The Truth Behind Double Standards
September 3 & 4, 2005 As posted on the Simon & Schuster Bulletin Board

Okay, I doubt I ever told you this before, but Nick Sinclair and DS were based on a family member's true story. Instead of a pretty pillbox, just subsitute a pearl-backed brush and comb set as the gift/bribe to Nick's mother.

In retrospect, I'm sure I wrote DS as a means to revenge.

As far as Tracy's comment that Nick sexually harrasses Lauren on the job, you're absolutely right, he did. However, in 1984 when DS was published sexual harrassment in the workplace was just...life as it had always been.

In order to be able to enjoy DS and TT, you almost have to regard them in the context of "historical novels." LOL

Many of the things I set up and wrote about in DS and TT were--at that time--hotly debated political women's issues. There are things in both books that should raise the hair on the back of the neck of any self-respecting feminist. Including me.

Would I ever consider writing TT and DS today? God no, not without a lot of changes! I still feel there is sufficient underlying merit in both stories to allow them to stay in print, however.

[ September 03, 2005, 02:07 PM: Message edited by: Judith McNaught ] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Carol Whitworth was my grandmother, Tracey.

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Thanks, and yes, he was my father. I should add here that I changed the locale and fictionalized some of the subsequent events in DS.

My mother revealed the story about the "pillbox" (actually, a comb,brush, and mirror set) when I was eleven or twelve, and unknowingly gave her a similar comb and brush present for her birthday.

The comb and brush set kept disappearing off my mother's dressing table after I gave it to her, and naturally I asked her where it was when that happened.

At first she pretended several times that she'd put the set away accidently. And then one day, when I was watching her get ready to go somewhere, (which was one of my favorite things to do), I noticed the set was gone again, and I asked her about it again.

I can still remember it as if it were last week: She hesitated, and then she turned around on the little upholstered stool at her dressing table, and she took my hands in hers and said, "I need to tell you a story about Daddy, when he was a little boy. Christmas was coming, and he asked his aunt and uncle to give him all sorts of extra chores because he needed to buy an extra-special Christmas gift for his mother...."

The oddest post script to that story is that although I treated my grandmother "frigidly" from that day onward on those rare occasions when I saw her, she was nicer by far to me than anyone who wasn't a part of her immediate "secondary" family.

I suspected, then and now, that on some level she recognized in me a developing hauteur and resolve equal to her own. Or perhaps she sensed that some day, somehow, I would find a way to even the score.

[ September 04, 2005, 02:34 AM: Message edited by: Judith McNaught ]

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One more note on DS, and probably the most important to help you understand why I wrote it exactly as I did...

Back in 1982 when I wrote the manuscript, the "sexual revolution" was just beginning to emerge from the closet. However, at that point in time, men were the sole benefactors.

The line of baloney that Nick gave Lauren about sexual equality was just that--baloney.

The truth was that men, and most of society, still regarded an unmarried woman who satisfied her sexual desires outside of marriage as promiscuous. The only difference in 1982 was that the birth control pill had become available, and so women also became solely responsible for getting themselves pregnant. In short, if she got pregnant, it was her problem, not his.

THOSE were the underlying messages/warnings I was sending with DS. Thankfully, most of that has changed now.

~~ Judith McNaught on Simon & Schuster's SimonSays Discussion Board