Blue Is The Warmest Colour is an erotic lesbian love story which won the coveted Palme D’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013. In 2010, The Kids Are All Right was the first lesbian film to be released to a mainstream cinema audience and immediately won universal critical acclaim, with both the film and the two lead actresses winning many awards.
In 2015, Cate Blanchett starred as an elegant 1950s New York housewife who began an affair with an aspiring young female photographer in the film Carol.
The graphic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which took the world by storm in 2012, was also released as a film in 2015. This book’s success is proof of how we’re demanding a lot more from our fiction than the ‘single girl with gay male, or larger-than-life chardonnay-necking female, best friend finally (after much alcohol-fuelled angst) gets her man’ than we did in Chick lit’s heyday, but what’s out there for women who want to read a ‘proper’ lesbian romance which doesn’t just revolve around a young girl’s ‘sexual awakening’?
My novel “Just Good Friends?” follows a group of wealthy ‘yummy mummies’ who appear to have it all, but are their seemingly-perfect lives quite as cosy as they think?
Eleanor’s blissfully unaware that her husband Harvey’s having a steamy affair with a young woman at the Office and is about to turn his back on his lucrative City career. Ruth thinks that her husband Simon’s working long hours too, but he’s more likely to be found at his other home (along with his secret long-term mistress and their young son), plotting their divorce.
In the middle of it all, a drunken kiss with her good friend Helen sends Ruth’s world into freefall, and what happens next changes all of their lives forever …
A Gap in the Market
A string of high profile women have left their husbands over the last few years in order to start a new life with a female partner. Same-sex couples are now commonplace in our Soaps and on many TV dramas. Lipstick Lesbianism* is very big business in almost every aspect of the media, yet there is still so little out there in the mainstream women’s fiction market which offers the reader anything other than the merest, teasing hint of a lesbian relationship.
I wrote “Just Good Friends?” in 2010, right at the peak of this phenomenon in the media, when almost every other TV show seemed to have somehow found a way to shoehorn a lesbian liaison (or the hint of one) in as a way of boosting ratings.
I’d been thrilled to have got an Agent almost immediately, but (as is the story of my life!) it was one who proved not have been genuine in their offer to represent me. After dusting myself down from the disappointment I self-published my book, and its theme is still as topical today as it was then.
“Just Good Friends?” is a novel which not only gives you a couple of good old ‘cheating husband’ storylines, but also a passionate love story involving one of their wives. It explores the agonising moral dilemma faced by married yummy mummy Ruth as the sexual attraction she feels towards her closest friend Helen begins to overwhelm her. But will she have the courage to follow her heart? (This novel includes some fairly graphic lesbian/sexual content.)
Click here to purchase “Just Good Friends?”
Links
Are you closer to your best friend than your husband? (08/07/10)
Why it’s never too late to be a lesbian! (22/07/10)
Too spoilt to leave him (13/09/10)
1 in 3 women prefer spending time with their girlfriends than their husbands (21/10/11)
More than half of women are attracted to their female friends (21/10/11)
Mary Portas speaks of her love for her female partner (02/03/12)
Mary Portas and her partner are expecting a baby (04/03/12)
Rachel McAdams leans in for a lesbian kiss (19/05/12)
Cynthia Nixon marries Christine Marinoni (28/05/12)
Ellen & Portia return from holiday looking relaxed (18/06/12)
Lesbians ‘come out’ at the Tatler Ball (04/07/12)
Emmerdale’s Michelle Hardwick to marry girlfriend (8/01/14)
Michelle Hardwick (Emmerdale’s Vet, Vanessa) read Just Good Friends? while she was on the holiday where she proposed to her girlfriend Rosie. Here’s what she had to say about it:
Eat Pray Love Author leaves husband for a woman (14/09/16)
E. Lynn Harris quit his job to write mainstream novels about professional gay black men in modern America. He became a NY Times Best-Selling Author before his untimely death in 2009. (I quit my job to write mainstream novels about professional gay white women in modern Britain. I’m still one lucky break away from success … )
Video: Mad Men – “1960, I am so over you!” (An agonisingly painful and powerful moment from the US drama series, highlighting just how far we’ve come since.)
*A feminine-looking/dressing gay or bisexual woman.