Your Personal Steel
Recommended
This event is in the past
March 8–22, 2019, 11 am–5 pm
Mount Analogue
Pioneer Square (Seattle)
$15 suggested donation
The subject of Love Life, Patty Gone's book-length essay published by Seattle press Mount Analogue, is the romance novelist Danielle Steel, who has sold more books than J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Dr. Seuss, Tolstoy, or Dickens. Steel is an interesting figure. She writes her novels with an old typewriter on a desk that is a "Jeff Koons–style" sculpture of her own books. She's also a wealthy heiress who's been married multiple times. In Gone's view, Steel doesn't write "bodice-rippers," as my dad called them. Steel's books follow a common formula, wherein an older man seduces a younger woman mostly by being mean to her. The woman eventually tames the man in one way or another, and they end up together in the end. In Steel's books the real Prince Charming will always be the guy who decides to buy her name-brand clothing and commit to starting a family. In addition to offering fresh insights into a popular genre, Love Life is also the first book-length critical essay I've read that contains real narrative tension. Gone will perform personal readings of Danielle Steel passages by appointment.
by Rich Smith