71 books like Big Sexy Love

I like to read about people pursuing their dream because that’s not an easy thing to do. When I was working as a lawyer at a corporate law firm, I was sure I wanted to become a partner. But eventually I realized that being in-house counsel at a company was a much better fit for me so I changed jobs. And similarly, I’d always wanted to write a romantic comedy and so, after many years as a lawyer, I started taking courses at night, and eventually I found the courage to quit my legal job and pursue this passion. The underlying theme of all of my books is to encourage readers to pursue their dreams. 

I like to read about people pursuing their dream because that’s not an easy thing to do. When I was working as a lawyer at a corporate law firm, I was sure I wanted to become a partner. But eventually I realized that being in-house counsel at a company was a much better fit for me so I changed jobs. And similarly, I’d always wanted to write a romantic comedy and so, after many years as a lawyer, I started taking courses at night, and eventually I found the courage to quit my legal job and pursue this passion. The underlying theme of all of my books is to encourage readers to pursue their dreams. 

I like to read about people pursuing their dream because that’s not an easy thing to do. When I was working as a lawyer at a corporate law firm, I was sure I wanted to become a partner. But eventually I realized that being in-house counsel at a company was a much better fit for me so I changed jobs. And similarly, I’d always wanted to write a romantic comedy and so, after many years as a lawyer, I started taking courses at night, and eventually I found the courage to quit my legal job and pursue this passion. The underlying theme of all of my books is to encourage readers to pursue their dreams. 

I like to read about people pursuing their dream because that’s not an easy thing to do. When I was working as a lawyer at a corporate law firm, I was sure I wanted to become a partner. But eventually I realized that being in-house counsel at a company was a much better fit for me so I changed jobs. And similarly, I’d always wanted to write a romantic comedy and so, after many years as a lawyer, I started taking courses at night, and eventually I found the courage to quit my legal job and pursue this passion. The underlying theme of all of my books is to encourage readers to pursue their dreams. 

I am a voracious reader of romantic fiction, and I’m always drawn in by books where time plays an important role. I love it when the characters have limited time and are on a countdown, or time is stretched out between their interactions, or when one single moment changes the course of their lives so completely. It always adds so much conflict and drama to a plot, as if time is a character in itself: it’s such a big thing in all our lives, but it’s also, in some respects, completely arbitrary. I love all these books because time and timing have such a big impact on the characters. 

I’ve spent years studying individual people involved in the American Revolution, especially the British soldiers and their wives. These were the people who did the day-to-day work, and their stories deserve to be told. I troll archival collections to find original documents that allow me to piece together the lives of the thousands of individuals who made up the regiments and battalions, focusing not on what they had in common, but on how they were different from each other, part of a military society but each with their own lives and experiences. They made the history happen.

I moved to New York when I was 15 and fell in love with the city. I was starting high school then, and arriving in Manhattan felt like the world opened up to me. Suddenly, I could ride the subway anywhere I wanted, see the best theater in the world, and feel as if anything was possible. The female journey has also been a topic I have long been fascinated by, and when I began my journalism career and became a wife and mother, the need to explore those dynamics grew ever more pressing. I recommend these books because they combine my two favorite topics—New York and women’s history. 

In 2006, I told a friend I wanted to write a book about grieving the death of a friend. Despite the fact that I’d never written a book before, she gave me her enthusiastic approval. Six months later she was dead. She inspired me to turn that book idea into a series of little books: the Friend Grief series. Just as I was finishing the last one, I began work on a full-length book that took me back to my work in the early days of AIDS. When COVID began, I returned to writing about friend grief. And I lost over a dozen friends while I wrote the book.

Where Are Your Boys is the book I always wanted to write. Watching emo bands like My Chemical Romance and Paramore soar from suburbs to stardom during my high school years inspired me to take writing seriously, that a kid like me growing up in New Jersey with few connections to the media industry could find a backdoor in, because those bands did, too. With its dense population, adjacency to New York City, and a multitude of record stores and all-ages shows, New Jersey was the setting for much of emo's 2000s boom and the home of My Chemical Romance and many other important bands. 

I first started walking in cities at night in my late teens – mainly London but also the Italian cities I travelled through alone when I went interrailing after leaving school. I discovered that cities have a quite different character at night, and that you cannot know the streets of one intimately if you don’t explore it – safely! – after dark. In my professional career as a scholar and lecturer, I have for decades almost unconsciously been drawn to those writers who themselves discovered, to their horror or delight, that the city at night is a foreign country. The books I’ve listed, fictional or non-fictional, are postcards from this foreign land.