The romance novelist is proud to be behind your favorite filthy sex scenes.
ByEmily Leibert,
a morning blogger for the Cutwho specializes in coverage at the intersection of gender and sports, the arts, and our relationship to our bodies
Photo: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet
Photo: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet
Tessa Bailey is about to meet some of her most devoted New York City readers and has opted for a rib-cage-clutching dress for the occasion. A U-shaped neckline hugs the focal point of her ensemble, dotted with blue-and-white butterflies and olive trees that resemble chinoiserie. The styling choice isn’t intended to suggest anything coy or mysterious. “I thought this dress was a really good representation of my books because it looks like it could be for Sunday school,” she says, a mischievous look in her eye. “But it’s very tits out.” With Bailey, one of the most prolific writers in the romance genre, what you see is what you get: a no-nonsense California native uninterested in half-hearted flattery. We quickly settle into the well-paced tango of old friends, catching up in Park Slope on a cloudy day in June.
“Are you drinking, or are you just gonna have coffee?” Bailey asks. It’s three o’clock here at the Mexican restaurant Claro, a ten-minute walk from the romance bookstore the Ripped Bodice, where later this evening Bailey will take photos with fans as they gush over whether characters Piper Bellinger, Wells Whitaker, and Matt Donovan light up their monotonous days with sparks, making their workdays a little more tolerable. The evening before, “cocktails were flowing” at Nobu with a few girlfriends, and she wouldn’t mind some hair of the dog. Instead, we decide on black coffee, though the allure of a glass of chilled red haunts us both as we make our way through chilaquiles and tuna tostadas.
Three years ago, Bailey’s enemies-to-lovers novel, It Happened One Summer, became a runaway hit, unlocking a new level of notoriety for the author and a teeming community of 250,000 fans on TikTok. A breakout of this size was inevitable: Since the start of her career, Bailey has written nearly 60 books, has sold over 4 million copies, and is overseeing the development of IHOS into a feature film with several other titles in consideration for adaptation. Her latest book (and second to be released this year), The Au Pair Affair, hit shelves in July, and the reigning queen of sex scenes, as she’s regarded by her readers, seems to be operating at the height of her powers. Together with mainstream romance writers like Emily Henry, Ali Hazelwood, and Jasmine Guillory, Bailey’s successes help provethat the genre previously dismissed as unserious is a powerful — and popular — form of literature. “We have this billion-dollar-a-year industry that is giving people hope and empathy and agency, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of that,” she says.
If the pandemic left romance readers hungry for happy endings, another year of political upheaval and economic strife has now left them voracious for quick hits of dopamine. Luckily for them, Bailey is slumping into her couch at 5 a.m. each morning, pounding out 3,000 words in an effort to satiate their rabid desires. She’s been flexing this muscle for well over a decade, churning out romance novels at an Olympic pace (eight weeks for a first draft, another four for revisions) and hammering away at gruff-dreamboat characters who will hoist her readers over their shoulders and carry them into a gentler future. And while the publishing industry may have only just warmed up to the commercial viability of smut, Bailey refuses to let corporate squeamishness muffle her pride.
“When people ask what I do for a living, I immediately come out of the gate saying, ‘I write steamy contemporary,’” Bailey says. “I’m proud of it. Ask me anything. I owe it to the readers to be all-in on it, balls to the wall. I owe it to them to not be ashamed of what I do.”
The contrast between the woman who sits before me and the come-hither advances that spread themselves across the pages of her books is stark. Bailey wears her salon-blonde hair in a slicked-back bun, is a frequent unironic-selfie poster, has been married for 17 years and has a 13-year-old daughter, and lives with her family in the house she owns on Long Island. She’s also responsible for sentences like “But hell if the white cotton cupping her pussy … had him sporting a semi.” In conversation, Bailey lowers her voice when saying the word horny, even though Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone” blasts throughout the restaurant loudly enough to drown out the utterance. It’s not that she’s ashamed to talk steam in public; she just likes her privacy. Even her husband, who has read just one of her books, raised his eyebrows at a salad-tossing scene in Fangirl Down. “I like having my secret world in my head that nobody else can touch or influence. Sometimes when you’re in a long relationship or marriage, that mystery goes away a little bit,” she says. “I just have a really dirty imagination, and it’s not something I always want to do myself.”
The event that keeps Bailey’s mind whirring is simple, much like the conceits of her candied body of work. During a family reunion in Maine when she was 13 years old, the women on her mother’s side of the family were busy drinking hot tea and watching a VHS tape of Riverdance “over and over.” Bored, Bailey went digging through her grandma’s things, where she discovered Hidden Fires, by Sandra Brown. She read it cover to cover three times. “Thus began my sea-captain phase,” Bailey says, laughing. “I only wanted to read about sea captains — these distant, gruff leaders.”
She had been a competitive basketball player for years (and would later play on her high school’s varsity team) when she found Brown’s writing. “Romance felt like this softer place to escape to where there wasn’t so much pressure on performing, to be the best, to score,” she says. Then there was the sex. Bailey was raised in a religious household, and her mother drove her around in a Volvo with a “Rush Is Right” bumper sticker in support of Rush Limbaugh, a memory that vexes her to this day. If her parents ever discussed sex in front of Bailey, it was to promote celibacy. In romance novels, she had unearthed hidden worlds in which she could explore the curiosities she’d gleaned were sinful. But embarrassment already had its hooks in her, stalking her well into her early career, when she adopted a pen name to obscure what she’d really been writing. To this day, Bailey and her mother shy away from the topic of the author’s acclaimed sex scenes, which have flustered even the likes of Benny Blanco.
Bailey knows the readers of her genre can be fickle. She’s quick to admit she was not part of the “Fifty Shades wave, nor the Twilight wave,” and she has always been satisfied with her status as a “midlist” author. She made the New York Times best-seller list for the first time with Staking His Claim in 2014 and then fell into a seven-year drought before reclaiming her territory with IHOS, the first in the Bellinger-sisters series, in 2021. But this year, Bailey has seen a surge in the industry unlike anything in her past 13 years of writing, which means she’s suddenly being stopped in Target by young women who found her through TikTok. The recognition is validating, of course, but that’s not Bailey’s North Star. If the characters are authentic and the heart is there, she knows readers will come. “I’m the palate-cleanser author. I’m the marshmallow in the marshmallow sandwich. Readers who don’t want something heavy know they can come to Tessa Bailey and laugh. There’s gonna be secondhand embarrassment. There’s gonna be steam. It’s going to be a little cheesy, but it will be fun,” she says, laughing. “I’m comfortable not writing heavy-hitter novels or the ones with dark themes. I’m the friend you come to when you want to go for light conversation and a margarita. I’m the Mike’s Hard Lemonade of romance authors: a little kick, but it’s mostly lemonade.”
As we make our way over to the Ripped Bodice, a light summer shower begins. Bailey is giddy, stomping through the streets of Brooklyn in pumps, reminiscing about her days roughing it out in the city and sending Snapchats to her daughter — the most surefire way to get in contact with a 13-year-old, she says with a sigh. Upon her arrival, she maintains a steady drumbeat of optimism as she chats with her fans and grabs a copy of Love Lettering, by Kate Clayborn, off one of the shelves. She hands it to me, winking: “You’re going to love this.”
Bailey knows that this new generation of readers — some members of which are present in this bookstore and aren’t far from the age of her own daughter — is vocal about its standards. They hate third-act breakups, and they get the ick, swiftly and often. They demand more from their partnerships, much like Bailey did when she happened upon her first sea-captain fixation nearly three decades ago. Within her own oeuvre, she can promise “down-and-dirty sex” and a happy ending that makes your heart buzz with desire. (Her own real-life meet-cute with her now-husband — a small-town San Diego girl with big-city dreams who, in the early 2000s, moves to New York, where she meets an Irish bartender and falls in love — is so adorably predictable it probably wouldn’t make the cut in one of her manuscripts.) But much like how she feels raising her teenager, her protagonists are destined to “find happiness in personal pursuits, too.” If romance fits neatly into that happiness? Great. “But it’s never just about the romance,” she nods.
When Bailey thinks of her 13-year-old, who hasn’t yet read any of her books and is instead busy gossiping about boys and A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, she’s relieved to know that her daughter, whenever she’s ready, will have sex-positive romance novels to lean on for education about pleasure and consent — the same soft landing Bailey was once delighted to stumble upon. “Romance made me want to write a character who had mutual respect for me and raise the standards of what I expect in a partner,” she says. “Plus I’d rather her hear about sex from a romance author than a 13-year-old boy in her class whose only frame of reference is pornography.”
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