Rumford native Julia Cohen has a book deal for three romance novels, complete with X-rated passion. The first one will be published in March.
Always a voracious reader, Julia Cohen never envisioned that what she read in secret at the Rumford Public Library as a girl was research for her new career as an author of books laden with steamy sex scenes.
The 1988 graduate of Rumford High School now lives in the United Kingdom where she teaches English at a girl’s Catholic boarding school in Ascot by day and writes romance novels by night.
Last year, in June, Harlequin/Mills & Boon gave Cohen a three-book deal. The setting for the first two books, to be published in March and April, is Portland.
Growing up, Cohen’s second home was the Rumford Public Library. While there, she used to “sneak Harlequin Temptations into the biography section and read them standing up while I was pretending to be doing research,” she recalled. She wrote her first unpublished novel at age 11. “It was about a sorceress who had to defeat a devilishly good-looking evil wizard,” she noted. Cohen went on to graduate summa cum laude from Brown University with an English degree in 1992.
She “fell in love with the United Kingdom” during her junior year abroad at New Hall College at Cambridge University. After graduation, she moved there to pursue a postgraduate degree in English literature at the University of Reading. Her thesis was a far cry from what she writes about today: It was a study of fairies in late 19th and early 20th century children’s fiction.
‘Featured Attraction’
Admitting “a weakness for a man with a guitar in a band,” the Rumford native also fell in love with Dave Smith, her husband of eight years and now a guitar tech for rock bands. “People always look at romance writers’ husbands and think we base our characters on them. But we don’t, although he is the perfect man,” she said.
Her first Mills & Boon novel will be “Featured Attraction.” The story was a 2004 short contemporary Golden Heart finalist with the Romance Writers of America and also shortlisted for the New Writer’s Award from the Romantic Novelists’ Association in the UK.
Most of the book’s action takes place in the Delphi theater, which is loosely based on Congress Street’s State Theater. Its owner, Jack Taylor, dreams about the most incredible sex ever with a mystery woman, who later enters his cinema and is named Kitty Giroux. According to Cohen, the two get locked in the Delphi together with “nothing but a year’s supply of popcorn, a year’s supply of chocolate-covered raisins and a year’s supply of condoms. And things take a turn for the distinctly X-rated …”
The titles of her two other Mills & Boon books will be “Being a Bad Girl” and “Delicious.”
The 35-year-old writer admits that Harlequin romance novels are “more explicitly sexy than they were 20 years ago. At first, I couldn’t write the sex scenes because I was too embarrassed,” she commented. She noted that the romance scenes now would even make her 88-year-old grandmother, Lillian Cohen of Auburn, a former Harlequin romance fan, blush.
What this genre of books does provide, she said, “is a quick feel-good read that promises a happy ending.”
Seminar about sex
Breaking into the romance writing field wasn’t easy for Cohen. Her first three novels were rejected by Harlequin/Mills & Boon. She said it’s easy to see now why her first novel was rejected. “It involved a tattoo artist and his girlfriend who foiled a drug smuggling ring in Belfast, Maine,” she explained.
Cohen has recently received national press attention in the UK. At a Romantic Novelists’ Association meeting, a London Times reporter took an interest in Cohen’s “Naughty Bits” seminar on how to write good sex scenes. Just as the new school year started, there was a full page spread on Cohen in the Times educational supplement.
“My headmistress was really supportive and said it was good that I was a practitioner of what I taught – English.”
Cohen also was invited to discuss the same subject on a BBC “Page Turners” program.
During her visit to Maine, Cohen shared her writing expertise on July 13 with teachers attending the Maine Writing Project Summer Institute at the University of Maine at Orono.
Julie’s parents, Jerry and Jennifer Cohen of Rumford, are proud of their daughter’s success. As soon as his patients plop down in his dental chair in his Mexico dental office, Cohen has a captive audience and tells them all about his daughter’s writing and book deal.
“Thanks to my dad, everybody in my hometown seems to know everything about me,” she laughed.
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