Lawyer finds happily ever after as a writer
Guillory releases 8th romance novel since leaving law career
Jasmine Guillory likes HEA.
As fans of romance novels know, HEA stands for “happily ever after,” a guarantee that the protagonist will find her version of happiness. And probably sex, too.
“Romance is a perfect thing to read when things are difficult,” said Guillory, 46, whose eighth novel was recently published.
“Even if something stressful is happening in the book,” she said, “you don’t have to be anxious that someone’s going to die, or that the little puppy that you got introduced to in the first chapter is going to have something terrible happen.”
Guillory’s novels feature ambitious Black women as they chase success while navigating romantic complications. In Guillory’s new book, “Drunk on Love,” Margot Noble, who runs a winery in Napa Valley, fights her feelings for Luke Williams, who left a lucrative Silicon Valley job before becoming her employee at the winery.
Some of the dialogue reflects the author’s experiences, Guillory said. When Margot is training employees to lead tours of the winery, for instance, she cautions them to anticipate certain frequently asked questions from visitors, including “‘So, you guys are … Black, and you own a winery?’ ” And when Luke tells Margot why he stopped working at a tech company, he says, “Mostly, I was tired of being one of the only Black people in the whole place.”
“I know these conversations would happen,” Guillory said, “because I’ve had enough of those conversations myself, working at a law firm and in plenty of other situations. When you’re one of a handful of Black people, these are the small moments that you have.”
While growing up in California, she thought her own HEA meant a career in law. “If you knew Jasmine, you knew she was going to become a lawyer,” said Nicole Clouse, a longtime friend from their days as students at Wellesley College.
After graduating from Stanford University Law School, Guillory clerked for a federal judge and worked in a high-paying job at a big law firm before moving on to legal aid and nonprofit work. Still, something was missing.
She decided to try writing. Some hopeful authors might have started with a blog. Not our heroine, who dove into writing a young adult novel in her spare time. It didn’t attract publishing industry interest. But she kept writing.
In 2013, while dealing with health issues, she binged on historical romance novels, including Julia Quinn’s “Bridgerton” series. Guillory said she worried that, as a former history major, she would get bogged down in research if she tried to write such a book herself. When she began to read contemporary romances, including “A Bollywood Affair” by Sonali Dev, she saw her future, she said.
She joined an online writers’ challenge that prompts fledgling novelists to commit to writing 50,000 words in one month. In April 2015, working from an idea she had sketched out in the Notes app of her phone, she said she spent every spare moment getting words on the page. “I looked forward every day to coming home from work and sitting on the couch and writing,” she said. She hit the 50,000 mark, then kept going.
By June she had a draft of “The Wedding Date,” a flirty, funny novel about a romance between a Black woman who is the chief of staff to the mayor of Berkeley, California, and the white male pediatric surgeon whom she meets while stuck in an elevator during a power outage.
After revising the manuscript and sending it out over the next year, she signed with a literary agent, who encouraged her to come up with a second novel. In 2017, Guillory signed a two-book deal with Penguin Random House.
In 2018, the publisher released “The Wedding Date.” The book got glowing reviews, and later that year, Guillory’s second novel, “The Proposal” — about a writer in Los Angeles who refuses a Dodgers Stadium Jumbotron proposal from her boyfriend — spent five weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. In 2019, Guillory left her day job for good.
“I didn’t quit my legal job until I knew that I could support myself with writing,” she said.
The transition surprised people who knew her, including her mother, Donna Guillory, a psychotherapist, who said she was glad her daughter made the change.
“When she was practicing law,” Donna Guillory said, “she didn’t have the spark in her eyes. But when she talks about her books, she absolutely does.”
More books followed, including “Party of Two,” about the relationship between a Black female lawyer and a white male U.S. senator, and “By the Book,” a re-imagining of “Beauty and the Beast” set in the world of publishing, which came out this year from a Disney book imprint, Hyperion Avenue.
When Guillory emerged, she joined a tradition of Black women who have succeeded in the romance genre, including Beverly Jenkins and Farrah
Rochon. Her books also bear the influence of Terry McMillan.
“It’s not that Jasmine was the first person to show Black women as desired by partners, beloved by their friends and successful in their careers,” said Hannah Oliver Depp, the owner of Loyalty Bookstores, a bookseller with stores in Washington, D.C., and Maryland. “But she was the first who the publishing industry really got behind as a romance novelist and as a crossover author, and she and her work were able to meet the moment.”
Oliver Depp added that the brisk sales of Guillory’s novels helped to prove that there is a large audience for romance novels centered on Black women.
“It’s always been malarkey that books by and about Black women and Black love would not sell in a breakthrough, crossover market,” Oliver Depp said. “Jasmine and her sales numbers provided a concrete example that was so undeniable.”