April 12, 1999 'People' magazine provides short biography of Nora Roberts

Celebrities like Nora Roberts inevitably find their lives reflected in the press. Roberts' decision to cease making tours to promote her books has caused a lessening of such coverage in recent years, but earlier in her career she was frequently the subject of news articles.

April 12, 1999 cover of People magazine

1999 was one such year. Roberts had just published Rivers End. During the previous year, eleven of her works had appeared on the New York Times bestseller lists. She had written a total of 128 titles and had more than 85 million copies of her novels in print.

On April 12, 1999  Alec Foege wrote the People magazine article, "Romance Writer Nora Roberts Found Her Own True Love with the Man Who Came to Build Her a Bookcase."  Foege provided a brief biography of Roberts which included the following information.

As a child in Silver Spring, Maryland where she grew up with four siblings, Roberts experienced "the power of stories" while watching films like Peter Pan and The King and I at the theater where her father worked as a projectionist. At home, "there were always books all over the house," said Roberts, who added, "And my dad was a real Irish storyteller."

An early marriage in 1970 to her high school sweetheart, Ronald Aufdem-Brinke, produced two sons – Dan and Jason. "I became a kind of earth mother," Roberts said of this time in her life. "I baked bread, canned, sewed, macraméd, embroidered, grew vegetables. I was obviously looking for a creative outlet."

She found that outlet during a February 1979 week-long snowstorm that stranded her at home with her young sons. Responding to her own pleasure in reading Harlequin romances, she decided to write one herself  – "a steamy saga set in Spain" – which Harlequin subsequently rejected. "It was very bad," admitted Roberts. "One big cliché."  But shortly over a year later, Silhouette Romances, Harlequin's American competitor, offered to publish another of Roberts' novels, Irish Thoroughbred (1981).

Divorced in 1983 from Aufdem-Brinke, Roberts later met a Bruce Wilder, a carpenter who came to her house one day to build bookcases. Roberts and Wilder were married in 1985. "I am living proof," she pointed out, "that what I write about can happen in real life."

Despite Wilder's involvement with the Turn the Page Bookstore, he continued to find time for more improvements on the house he and Roberts shared in Kneedysville, including an enclosed pool and hot tub and a  room-size closet just  for Roberts' shoes. "My one weakness," Roberts confessed. "There are never enough."