Danielle Steel, and the Person I Used to Be.

"When I was a child, I read everything, everywhere..."

When I was a child, I read everything, everywhere. (Remove the first clause of the previous sentence, and it still holds up.) Ads on buses, Oshawa-Whitby This Week, shampoo bottles labels in the vicinity of the toilet, my mother’s magazines. Gross and exploitative true crime books, lurid Sidney Sheldon novels lying around the house, Highlights for Children at the doctor’s office, the copy of the Guinness Book of World Records that had choice placement on my best friend’s coffee table. My high school boyfriend became bothered when I’d come over to his house and pick up the Toronto Star, asking whether I’d come to see him or to read the paper, and—needless to say—we’re no longer together. I have my own Star subscription now, and indiscriminate, omnivorous, bordering-on-obsessive reading has been one of the through-lines of my life.

The literary diet at my paternal grandparents’ house, however, was remarkable. Downstairs, in the front room of their Toronto semi, their easy chairs sat on either side of the bay window, each one with a small table beside it heaped with copies of The National Enquirer, and large print Readers Digests, either of which I could leaf through all day. The former usually featuring unflattering images of Kirstie Alley in a bathing suit alongside sightings of UFOs and Elizabeth Taylor in her Larry Fortensky era, the latter with my favourite sections including “Laughter, the Best Medicine” and “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.” And if I ever ran out of periodicals, there was always the phone book, atop which sat my grandparents’ beige rotary telephone (which was always ringing).

Last weekend, while I was looking for something else, I found this photo of me in my Grandparents’ front room, surrounded by people, and reading the TV Guide.

When the front room was too full of cousins, uncles and aunts, however, both big chairs occupied, I’d retreat upstairs to the front bedroom, a place shockingly decorated with bright coloured floral wallpaper, perhaps more psychedelic in my memory than it was in reality, but I hope not. And there on a little wire bookshelf lived my Nana’s fiction library, which was mostly large print editions of novels by Danielle Steel, books I devoured so avidly and at such an impressionable age that I suspect the experience formed a vital component of my literary DNA.

And the reason I suspect this is because recently when the thought of writing an historical saga occurred to me, all I could think about as a template was Steel’s 1992 novel Jewels. Jewels, where I first learned there was ever such a person as Wallis Simpson (whose husband had been King Edward, also known as David, which confused me), an historical figure I’ve never stopped being fascinated by, who turns up in other books I love like Brynn Turnbull’s The Woman Before Wallis, Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy, plus she was Mitford-adjacent. Once, years ago on Twitter, I was able to identify the book from a thumbnail photo of the green background against one of the gold letters from Steel’s name. I must have read Jewels at least a half-dozen times in my adolescence and—along with that cover and my Nana’s wallpaper—the story has been seared into my brain.

Wallis Simpson

Jewels was not the only Danielle Steel novel I read from my Nana’s collection. I also read Star, which was made into a made-for-TV movie starring Jennie Garth at her 90210 Kelly Taylor zenith. And there was one other book I read as often as I read Jewels, 1989’s Daddy, but the difference is that when I think about the plot of Daddy now, it really does not appeal (a romance about a man who talks his wife out of abortion after abortion, and then [wait for it] she ends up middle aged, unsatisfied, and leaves him, and he has to raise all their kids on his own!), while I just couldn’t shake the notion that I might pick up Jewels again.  

But picking up Jewels again would prove difficult. I’d had the impression that anyone as prolific as Steel (author of more than 140 novels) would have her own section in any used bookstore. So imagine my surprise when I found just a handful of her books in the BMV “Romance” section, not one of them the emerald green I was looking for. Travelling a bit further down Bloor Street, I was informed that Seeker’s Books don’t even accept Danielle Steel novels—apparently the Amazon market has sucked up the Steel second-hand trade altogether. Maybe try Value Village, they suggested? So I did, but the shelves were devoid of organization, and I had to enlist my husband and children to help scour them. We found many Danielle Steel novels, even some that were green, but just not this particular green, from a book published more than 30 years ago, still in print, but hard to find in the physical world.  

I was actually relieved when I couldn’t find it. Did I really want to be rereading a Danielle Steel novel, a book I was besotted with around the same time I was analyzing the lyrics to “Baby Got Back” as it played on the radio, and poring over the YM column “Say Anything”? A novel that lived in the same house as The National Enquirer? There are so many books I mean to finally get to or reread in my life, and what are the odds that this one might be worthwhile?

But then at I found it, at Doug Miller Books even further down Bloor Street, where the books are shelved three volumes deep, and Doug had to dig to find it from the rack at the front where all titles are on sale for a dollar. A mass market paperback that could be tucked in my purse, which is my version of living the dream. And now all I had to do was begin.

The novel opens with Sarah on her 75th birthday: “The air was so still in the brilliant summer sun that you could hear the birds, and every sound for miles, as Sarah sat peacefully looking out her window.” Sarah, the Duchess of Whitfield, at home at the French chateau that had been hers for more than a half-century, that she’d once shared with her late husband, a place they’d seen through war and peace, the births of five children, so much change. She’s wearing “an old, but beautifully cut, simple black Chanel dress with the enormous, perfectly matched pearls that she always wore, which caused people who knew to catch their breath the first time they saw them.” The pearls are worth two million dollars, but Sarah wears them because she loves them, and she loves them because her late husband, William, had insisted they be hers. His love ever-present, even years after his death, as she watches their children begin to arrive for her birthday celebrations: “Hard to believe…It seemed only moments since the beginning.”

Jewels takes the reader back to 1916 with the birth of Sarah Thompson, “a slightly less fortunate but extremely comfortable and respected cousin of both the Astors and the Biddles.” At age 19, Sarah marries Freddie Van Deering, whose chief attribute is his sense of fun, which turns out to be a pretty obnoxious attribute from the perspective of his wife. He’s never home, always out drinking with friends, leaving Sarah alone and bored, with nothing to do but rearrange the furniture, which leads to her miscarrying. And rock bottom is still to come, arriving on the occasion of the couple’s first wedding anniversary, Freddie rolling up to the celebratory party at her parents’ home in The Hamptons completely inebriated and with a car-full of prostitutes. (Freddie Van Deering, like Danielle Steel herself, does not go in for understatement.)

There is particular stigma to having one’s marriage fall apart during the summer of 1937 (“Her mother watched her grieve for the next month, and on into August and September. The only thing that had caught her attention in July was when Amelia Earhart disappeared, and a few days after that, when the Japanese invaded China”), Sarah resigning herself to life as divorcee, steeped in shame against the backdrop of a media frenzy about the former King’s marriage to the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson. Sarah hides away from the world, rather melodramatically projecting her own judgment of Simpson onto herself and the supposed dishonour she’s brought upon her family, resolving to spend the rest of her life alone on a remote Long Island outpost.

Thankfully, her parents manage to drag her away from her solipsism, via the Queen Mary, which departs from New York in the spring of 1938, and Sarah sulks her way across Europe, uninterested in all the eligible young men to whom she is introduced…until she meets William Whitfield on the grounds of an 14^th-century moated castle belonging to his cousin. He is a worldly 35-years-old compared to her just 22, and Sarah is immediately comfortable in his presence, so much laughter between them, as well as heavier conversations about European politics, mutually besotted—Sarah with no idea that she’s just won the heart of a duke.

But 1938 is a heady time to be falling in love with an aristocrat—and I think it was this novel’s historical adjacency that made such a fairy tale come to life for me. As Sarah and William’s relationship progresses, and he becomes determined to give up his right to the throne (he is 14^th in line) in order to make her his wife, Hitler across the channel is making clear his intentions toward the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. On September 21, Prague capitulates to the Germans, “[a]nd by then it was raining in New York, as though God were crying for the Czechs, as Sarah did, as she listened to the broadcast.” That night a hurricane hits the Atlantic coast, devastating New York and Long Island, the Thompson family’s summer home nearly destroyed. Eight days after the storm, the Munich Pact is signed, “[b]ut William wrote and told her that he still didn’t trust the little bastard in Berlin.”

For their first Christmas as husband and wife, Sarah gives William a Faberge cigarette case, he buys her the French chateau, and they move there together. She is expecting a baby, and three weeks before her due date, Germany and Russia sign their pact of nonaggression. “All Sarah wanted was for the world to settle down long enough for her to have her baby,” but she doesn’t get her wish. Giant Baby Philip is born on September 1, 1939, the day that Germany invades Poland, and nothing is ever the same again.

I don’t wish to convey the idea that this novel isn’t preposterous. It absolutely is, though never more so than when Sarah Whitfield lives through the war in occupied France under the watch of the world’s most sympathetic Nazi. Except for, perhaps, when she keeps giving birth to 10 lb babies, but only when anybody in the vicinity with obstetric expertise is unavailable, so that her babies are delivered, variously, by William, a local peasant girl, the aforementioned sympathetic Nazi. Her girlish figured is always returned to within weeks. William spends the war in a German POW camp and is found near death, in a coma, his hair turned snow white, having lost the use of his legs. And when he emerges from his coma, he finds that he can still have sex—just in case you were wondering—thereby paving the way for one more monstrously-sized infant’s tight squeeze through Sarah’s delicate pelvis.

(The sex in this book, sadly, is very tame, scarcely detailed, disappointing, even. I’d remembered the whole thing as quite steamy upon my earlier reads, but, of course, I didn’t get out much back then.)

In order to help their neighbours in the post-war French countryside, the Whitfields—apparently in a gesture of abject good will—decide to…start buying up everybody’s jewellery? Eventually amassing such a collection that they open jewellery stores in Paris and London, growing the family fortune, Sarah and William’s children knowing nothing like the depravity their parents lived through. The children are all terrible and the novel by this time has lost its heart and its mind, become an absolute soap opera, consecutive sentences all beginning with “But” enough to give the reader whiplash, such prose making a kind of sense in a literary world of contradictions and implausibility.

And—not so incongruously—I loved it, speeding through its near 500 pages in two days. Sarah Whitfield is a wonderful character, smart, fierce, complicated, principled, and imperfect. Her love story with William is a captivating one, though it gets lost in the throes of the 20^th Century, which is kind of the point. The story is full of peril and adventure, Atlantic crossings, Dowager Duchesses, bitchy asides, and dramatic showdowns. The historical backdrop raises the stakes. Jewels is rich, vivid and fun. A very good book.

Which I was moved to realize, and not just because—who wants to be stuck rereading a crummy book? No, confirming that Jewels has merit means something because it’s also confirmation that the person I used to be was not wrong about everything, and neither was the world I came from, even if it was a world where I used to say things about being a humanist not a feminist, had to be drawn a diagram to understand the difference between left and right wing, and where rumours surfaced periodically that Elvis was alive.  

It is refreshing to feel fond regard for my younger, less-learned self, to be able to relate to her passions and affinities, instead of feeling shame for how much I still didn’t know or understand. To realize that sometimes that young woman was absolutely onto something as she hid away with a book, building a self, a life—a world, even!—with every flip of the page.  

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