Bestselling romance novelist Courtney Milan talked about her latest book and the controversy that rocked the Romance Writers of America last year in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
Milan revealed the cover of The Duke Who Didn’t, her novel that’s slated for publication on Sept. 22. The book tells the story of Chloe Fong, a woman whose childhood crush reappears in her life and reveals that he’s actually a nobleman.
Milan said that the book, which “has been percolating since about 2013 or 2014,” was inspired by her grandmother.
“My mother’s family immigrated to the United States relatively early,” she told EW. “I’ve always been interested in that early history of immigration and diaspora. This is a book that's set around the same time, when my ancestors were coming over from China into various parts of the West, and I wanted to think about what it would have been like for them and why they were leaving and what they were hoping to get.”
Milan also talked about the controversy that enveloped the RWA after the group suspended her for calling out what she said was racism in another author’s book.
“I had been dealing with people from RWA complaining about me saying things for years,” she told the magazine. “And it didn’t really matter how nicely I tried to say it, someone would complain about the fact that I was saying it.…The thing that was most damaging about this, for me, is that it felt like I had to give other people permanent residence in my head. Every time I spoke or wrote something on Twitter, I had to think, ‘But is this gonna make racist people mad at me?’”
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
