Back in 2011, I was seriously considering a move overseas. I had graduated into a post-recession economy with an M.A. in Art History and Museum Administration. The job market was not “on my side.” (This is a post about the launch of On My Side, so pun fully intended.) I went to the College of DAAP at the University of Cincinnati, and the region poured forth a veritable font of new arts graduates. Virtually no jobs existed within a 100-mile radius. The Master’s degree seemed barely worth the cardstock it was printed on.
Germany seemed to hold postgraduate degrees in higher esteem and had more cultural opportunities. I applied for a grant to do research. In the meantime, in the depths of my parents’ basement, I wrote historical fiction about German Romantic authors and worked on becoming fluent in German.
Part of my studies included reading at least one article in a German newspaper, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine, every day. It was in that roundabout way that I become hooked on the German scandal of the decade. Memorably, it was described by one journalist as Germans hanging on every moment of a scandal involving cribbed passages in a 475-page law dissertation with the fervor of Americans invested in a political sex scandal.
That is so incredibly German, but I digress. The scandal in question was the Guttenberg plagiarism scandal, which honestly was super fascinating to a person who was recently sprung from academia, living with her parents, and doing five part-time jobs. Spoiler alert, if one can spoil a 15-year-old plagiarism case that made headlines, the accused (who was Minister of Defense in Germany at the time), had his doctorate rescinded and lost his job.
It was from these headlines that On My Side was ripped. This book was written six or seven years after The Scandal. I had met my now-husband in the meantime and decided to stay in North America after all. Heather and David are the first of two marriage in crisis stories that appear in Degrees of Desire. The second is the final book, The Life We Chose, which is out August 24. We see Heather and David’s relationship begin in previous books, and by the time they star as FMC and MMC in their own story, they’ve been married a year.
Things are excellent on the surface - they get good jobs, David is a millionaire, they’re living on the same continent again. Unfortunately, things are rocky underneath all that. Heather is still pissed at him for taking a yearlong postdoc that started a month after their wedding. His huge wallet makes her uncomfortable. David has impostor syndrome and is terrified of teaching students.
Worst of all, David’s best friend, Percy, is a total asshole to Heather. She hides the true depths of his assholery from David. When Percy is accused of plagiarizing his dissertation, things spiral fast. The Society of Fellows retroactively kicks him out, which tears our found family friend group apart. All the rocky undercurrents swirling about bubble to the surface to make things even worse.
Of course, this is a romance novel, so everyone (except the villain, obvs) lives happily ever after. But man, this one gets dicey. Fasten your seatbelts and make sure your linguistic philosophy dissertations contain the proper citations. Percy is one of my most-hated villains, so I hope you enjoy watching his fall from grace as much as I enjoyed writing it for you.
On My Side is an angsty, emotional, interconnected standalone contemporary romance. Featuring a slow-burn marriage in crisis, high-stakes academic intrigue, and a deeply devoted couple who must figure out if love is enough when their entire world is falling apart. The Degrees of Desire series is free to read on Kindle Unlimited.
