didn’t want Confessions of a Pregnant Princess, the sequel I’d already written and that had been published in the U.S. The U.K. book-publishing market is entirely separate from the U.S. market, so readers in Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries could enjoy (and not be confused by) an entirely different continuation of Venus’ story—a kind of fictional parallel universe.

 Stranger things have happened.

Venus and the characters surrounding her offered so many juicy story possibilities that I was able to re-imagine her life after My Three Husbands in a novel that was set in New York instead of Rome and called Memoirs Are Made of This.

Seeking a new life after the fiasco of her third marriage, Venus moves into the apartment of her overprotective gay dads on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Whitman, one of her dads, arranges for her to get an entry-level job as the PA to Susanna Hyde, an old acquaintance who has become the high-powered editor of Aura magazine. Venus is thrilled to be entering what she imagines to be the glamorous world of New York magazine publishing, and she’s determined to do a good job and make a career for herself. When her dads return to Portland, Venus is on her own in New York City.

At first she is little more than Susanna’s on-call-at-all-hours servant. But when the perpetually multi-tasking and social-climbing Susanna no longer has time to write her sex column for the magazine, she inveigles Venus to ghost write it for her. Who has more experience with sex and failed relationships with both genders, after all, than Venus Gilroy? Venus takes on this new challenge and, to her surprise, not only enjoys writing the monthly column but becomes really good at it. She’s no slouch in the romance department, either, and juggles a trio of new New York possibilities, including her building’s super, a sweet but tough-talking Italian girl from Brooklyn named Mary-Joseph Capistrano, a sophisticated but burnt-out editor named Giles Travaille, and one of Susanna’s cast-off boy toys, a writer named Josh O’Donnell. For starters.

As life at Aura unravels into a nightmare under Susanna’s power-hungry, control-freak leadership, a showdown between Venus and her boss becomes inevitable…and turns ever-so-nasty. But as she weathers the difficulties, discovers her writing talents, and revels in the remarkable diversity of her new New York life, Venus realizes that she has finally found her heart and her home.

Memoirs Are Made of This came out in a hardcover U.K. edition in 2007, followed a year later by a paperback. A few months after that, Memoirs Are Made of This by Cyoп Aԍancoп (pardon my Cyrillic) appeared in a hardcover Russian translation.