Publishers are treating the modern-day equivalents of Jilly Cooper and Jackie Collins with renewed respect, writes Paul Little.
The success of the TV series Rivals, based on Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel, has focused renewed attention on those bawdy, bouncy, bed-breaking, boob-bobbing, butt-baring bestsellers of yesteryear familiarly, if condescendingly, known as bonkbusters, a literary niche that reached its apogee in the works of Shirley Conran, Jackie Collins and Cooper herself.
But where did the bonkbuster go? Well, nowhere really, although you can find earnest articles proclaiming their return as far back as the early years of this century.
Allowing for a few demographic adjustments – sexually frustrated adolescent readers maturing, tastes evolving, no-holds-barred porn spreading everywhere – the bonkbuster has always been with us. Jackie Collins’ last book, The Santangelos, was published in 2015, the year she died, aged 77. Cooper’s latest, Tackle!, appeared in 2023, when she was 86.
The last five or 10 years have felt like such a grind, and we all need to give ourselves a break. A good bonkbuster is the greatest place to start.
Younger authors, such as Daisy Buchanan, author of 2021′s Insatiable, are keeping the tradition alive. Despite all sorts of harder-core competition, the bonkbuster has maintained its appeal, although the modern equivalents are often books with a self-conscious awareness of contemporary concerns – wokebusters, if you will.
Whether as reader, writer or critic, everyone with an abiding interest in bonkbusters seems to have come to them at about the same adolescence-adjacent time. “I would have been hitting my teens,” says Jo Parsons, senior lecturer in English and creative writing at Falmouth University in the UK. “This is where we found our information about sex. There was no internet and books would fall open on certain pages. I don’t know what they were doing in the school library.”
However the books got there, their presence would have pleased Shirley Conran, who once explained to Parsons that she wrote Lace “because she wanted to write a guide for girls, to teach them about sex. But they were never going to read [a guidebook], so she put it in a book they were not allowed to read.” Which, Parsons points out, is great sexual hygiene until you get to Lace’s notorious goldfish scene (don’t ask).
For enthusiasts, it’s an interest that never seems to wane. “Anytime you’d go to a bach or backpacking, if there was a Jackie Collins or anything like that, that would be amazing,” says enthusiast Rebecca Wadey, co-founder of the magazine, ensemble.co.nz. “Mills & Boons are very passive, very kind of misogynist. And these are powerful women doing powerful things and owning the narrative and treating men like crap. Or having the whole world fall at their feet.”
Despite the strong elements of fantasy in the classic bonkbuster, lots of relatable buttons are pushed by the likes of Cooper, Conran and Collins – all of whom were mentioned repeatedly by the women spoken to for this story.
“Jilly Cooper was the first time I’d read about women who seemed really multifaceted,” says Buchanan. “They could be strong and confident at one point and then really vulnerable in another and they felt really awkward; they felt the way I felt about myself. It was really comforting to have these flawed women actually getting what they wanted sexually, and in other ways as well.”
They also meet the need for another kind of pleasure, says Parsons, who asserts that profundity doesn’t have to be an essential component of a good read.
“I believe we read bonkbusters for pleasure,” says Buchanan. “And I honestly think that reading for pleasure is the greatest thing that we can do for ourselves at any point. And it sounds indulgent, but I think that the last five or 10 years especially have felt like such a grind, and we all need to give ourselves a break. A good bonkbuster is the greatest place to start.”
That said, the bonkbusters do, often, have a point, even 30 years later.
“I think there’s lots of really powerful messages about female desire, and [how] you can have what you want,” says Parsons. “Jackie Collins had the motto that girls can do anything and they always come out on top – it’s a really powerful feminist message.
“Jilly Cooper can be a bit different. There can be really positive things in terms of female desire but there’s also some more negative things in terms of the treatment of women.
“In Riders [1985], Helen Campbell-Black doesn’t come across well. She’s always wanting to read stuff and talk deeply about things, and she’s kind of criticised in the text. But then there’s this scene where she is effectively forced into a foursome with her husband and his best mate and the wife and there’s an element that she just needs to be a bit more fun.”
Parsons notes the recent TV Rivals smoothed over some of the anachronistic awkwardnesses of that book.
Also separating the bonkbuster genre from the likes of Marian Keyes – and, more widely, romance fiction – is the rejection of the notion of the magic penis, she adds.
“[In those books] women are able to have that freedom of having sex, [but] there’s an idea that when you meet the one you’re supposed to be with, there is his magic penis, and suddenly the sex is amazing. It reinforces this narrative that really you should just be with the one. You keep going, until you find him, then you stop.
“In bonkbusters, the female characters get good and bad sex with all sorts of people and there’s much less emphasis on finding the ‘one’.”
These are powerful women doing powerful things and owning the narrative and treating men like crap.
As Parsons’ career shows, the bonkbusters’ place in academia seems secure. Not only can you study them at university, but publishers are treating them with renewed respect. The oeuvre of Jackie Collins, for instance, is getting the sort of treatment normally afforded the likes of Balzac or Dickens. The books are currently being reissued with specially commissioned forewords.
Wadey observes that in Collins’ books “people would turn up and have cameos in other books, so there were little Easter eggs. It was like [TV] spin-off shows – like how you could see someone on Melrose Place coming to Beverly Hills, 90210.”
All of which raises the question of whether the “bonkbuster” label is somewhat derogatory and due for revision. There’s no doubt that when it was coined by British journalist Sue Limb in 1989 it was not meant to be entirely complimentary.
“Jilly Cooper says she’d call them shag sagas,” says Parsons. “I like the idea of reclaiming it, because it’s this pejorative term that’s lumped at a load of books that aren’t always as tightly linked as the term would imply.
“I think there’s something dismissive about it, but I think there’s something that could be celebrated as well. Why not celebrate that power of female desire and being able to achieve, and why not celebrate being popular?”
Wadey studied at university at a time when the old cultural hierarchies were being broken down, and the bonkbuster has benefited from this loosening of the literary stays. “I try to instil that in my kids as well. Just because something is seen as lowbrow or pop culture, that doesn’t mean it’s any less of an art form.”
Not every university offers a bonkbuster major. Parsons says she is “very lucky that I work at Falmouth, because they’re really up for exciting new stuff. They’re really on board with it. Last year, I ran the Sex, Scandal and Sensation conference, which had loads of bonkbuster stuff in it. I’ve been positively encouraged in my work, which I know other people aren’t so much.”
Sexual adventurer
Someone who has engaged more intimately than most with the bonkbuster in recent years is author Daisy Buchanan, whose Insatiable was partly an attempt to reinvigorate the form. It’s the story of Violet, a slightly faux pas-prone ingénue struggling to find her professional place in the art world. It’s like Bridget Jones, but this time she’s got a clitoris. Violet also falls under the sway of Lottie and Simon, a problematic couple of sexual adventurers who may also be able to provide her dream job.
A journalist and non-fiction author, Buchanan’s path to fiction was one previously trodden by many others. “I tried to write what I love to read. I’m drawn to writing [about] women out in the working world, and reconciling ambition with all the other parts of you. I think I was curious about exploring that power dynamic.
“Violet is not actually working with these people, but she is sleeping with them … They’re able to exploit her ambition. And I think now more than ever, the conversations are getting louder about what’s appropriate and what’s okay and where, and I think that the messiness of that means we never untangle it.”
The high erotic content of Insatiable is a very long way from the author and book that Buchanan says provided the initial spark for her stab at the genre.
“There’s a novel, Look at Me, by Anita Brookner. It’s about a youngish woman who works in a library. She’s got a quiet life. She’s longing for excitement. She’s very, very restless. And she befriends this very glamorous couple, because the guy keeps coming to the library. I remember thinking about that set-up, and that it’s about a woman who doesn’t know what she wants, but she wants something, and she’s just waiting with great big eyes for someone to pick her up and change her world.”
So there’s a level at which Insatiable is Anita Brookner with group sex, and a bonkbuster with a few twists on the genre. Significantly, Buchanan explicitly states in the book that characters’ bodies are not the kind that are to be found in porn.
“It was important to me that there was space for the reader to see themselves. Some people have a really strong kind of physical sense of who Violet is and some don’t. But I did try to never, ever describe her body, but just talk about the way she feels in her body and the way she sees herself.”
The reactions Insatiable has had – including many enthusiastic reviews – cover the range that bonkbusters seem to have always attracted. “One woman told me that it completely reinvigorated her sex life. I gave my husband the first 20,000 words, which sort of tumbled out of me. I think he was reading it on a train, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s very sexy.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, there’s a lot of sex in there. It’s quite rude.’ He said, ‘No, it’s sexy.’ I thought that’s exactly the reaction.
“And my friend asked me to her mum’s U3A [University of the Third Age] meeting. There was a short story competition, and I judged it and came to the prizegiving with all these people who were mostly in their 70s. They were asking me about what I’d written, and I said, ‘I’ve got this novel called Insatiable, but don’t read it. It’s really rude.’
“And they said, ‘Oh we’ve all read Insatiable.’”
In the beginning
Dirty books with strong female characters are as old as time, we just didn’t know it.
Playing “spot the first bonkbuster” is an entertaining diversion down the byways of popular literary history that throws up some surprising nominations. Dirty books with strong female characters taking on a male world are at least as old as Fanny Hill (1748), by John Cleland. For women dealing with the bad hands that male supremacy has dealt them, try several novels by Wilkie Collins, who often dealt with themes of female disempowerment.
An early form of bonkbuster was the bodice ripper, which safely situated its heroines’ transgressive behaviours in historic times.
UK academic Jo Parsons says she began her career “as a Victorian specialist doing sensation fiction, that sort of super popular Victorian page turner” and sees the transition to contemporary bonkbuster studies as a natural progression. She identifies “preposterous coincidences” in plotting as an element shared across the years.
The 18th-century gothic novel, popularised by Ann Radcliffe in the likes of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), was an important antecedent. Jilly Cooper played with this form in The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous (1993). With the character Ranaldini (!), says Parsons, “Cooper is riffing off Ann Radcliffe. He’s got a maze. He’s got a sex tower. She’s playing with some of those Gothic tropes.”
Other bonkbusters before the term was coined would include the wonderfully readable Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious (1956), and what dinner party conversation wouldn’t be enlivened by someone proposing that Gone with the Wind was actually a bonkbuster in disguise?
Then there’s George Eliot. No, really. “I interviewed Jilly Cooper on the podcast I host, You’re Booked,” says author Daisy Buchanan, “and she told me that one of her favourite books is Middlemarch. If there is any sex in Middlemarch, it is implied. It’s fine literature, but it’s also got that soap opera feel of lots of different things going on at once. And I think that’s sometimes what gives the bonkbuster its momentum.”