Who is this Nora Roberts woman?

Nora Roberts, a romance novelist who also writes futuristic police procedurals under the name J.D. Robb, is certainly prodigious. She has published a hundred and eighty-two novels. In a typical year, she publishes five “new Noras”: two installments of a paperback original trilogy; two J.D. Robb books; and each summer, the “big Nora”—a hardcover standalone romance novel. Twenty-seven Nora Roberts books are sold every minute. Roberts grosses sixty million dollars a year, Forbes estimated in 2004, more than John Grisham or Stephen King.

“You know, writing’s creative and all this, certainly, but you don’t just wander around dreaming,” Roberts says. “That’s not what you’re getting paid for.” Describes Roberts interacting with readers at a bookstore signing. Roberts is not a hugger or a crier. She has a dirty mouth, a smoker’s voice, and a closet full of Armani. Shopping is her main form of self-indulgence. Listening to the give-and-take between Roberts and her fans is like eavesdropping on the collective unconscious of American women. A self-taught writer, and an irreverent one, Roberts was not, at first, an easy sell. Nancy Jackson, the editor of Roberts’s first novel, notes that Roberts “didn’t follow the formula as strictly as others.” Roberts is as uninterested in the literary establishment as she is unloved by it.

Roberts was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1950. She married Ronald Aufdem-Brinke upon graduating from high school and settled in Keedysville. She had two children. She began to write in1979 while housebound during a snowstorm. In 1980, Silhouette accepted her novel “Irish Thoroughbred.” In her choice of milieu, if nothing else, Roberts is the Raymond Carver of romance. Her characters thirst for cold beers on the porch, not Daquiris by the pool. The engine of the romance genre, according to Roberts, is not escapism, but identification. “Character is plot. Make them accessible to the reader.”

“Sex is important in the books because, without it, it would be like eating a rice cake instead of a cupcake,” Roberts says.