Kimberley Ash
As a teen, award-winning author Kimberley Ash would sit in her English boarding school dormitory and read Silhouette Romances with her friends. They would have passionate arguments about the kind of American hero they really wanted to see in the books, so to settle things, Kimberley wrote one. While she took great pleasure in deconstructing alpha males and exposing their chiseled but vulnerable underbellies, life and inner demons made her put away her dreams for twenty-five years. She was forty before she realized that what she wanted to be when she grew up was what she’d always wanted: a writer. So she joined New Jersey Romance Writers, took all the classes she could find, and has never looked back.
Meanwhile, to her great surprise, Kimberley was swept off her feet by her own all-American hero. Now making her home in rural New Jersey (yes, there is a rural New Jersey) with him, two hybrid children and two big furry dogs, she can be found staring into a computer screen, wrestling with plotlines and ignoring the giant dustbunnies.
Kimberley's debut novel, Breathe, was released in 2018 with Crimson Romance. Her trilogy, the Van Allen Brothers, was published by Tule Publishing in 2019. Kimberley re-released Breathe under her own imprint, Tea Rose Publishing, in June of 2022 followed by its sequels: Hold, in October, 2022, Stand in January, 2023, and Rise in November, 2023.
Kimberley holds a bachelor’s degree in French from the University of London (spectacularly useful at PTA meetings) and a master’s in English Literature from Drew University. She writes contemporary romance about fish-out-of-water characters who find home where they least expect it.
Marina Raydun: You wrote your first romance novel as a student in an English boarding school (sidenote: I think we need to know more about your experiences!). If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?
Kimberley Ash: Boarding school was a great experience for me, personally. I got out of the village I wasn’t happy in, learned a whole lot that I’ve been using ever since, and met friends who I’m still close to forty years later. And yes, we all loved reading romance! I would tell my younger self that it’s okay to wait until you know a whole lot more about life before you publish! The book I wrote in school became my first novel, BREATHE, but boy did it need about 30 years to stew before it could be unleashed on the world!
MR: What is the first experience you had when you learned that language had power?
KA: I feel like I’ve always known. I love words, English words particularly! I grew up in a house full of books and with a mother who loved the art of words and a father who loved a good joke. That was about all I needed! There were also some wonderful comedians who taught me the value of language: the Monty Python guys, Stephen Fry, and the Blackadder series, for example.
MR: I know you liked deconstructing male leads in romance novels growing up. What is your favorite underappreciated romance novel?
KA: Ooh, that’s very hard. I’m not much of a pioneer when it comes to reading romance, so I don’t have any secret authors to give you! But I do love the cinnamon roll heroes that have been taking romance by storm in the last few years. When a man will hold onto a woman having a nightmare, or take her kids for the day to give her a break, I just get all gooey. Talia Hibbert’s heroes come to mind.
MR: What do you owe real life people upon whom you base your characters?
KA: It’s no fun at all to be my friend or relative these days. Anything you say can and will be put in a book. Like all authors, I take people, places, scenes, smells, tastes, and experiences from my real life (and other people’s) to create my stories. For example, a few years ago I heard two stories about a man who was being physically abused by his wife in the space of one week. The nugget of that story became my hero in STAND.
MR: What’s the most difficult part about writing characters from the opposite sex?
KA: Without a man to tell you every single thing that goes through his mind (and I don’t think any of us want that, or vice versa!), we have to take an educated guess. I like my men to be intelligent and aware of their own feelings, so while of course they need to learn a thing or two and my heroines are the perfect ones to teach them, generally they’re pretty mature. No one likes a manbaby. (I’m looking at you, Kylo Ren.)
MR: What’s the best and worst book review you’ve ever received?
KA: Oh I have a good worst one. And the awful thing about it was that they were kind of right. In Breathe, my heroine is traumatized from an attack on her back home. So she has a heightened trauma response to any man coming near her. The hero tries to find out what happened and to help her not to react so strongly. But I wrote the story right before #MeToo came out, and in light of that, my hero’s attempts to “calm her down” were bull-headed and stupid. I changed it when I got the rights back and re-released it on my own, but this reviewer was really mad at him. And my best review was for the same book! Library Journal said “In the midst of the #MeToo movement and a lack of celebrity privacy, no romance could be more apropos for exploring these issues. Libraries should add this debut novel to their romance collection.” So there you go! Everyone reads books in different ways.
MR: Is romance your favorite genre to read as well? Any favorite authors?
KA: Definitely. I like my stories to have happy endings. There’s enough sadness in the world. You can run me through the mill a little, but I want to be sure it’s all going to be okay in the end. Some authors whose books I’ve loved recently are Helen Hoang, Farrah Rochon, Mhairi McFarlane, Erin Sterling, and Lily Chu.
MR: What are you currently reading?
KA: Right now I’m reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for a class I’m going to be teaching in the Spring. The only thing I can say about it is that I thought the pearl-clutchers of the 1920s were overreacting at its content. Well, it does indeed go into subjects no other book of the time dared to! And it’s flipping brilliant for it. After all my contemporary reads recently, it’s fun to get into an ‘historical’ mindset.
MR: If you could have drinks with any person, living or dead, who would it be? Why?
KA: Oh my. I would love to make Virginia Woolf feel better about the world. And get her some medication! I wish I knew exactly what Shakespeare did and didn’t write. And there are many contemporary authors I’d love to have a drink with, but I’d probably embarrass myself fangirling all over them.