"A woman sits next to a very dashing, mysterious man in first class, decides he's the love of her life," Tia Williams says, describing her new book, The Missed Connection. "They didn't exchange information, and she hires a detective to track him down. The detective is also hot, so she has a love triangle on her hands."
The Missed Connection is Williams’ eighth novel, the latest in a successful career that includes Seven Days in June and The Perfect Find, which was adapted into a film starring Gabrielle Union. Williams certainly knows how to craft a romance, but before she was dreaming up stories about jet-setters and detectives, her ideas came from her own life—with a twist.
Williams has been writing since she was a child, and as a “socially awkward” middle schooler, she developed a process for getting through tough days.
"I would come home and I would rewrite the day so that it worked out," Williams tells Marie Claire editor-in-chief Nikki Ogunnaike on the "Nice Talk" podcast. "So that I said the funniest, coolest thing, that I got the guy. So I would do that as, like, I guess today you would call it self care ... And I was writing fiction, I was writing Tia fanfic."
And that fan fiction about her own life didn't stop once she was out of school. In her twenties, while working as a editor at Glamour and dating "a lunatic, as one does," Williams decided to make a change and move to Spain.
"I was teaching English to third graders in Seville, and while I was there, I just did what I always do," the author explains. "I started rewriting this horrific love story into something beautiful. I made my crazy boyfriend be, like, a good guy, and I gave it a happy ending, and all this stuff. And when I got back to New York, working at Condé Nast again, I was looking over what I'd written in Spain, I was like, 'Oh, this is my first book.'"
That book is 2004's The Accidental Diva—about a career-focused magazine beauty editor who falls for a performance artist.
Williams' habit of injecting her own life and background into her work isn't always quite so literal. More broadly, Williams writes about Black women, like herself, because they were left out of the Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz "glamor fiction" that she loved reading when she was growing up.
"There was always career drama and relationship intrigue, and it just felt so larger than life, and just so cool," Williams says. "But there were no Black people in those stories."
She goes on, "I remember having that thought, like, 'When I grow up, I'm gonna write these books starring us.' Because what I would do is recast the books with Black people, which is, like, a very dehumanizing thing to do as a kid, because you're teaching yourself Black is a version of white."
These days, Williams says she especially enjoys writing Black women villains. She's inspired by Dynasty's Dominique Deveraux, who was played by Diahann Carroll, and was "just as bitchy as Alexis, just as beautiful, just as glamorous, just as rich."
"It was like the audacity of us rooting for a Black female villain," Williams continues. "Because we're either supposed to hate her or she's supposed to be, like, good and virtuous, so we can love her. Loving someone who isn't good and virtuous but is Black was groundbreaking."
For more from Williams—including her writing tips and a glimpse at what goes down in the group chat for Black romance writers—check out this week's installment of "Nice Talk." The episode is available everywhere you listen to podcasts.