It's tempting to preserve the purity of the original one-off story, knowing that it might bring in more new readers that way. But it's also hard to keep telling your existing fans "no."
I made the choice to write the sequel that my fans were asking for. I love Meg and Adrian, after all. But it was still a struggle. I doubted myself the whole way through. And right away, it was clear that only a tiny fraction of the existing readers of His Secretary were coming back.
This is normal, of course. Of all the people who buy a book, only a fraction actually read it. Of those, only a fraction really like it enough to remember my name. And an even smaller fraction of those people will see the sequel and buy it.
All the same, I let it get to me. I let myself believe that writing the sequel was a career blunder. The kind of thing I usually warn other authors against doing. The old Melanie would have bounced back - I'd done it plenty of times before.
But something had changed.
Hold on. Let's rewind.
It's weird, how time plays tricks on you. I have this memory that I'd started working on His Secretary before my life fell apart, but I know it hit the bestseller lists about a year later, because I was living alone for the first time in my life. A silent, empty house while you sit on the sofa, heart racing as you read the email from your new literary agent, telling you that you're on the New York Times list. That's not something you forget.
But that means it took me a year to write that silly book. That can't be right.
It doesn't matter. What matters is this: in November of 2013, my life came crashing down around me.
Later, my agent would tell me it was quite common, actually. Newly successful authors, especially women, often found themselves facing a divorce. The way it shook up a dynamic, changed everything. It brought out all the latent issues in a marriage.
My husband left me for someone else. She was a decade younger and still lived with her parents. I knew her. Thought she was my friend.
There's a scene in the movie Love Actually where Emma Thompson confronts Alan Rickman about his infidelity. He tries to apologize by telling her he's been a fool. She says:
But you've made a fool out of me. You've made the life I live foolish too.
If you read self-help books about surviving infidelity, you'll see this addressed a lot. It's not just about the in-the-moment betrayal, it's about the fact that your reality has been rewritten without you, going back months or years. It’s one of the most destabilizing things you can experience. Even if you know, even if you’ve known for a long time that something was wrong, or even just suspected. The revelation still has a way of ripping the rug out from under you.
I thought it would be hard to write romance after that. It wasn’t. What I couldn’t do, as it turned out, was deal with failure.
And I do realize how that sounds, writing off books that “only” sold thousands of copies as failures. I don’t mean it like that. But my expectations for myself were sky-high. Anything less than a runaway success was going to feel like failing. That was inevitable. I thought I was prepared to deal with it like I’d dealt with it before.
But this was different. The cliff was steeper. The heights were higher, harder to reach. And I was alone.
There had been only one thing in my life that felt secure. Effortless. My career was a whole field of unknowns, taking risks, and my marriage was everything that kept me grounded. And now it was gone.
No - not just gone. It was never real. The thing I thought I had, the life I thought I led, was a lie. For how long? At least a year or two. Maybe longer. Maybe always. The man I married was gone. I didn’t recognize this person who could hurt me so deeply.
Lies on lies on lies.
I did everything I could do to leave it all behind. I signed up for every conference I could. I traveled all summer, bought a new house, adopted a new cat. I made new friends, flirted, took up yoga.
And when I was alone, in the dark and the silence, my life still mostly packed up in boxes from the move, I shuffled around the house like a zombie. I lacked the motivation to do much of anything. I thought it would pass. I’d signed on to write a very long book for a traditional publisher, my very first big-girl contract. I didn’t want to let them down. In fact, it was my worst nightmare.
But every day, the cycle continued. I drank. I played video games. I couldn’t find the duct tape, my stapler, my lotion, my hairbrushes. I had to dig through boxes to find basic things I needed, but still I didn’t unpack.
And I didn’t write.
I signed up for a personal trainer, but I didn’t write. I was doing yoga six days a week, but I didn’t write. My house started to look like the midway point of a Hoarders episode. I couldn’t pay my lawn service anymore, so my yard started to overgrow. Vines crept up the sides of my house, tightening and twisting, and I didn’t fight it.
Eventually, all those bills caught up with me. I couldn’t pay my trainer anymore, couldn’t afford those yoga classes. I rarely left the house. I was afraid to check my mailbox. My book was two years late. The editor who acquired me, a lovely woman who shared my taste in movies, told me that she’d been transferred to a new position. I had a new editor, the one who’d decide my fate when I finally turned in that book.
I wasn’t surprised when she turned the book away. It was my last hope at turning my career around - if they had only paid me the agreed-upon remainder of my advance, I could have dragged myself out of my hole. But they didn’t. I couldn’t blame them. Two years late, after all.
Maybe it was badly written. I don’t know. I still lack the wherewithal to go back and read it with an objective eye. All they said was that “it was not in publishable shape,” which I knew - they’d encouraged me to turn in a draft that still had a few unfinished scenes. Again, it was my first time working with a publisher. I thought they were expecting something a little bit rough. But even with revisions, they said, I wasn’t getting another cent out of them.
I suspected the new editor simply didn’t like my work, had no interest in publishing me no matter how many books I’d sold. And I couldn’t blame her for that. There’s no accounting for taste.
But it left me at the lowest point I’d ever been. My mortgage was in arrears, my utilities about to be shut off, and the royalties on my back catalog had slowed down to a trickle of a few hundred dollars per month. I could buy food and booze, and that was it.
It was 2017, and nothing felt real anymore. My country had just sworn in a reality show president, and that was just the beginning of how surreal things were going to get. I knew that I’d never recover my career if I couldn’t focus, stay grounded, stay in reality. But it felt impossible to do.
Every week, I talked to my therapist. Every week we had the same conversation, and every week I promised to do better. Baby steps. Get into a routine. Write for just a little bit every day. Every week I came back a failure.
For the last few years I’ve been gripped in the kind of despair that I always feared. Every time I panicked upon publishing a new book, I panicked because I was afraid of this. This, right now. Exactly what I’m living. That I would fail, and fail, and keep failing. That I would run out of money and motivation to live.
And that’s it, isn’t it?
Slowly, ever so slowly, the understanding of this reality began to creep its way in. I began to let myself feel emotions again, even though the intensity threatened to tear me apart.
Because, hey - what’s the worst that could happen? Just more of this?
Big fucking deal. You’ve survived this long.
And so, the last four years of my life became a form of exposure therapy for my greatest fear. It proved that failure alone couldn’t kill me. Disappointing everyone I loved? Not a fatal condition. Proving my mom was always right, that I’d never make it as a novelist and I’d be stupid not to have a backup career?
Sure, okay. But I’m still here.
As the meme would have it - I lived, bitch.
So, what
now?
I don’t have a backup career. I don’t have a plan. So I’m going back to the last place I felt like anything made sense.
I used to joke that the character of Adrian could burst through the wall of my subconscious like the Kool Aid man, even though I wrote the first book from Meg’s point of view. It was no accident that Meg became more like him the more I wrote her - more ambitious, more driven, more confident.
All this time, Meg and Adrian haven’t changed. The years go by, and they remain, frozen in time in the mid-2010s when the world felt like a very different place. Looking back on them now, I didn’t even know how to begin writing about them again.
But I knew I had to try.
Not just to add a little postscript to their story. Not just for me. But to bring them to the world of 2019.
Not 2020 - I’m not quite that cruel.
I’ve changed a lot in the past few years. One thing I’ve realized, more and more every day, is that I could no longer write the rich and powerful as flawed-but-lovable heroes without addressing some of the deeper issues at play.
I know it’s not quite the same fun escapism that people are used to. I know it might not really scratch that itch, but I can’t be sorry about it.
I don’t know what the future holds for me or my writing, but if Meg and Adrian show up in it again, I know things are going to be a little different. But I’m excited for it. I hope you will be, too.
Xoxo,
Melanie
His Secretary: Undone and Unveiled (The Complete Series Collection) Page 48
