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Photo courtesy of Lance Shores/H
Julia Quinn, the New York Times bestselling author of the Bridgerton book series, speaks at the Hoover Public Library's 2025 Southern Voices Festival in Hoover, Alabama, on Friday, Feb. 21, 2025.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
Sandy Dollar of Hoover, Alabama, looks over books by New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn at the Hoover Public Library's 2025 Southern Voices Festival in Hoover, Alabama, on Friday, Feb. 21, 2025.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn arrives on stage as the headliner speaker at the Hoover Public Library's 2025 Southern Voices Festival in Hoover, Alabama, on Friday, Feb. 21, 2025.
The Hoover Library Theatre was packed Friday night with people who came to hear a writer described as the “veritable queen of historical romance.”
Julia Quinn, the author of the famous Bridgerton book series that was made into a Netflix series and the author of 19 consecutive New York Times bestsellers, gave the crowd a rundown of how she became a novelist.
But she also took about five minutes at the beginning of her talk to champion the fight against book banning, noting that her speaker’s fee Friday night was going to a group called Every Library, which supports public and school libraries.
“The vast majority of Americans do not believe in book banning and do not agree with the book challenges happening today, but the people who are trying to challenge and ban books are really, really loud, and they show up,” Quinn said.
“You need to be aware of when there are school board meetings and town meetings about libraries and library boards so you can show up as well and you can let them know that you disagree, that you think one parent with an agenda does not have the right to decide what your children read,” Quinn said.
The people trying to ban books are careful to couch their language in a way that they’re just trying to protect children from inappropriate books, Quinn said.
“I don’t want children reading inappropriate stuff, but nobody’s putting “Fifty Shades of Grey” in the kids’ section,” Quinn said. “Our librarians and media specialists are highly, highly educated. Many, if not most, of them have master’s degrees, and their job is to know about the books, to read the books, to read the trade journals about books, to know what’s out there so they can curate a collection that’s appropriate for their patrons. They know what books go in the kids’ section. They know what books do not go in the kids’ section.”
Some people don’t like children’s books with characters who have two mothers, Quinn said.
“If you feel that is inappropriate and you don’t want your children to read it, that’s fine. That is your job as a parent to look into what your child reads, but you don’t get to decide what my child reads, Quinn said. “I trust the librarians. I trust the media specialists who are trained to curate collections. I don’t trust a random parent with an agenda.”
But, realizing most people probably didn’t come to hear her talk about book banning, Quinn spent most of her time Friday night sharing her personal story of getting into writing.
Quinn, whose real name is Julie Pottinger, said she grew up loving to read. She walked past a library on her way home from school each day and would take home as many books as she could carry, she said.
And every time she visited her grandparents, they would give she and her sisters $10 each to buy something, so she always bought five Bobbsey Twins books, and one of her sisters always bought five Nancy Drew books, she said.
When it was time to go to bed, “I was the kid with the flashlight under the blankets,” she said. “I was the one who was always reading.”
Photo by Jon Anderson
New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn signs a book for Lauren Dowdle at the Hoover Public Library's 2025 Southern Voices Festival in Hoover, Alabama, on Friday, Feb. 21, 2025.
When she was about 12 and 13, she loved the Sweet Dreams romance novels for teens, and she spent two summers with her Dad, a screenwriter in California, writing her first romance novel of her own, she said.
By age 16, she sent it off to the publisher of the Sweet Dreams series, and “I was rejected so fast that I know they didn’t read it,” she said.
When she got to college, she rediscovered romance novels as something light and breezy to read amid all the serious coursework and decided she wanted to give writing another try. She wrote the first four chapters of a book between her junior and senior years in college and then finished it after she graduated while taking extra courses to get into medical school, she said.
She spent only 2½ months in medical school before realizing it wasn’t for her, she said.
“I’m married to a doctor. I made the right choice,” she joked.
Her real entry into writing came sort of through nepotism, she said. Her then-boyfriend’s father was dating the most powerful woman in publishing, who connected her with a literary agent, she said.
The agent shopped the book around. It got rejected for a lot of different reasons, but eventually two parties showed interest, and the book sold at auction in 1994 for more than an author’s first romance novel normally attracts — enough to support her for a year or so, she said.
While she didn’t really have one breakout book, she did start hitting bestseller lists with her books and became well-known within her field, she said. But things really took off after Emmy and Golden Globe-winning producer and director Shonda Rimes took interest and turned her Bridgerton books into a Netflix series, she said.
Photo by Jon Anderson
Books by New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn sit out for sale at the Hoover Public Library's 2025 Southern Voices Festival in Hoover, Alabama, on Friday, Feb. 21, 2025.
The TV show debuted during the pandemic, which was the perfect time for her stories, she said.
“We were all trapped, and we were all starving for human connection, and Bridgerton was a show that was all about human connection,” Quinn said. “Everybody wanted to find something that was joyful, that had some drama but was all about the happy ending.”
Now, with her Bridgerton fame, she’s living a life that is kind of surreal, where she gets invited to speak and people are interested in what she has to say, she said.
And the best part is “I’m finally the cool mom,” she joked. “It’s really kind of lovely and wonderful and surreal.”
One person in the audience Friday night asked Quinn how the TV show compares with what she envisioned when she was writing the books. Quinn said she’s not really a visual writer who actively pictures her characters, so for her, it was delightful to suddenly be able to see them, she said.
“Now I do picture the actors,” she said. She doesn’t care that she originally wrote that the character Simon Basset has blue eyes because she now sees actor Rege-Jean Page, and “that man is super naturally handsome” she said. “When he smiles at you, it’s like … I honestly think it has to be a handicap because I do not know how you go through life like that.”
Quinn also was asked how she feels about fan fiction, which is fiction written by fans about characters in a book or TV series.
She doesn’t read the fan fiction related to her books for legal reasons, she said, but she has read other fan fiction and is fine with it.
“I love that people want to do it, and I love that people are so inspired by the show and the books that they want to write fan fiction,” she said. “I think it’s a great compliment, and I think it’s a wonderful outlet for people’s creativity.”
However, “you can’t make money off of it, Quinn said. “Once you try to monetize it, that’s when the copyright infringement comes about.”
There was a case where two women wrote “The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical.” “The songs were great. They’re very, very talented, … but it stops being fan fiction when you perform it at the Kennedy Center,” Quinn said. “Netflix ended up having to sue them. … You can’t infringe upon somebody’s intellectual property in that manner.”
Carlie Traylor, a Vestavia Hills woman who has read all of Quinn’s books, said she loved hearing her talk about them in person Friday night.
“I loved her levity,” Traylor said. “I just felt like I got to know her tonight.”
Photo by Jon Anderson
New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn signs a book for Jessica Rhodes of Hoover, Alabama, at the Hoover Public Library's 2025 Southern Voices Festival on Friday, Feb. 21, 2025.
Traylor brought a friend from Hoover, Jessica Rhodes, who described herself as a casual fan who has seen the Bridgerton TV show. “I loved her theme of connection,” Rhodes said. “In dark times, we all want a feeling of like being together.”
Quinn was the chosen headliner for the 2025 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover
Public Library, which continues today (Saturday, Feb. 22) with fiction writers Kimberly Brock, A.J. Finn, Chris Pavone, Steven Rowley, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Stacy Willingham and nonfiction author Tommy Tomlinson.
Tomlinson said he enjoyed hearing Quinn’s story Friday night.
“She caught a couple of breaks, but she also worked really hard to get where she is, and she writes what people like to read,” Tomlinson said. As writers, “sometimes we overthink this stuff. Sometimes people just want to escape and find something that just takes them away from the day-to-day for a while, and there’s not many better at it than she is. She writes great books that people want to read. There can never be enough of that.”
