In an interview that raised many hackles, Gregory dismissed erotica as ‘pornography’ and crime novel villains as ‘blindingly obvious’ – despite her own novels occupying a distinct genre themselves
In a bizarre miscalculation, the historical novelist Philippa Gregory took a sideswipe at the authors of genre novels in an interview with the New York Times yesterday. “Choosing to write a genre novel is like fencing the universe because you are afraid of space,” said Gregory, loftily. “Why does anyone write lazy, sloppy genre novels? The typing alone is so exhausting — surely if you’re going to undertake 150,000 words, you might as well have something interesting to say?”
Quite apart from the fact that every piece of writing falls into one genre or another, the comment is bizarre first because of who Gregory is. The author of The Other Boleyn Girl, The Taming of the Queen, and most recently The Last Tudor, Gregory writes historical fiction – and is indisputably a genre novelist herself. You know what you’re going to get when you pick up a Philippa Gregory novel – and I write that as someone who has read a fair few of them.