Romancing the medical model

Chirpy optimist and Mills & Boon author Kate Hardy defends her genre with such vigour that cynic Kelly Mullan can’t help but be charmed

It’s as improbable as any Mills & Boon plot: uppity feminist from Disability Now meets starry-eyed romance author, sneers at her formulaic work but ends up seeing merit in it. Could romantic fiction have some relevance to the lives of women in the 21st century?

Kate Hardy reckons it does. “I get great feedback from readers. I handle contemporary issues like breast cancer, divorce, rape and disability. I write weepy books with feel-good happy endings. One reader said that if she’s having a bad day, she’ll read one of my books and feel like the world is a good place after all.”

Hardy has a hearing impairment and Katrina, the protagonist of her 39th book, The Children’s Doctor’s Special Proposal, is deaf too. “Katrina has been rejected because of her impairment. She was made to feel incomplete and that she wouldn’t make a good mother, but the hero convinces her otherwise.

“She falls for the hero when he plays the cello and she listens to the vibrations. I got the idea from trying to play the guitar as my hearing loss progressed; I’d get into contorted positions to feel the vibrations.

“I don’t think people are aware of deafness as an issue. It’s frustrating when people underestimate my intelligence if I’m having trouble lip-reading them.

“I didn’t realise I was lip-reading until my impairment was diagnosed in my early 20s. Now that I have a hearing aid I get spooked by things like birdsong. I’ll say, ‘what’s that?’ and my kids’ll say, ‘that’s a pigeon.’”

Hardy writes for the medical strand of Mills & Boon. She explains that she took her interest in all things medical from her mother who was a nurse. “Hospitals are places of high drama and the stakes are high. It suits the need for a romance novel to be intense.”

Although unfamiliar with the medical or the social model of disability, Hardy says: “It annoys me when deafness is written with a capital D. I’m the same as anyone else. There needs to be integration so we can educate people about disability. I do get angry, though, if I’m provoked by the way I’m treated and I will tell people off.”

At the risk of getting a telling off: although today’s Mills & Boon is more progressive than its predecessors (the women can be go-getting doctors and there are disabled characters), their attraction remains a mystery to many. But then romance needs mystery to survive, such as the mystery of how Mills & Boon books are so successful when no one will admit to reading them.

•The Children's Doctor's Special Proposal (Harlequin Mills & Boon) is on sale from 6 March.

Pic credit by Chris Brooks