discuss their first foray into the genre.
Seth Maxon: What was your previous romance-novel exposure going into
The Duke and I?
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Madeline Ducharme: I’ve always
hated those cheesy covers of thick, cheap, paperback romance novels. Maybe it was my latent queerness, but something about the bulging muscles and sighing women in that corny art style just immediately turned me off. Stuff like this.
Maxon: I am little bit older than you, and also a straight man, and these sorts of covers did always make me laugh more than anything. I think a youth spent with Fabio as a ubiquitous romance-novel cover model and cultural joke as a dumb hunk who women nonetheless fantasized about forged my general impression of romance novels as fundamentally silly, if hot to some.