Milan was at the center ofthe implosion of the Romance Writers of Americathis past winter.
He disappeared that night.
Read the interview below the cover.
Credit: Jovanka Novakovic
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Where did the idea forThe Duke Who Didntcome from?
Although it’s nothing like anything we call football today.
People come from far away to participate in this game.
courtesy Courtney Milan
That’s where it first started.
I understand your grandmother inspired it in part.
Can you elaborate more on how family history shaped the storytelling?
My mother’s family immigrated to the United States relatively early.
I believe my great-grandfather first came over in the 1870s or 1880s.
And my great-grandfather on the other side came over in the 1870s as well.
I’ve always been interested in that early history of immigration and diaspora.
There’s a substantial amount of personal history that comes into play.
All of those things would have been new to her.
They don’t overlap.
This is someone who is determined and ambitious and intelligent and not taking no for an answer.
And then you have what other people tell you she should have been like.
Do you feel like this book took longer to percolate than others?
I have some books that percolate a really long time.
This took a little longer than average.
But that’s just a function of having had more ideas that have been sitting around.
I feel like my ideas are kind of like black holes.
Is there one here and can you talk about why or why not?
I don’t have one in this.
The thing that happens that would normally be the climactic moment of the book is not a dark moment.
Was that just a technical challenge for you, or what prompted it?
As a writer, the first four or five books, you just accept it.
Why do I have to?"
I felt like the thing I was being pushed to do didn’t work.
It felt like it was undercutting the work that we’ve done to make them a good team.
I had low blood sugar."
And then it has to be resolvable.
So there’s this weird tension that arises.
But there are other times when I don’t think that’s there.
So I started thinking about what you could write to instead of writing toward this black moment.
First off, how did that experience impact your writing?
I can imagine it was exhausting and took time and energy away from your work.
I had to learn to be able to write again.
Everyone else’s perception of the RWA matter is that it started in December.
From my perspective, it started much, much earlier.
I had been dealing with people from RWA complaining about me saying things for years.
It always turned into something.
Somebody’s gonna email and say, “Courtney should not be saying this.
kindly make her stop.”
It turns out that it’s very difficult emotionally to compartmentalize.
Before I joined the RWA board, I was doing one about every six months.
Did going through all of that impact this book or its story at all?
Did you tweak anything in light of it?
I always thought her to be a full anomaly.
In 1850, there was a man who was Hakka who started, essentially, leading a rebellion.
It was a massive civil war in China.
But one of the tenets [of the rebel government] was that men and women were equal.
I hadn’t really known any of that cultural background.
It’s not that my grandmother wasn’t an anomaly.
But being able to look at that and say, “Also it was complete s—.”
