Two women were named in the initial Washington Post story detailing Judge Alex Kozinski’s pattern of sexual harassment of his subordinates. One of them, Heidi Bond, had gone on to clerk for the Supreme Court, and had then followed a rather unorthodox career path for a budding superstar lawyer. She became a romance novelist, writing under the name Courtney Milan.
I did with this information what any sensible fan of romance novels and opponent of sexual harassment would do: I bought one of her books. It was worth it and you should follow the same course of action, although we should first pause to renew our fury at the abuse by Kozinski that ultimately pushed Bond out of the law:
If you did not know about Kozinski, it would be impossible to understand my career choices. I applied for jobs as a law professor, but I pulled out of the UCLA interview a month before I was scheduled to visit—I couldn’t bear to be anywhere I might see him on a regular basis. I withdrew from the hiring process at the University of Michigan, my alma mater—when I did the campus visit, it reminded me too much of who I had been before the clerkship, and I couldn’t handle the memory.
I got job offers and warm congratulations, and they hurt so much I could barely acknowledge them. I could not escape the notion that my career success was built entirely on my silence, and it poisoned any joy I could have found in the job I did take.
But Bond turned her experience with Kozinski into something really excellent. The experience didn’t just lead to the books because she left the law. It led to the books because Kozinski, as her all-powerful boss, had forbidden her to even read romance novels, and:
In a private act of defiance, I didn’t just read romance novels—I began to write them. I wrote dozens of books where my characters had secrets that they could not tell. The secret varied—sometimes a heroine kept it; sometimes it was the hero.
I wrote books where women won, again and again.
I grappled with my own secret in fictional, changed form. Book after book, I wrote the happy ending I couldn’t quite reach myself. That the stories I wrote resonated with readers, I think, speaks to the fact that #metoo has been building for centuries.
Having read three of Bond/Milan’s books—The Duchess War, The Heiress Effect, and The Countess Conspiracy—this rings very true. They are about women fighting to be able to be their full selves publicly, risking public condemnation and real loss in that fight. And, yes, they are about secrets. Secrets imposed by other people’s power over women—and sometimes men. Corrosive, life-defining secrets. Secrets about unrealized potential. They’re also witty and well-drawn and thoroughly enjoyable.
If you like historical romances, I’d recommend Courtney Milan in a heartbeat. If you don’t, I’d still suggest reading what Heidi Bond had to say in her fiction.