Our experience with Peggy was simply great. She was actively engaged in promoting and selling our home from day 1 and had us Under Contract within a week of Listing!” LHS33
No. 19 Vol. 12
www.mypaperonline.com • 973-809-4784
December 2023
Denville Woman Releases New Book
D
By Steve Sears enville resident, Joelle Speranza, has her dream job as a book publicist specializing in non-fiction. Often immersed in reading in that genre during her personal time, she sought a break and escape to something different. She found it reading romance novels. And now, she has written one. Speranza said, “I instantly became hooked. Once you read a few, it is easy to notice the formula of how to write a romance story, including the big third act breakup and then the couple resolves the issue and gets back together to live happily ever after. I got inspired to write my own, and as I wrote The Comeback Tour, the story just flew out of me, and I had my first draft after just three months.” When Speranza set out to write her novel, she knew she wanted to do something that was super fun and empowering for women. She decided to launch a fiction series around her “Trash the Dress” brand from her previously written memoir, Trash the Dress: Stories of Celebrating Divorce in your 20s. Speranza explained, “In The Comeback Tour, my main female character is
Wishing You and Your family the Very Happiest Holidays!
Joelle Speranza (credit: Leanne Dolan)
a member of the ‘Trash the Dress’ online support group and, throughout the book, there are conversations between her and fictional support group members. Those chats provide insight into what it is really like being a young, divorced woman, provide inspiration, and also set up future books in the series as we meet other characters and learn their stories.” Speranza, remarried now with two children, was divorced in her 20s, so she had a first-hand experience of her main character’s journey and feelings. And, when thinking of a love interest for The Comeback Tour main character, Cailin, she reached even further back into her past, the boy bands from her childhood coming to mind. She said, “For so many of us, boy bands are our first real loves. We grew up with posters of them on our walls and singing their songs. Yet, I have never
The Comeback Tour (credit: Leanne Dolan)
seen a tribute to them in novel form. To quote *NSYNC, I thought, “It’s gonna be me.” And it is. “Basically, I wrote the novel I want to read!” She said of Cailin, her protagonist, “It was important for me to show that although she had a positive attitude, she still struggled. She let a lot of herself go in her marriage and is on a mission to reclaim her life. Cailin is a strong female character
who, although she gets divorced, loses her job, and moves back home all at once (I drew this inspiration from my own life), remains positive. I also put in some other parts of myself, by making her straight-edge, because I feel so many romance novels involve drinking and I think we need to start representing other communities of women—like the young divorcees and the women who do not drink or do continued on page 2