Guest post written by The Trouble With Anna author Rachel Griffiths
Rachel Griffiths was most recently an editorial director at Scholastic, where she published more than twenty New York Times bestsellers. As you might guess from a book full of high-stakes horse races and romantic midnight rides, she spent much of her childhood in the saddle and knows from painful experience how it feels to take a fall at twenty-five miles per hour.
About The Trouble With Anna (out March 4th 2025): A tart young woman and an arrogant lord collide in this flirty, sexy, and remarkably modern historical romance, perfect for fans of Bridgerton.
My family is enormous. And loud. And loves nothing more than teasing, like when we dyed my uncle’s white dog pink (it was accomplished with Kool-Aid and lots of belly scratches. No pooches harmed in the making of this prank.) Or when my cousin slapped a stealth So many cowboys, so little rope bumper sticker of my mom’s car. Or the time an unnamed perpetrator snuck a ten-pound rock in my suitcase.
So imagine my trepidation when I announced that I’d just sold a pair of novels. Romance novels. Spicy romance novels.
“Gross,” said my older brother.
“Which chapters should I glue shut when I give it to my friends?” said my mother.
“Rachie! Congratulations!!!” said one lovely aunt.
“Oh, we’re definitely doing a read-aloud at Christmas,” said my most fiendish cousin.
We most definitely are not, I thought, and when I showed up at Christmas, I conveniently forgot to bring the galley. It didn’t stop the endless texts, or my brother’s five-star Goodreads review: “Total smut. The author must be a pervert.”
My editor said, “Don’t worry. As a review, I think it’s selling.”
Then that fiendish cousin and a pack of relatives came to visit. While I was in the kitchen, they sniffed out a galley from my desk. When I came into the living room carrying the bread and wine, I found them sitting in a circle and howling with laughter as my cousin read out, “He let his body slide again, slow and rough, and—”
I put the food down, dropped to the floor, and died.
Please don’t think that the fact my family can’t get enough of teasing me means they’re sex-negative, or prudish in any way. Only my grandmother, whom we called Baba, even came close. She was British and in a hopeless battle to train us up for tea with the Queen, and seemed startled to find herself surrounded by hooligans instead. Often, when we started to talk about our love lives over the dishes, she’d shake her head from the kitchen table and say in her starchiest voice, “Really! You people are oversexed!”
I have a devil on my shoulder who just can’t help himself, so once I turned around and asked, “But how was your sex life, Baba? You never say a word about it.”
The family gave a collective gasp.
It’s a question I could only ask because she had a soft spot for me, and probably also because my grandfather didn’t quite exist in my mind as a real person, gone long before I was born.
To everyone’s wide-eyed surprise, my grandmother decided to answer.
“I’ll only say this.” She crossed her hands in her lap, pleased when everyone leaned forward. “Once, I went away for the whole summer. When I left, we had two twin beds, but when I came back there was just one big bed. And your grandfather and I never said a word about it.”
Her saucy was so sweet. But oh, Baba, my book takes it a lot further.
