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The Many Romances of Deborah Bedford
Why a bestselling Harlequin romance author is rewriting her career—and her own novels.
By Sarah Sawyer
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Deborah Bedford's 94-year-old grandmother is not sure what she thinks of Deborah's latest romance novel, If I Had You. It's not one of the conventional romances Deborah used to write, containing saucy sex scenes between unmarried characters. This romance novel reflects Deborah's Christian faith, and it confronts the explosive issue of abortion.
Deborah's grandmother read If I Had You, but she tucked it under her pillow, where friends and staff at her retirement home aren't likely to stumble across it. Deborah was surprised to hear this, but she understands. She's felt a similar nervousness about the book, especially when she introduced it to 500 booksellers at a trade show last year.
She remembers waiting with a stomach full of butterflies and praying, "God, tell me what to say." In answer to that prayer she felt peace and calm when she addressed the booksellers. "I'm not a preacher," she said. "I'm not a speaker, but I wrote this book because I had an abortion and I want to share how God healed me."
Moments like this one, butterflies and all, are why Deborah left a 12-year career writing novels for Harlequin Romances—her bestselling books appeared in 15 countries and a dozen languages—and chose the niche market of fiction centered on Christian faith.
Starting over
Her inspiration to make the change came during a sermon preached at her church in Jackson, Wyoming. "My pastor gave a sermon on 2 Samuel 23. He made this one point about this one guy that went over my head and then another point about another guy that also went Whoosh! over my head," she says. Then he mentioned Shammah "and how he stood in the middle of a field of lentils and fought the Philistines and not one lentil was harmed. I knew writing books that had [premarital] sex in them was giving away lentils in the Lord's battlefield."
Harlequin was not interested in publishing Christian romances at the time, so she took a leap of faith, left her agent and her publisher, and began reinventing herself in the tradition of Christian writers. "When I was making this change, I would go to Barnes & Noble and sit on the bottom row, where the religious books were, and pull out all the authors that were really well known and loved in both markets—C. S. Lewis, Catherine Marshall, and Madeleine L'Engle—and I have this memory of myself just sitting with these books around me." She laughs a little as she describes her initial thoughts on breaking into the market. "I thought, These little Christian publishers are going to just snatch me up," she recalls. "After all, I knew my way around the business."
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