Author Adele Parks has created a fair few fictional 'happy ever afters', but what of her own? She tells Hannah Stephenson about her journey to finally finding Mr Right.

 

She's on the top of many women's holiday reading lists along with the likes of Marian Keyes, Jane Green and Lisa Jewell.

Her racy romcoms have sold in their millions and been translated into 25 languages, yet Adele Parks is not particularly romantic, she reflects.

Indeed, the Teesside-born author has been proposed to no less than seven times but is a lot less romantic than Jo, the heroine of her latest novel The State We're In, an optimist who believes she will find 'the one', and who begins a relationship with Dean, a cynical commitment-phobe she meets on a plane.

"I never thought that getting married was the be-all-and-end-all," Parks, 44, explains. "I was the one in our family who said I'd never marry.

"But I know enough women who have been brought up in a culture that tells us there is going to be a 'happily ever after' that will come via a happy marriage."

She laughs at the memory of the various proposals she's received over the years.

"The first one was a boy who was 16. I had decided I wasn't going to sleep with anyone until I was married, so he promptly said, 'Marry me'.

"At that time I would morph into the perfect girlfriend for whoever I was going out with. The proposals used to come quite quickly in the relationship and I'm always suspicious of anyone who proposes within the first three months."

Parks, whose parents Tony, an ICI engineer, and Maureen, who worked at Barclaycard, have been married for 51 years, says she suspects her parents wanted her to get married at some point.

"My mum married when she was 18 and my sister married at 23. I was 20 and I remember people saying, 'You'll be next', and I was horrified."

After a few proposals which she turned down, she married her first husband Simon, whom she met while working in advertising. They had a son, Conrad, but six years later they split up and she was divorced at 32. "I married my best friend when we were too young. As we both grew up, we grew apart."

The following year she met Jim, a marketing director, and they've been together ever since. Parks had finally found 'the one'.

They've been married for nine years and she says that if he died, she'd never get married again.

"I don't think it could get better than this. He's kind, genuinely sees the best in everyone while I see faults in people. He's very optimistic about life."

They met in a salsa bar - she was with a group of NCT friends, most of whom were coupled off and some were expecting their second babies. She was newly single. Jim was at another birthday party in the same venue.

"It was literally 'Our eyes met across a crowded room'. I asked him to dance and the minute I did that, I thought, 'What if he's a terrible dancer?' Actually, he turned out to be a brilliant dancer, way better than I was."

When they married, Jim took her surname - the ultimate romantic gesture of commitment - so now he's Mr Parks.

"Conrad and I were Parks so he changed his name to be the same as us. It's a huge deal, but not to him. He's very laid back about it."

Yet it was a different scenario when they first met, she explains. "When I met him he was a complete commitment-phobe. He told me that he didn't want a serious relationship and nor did I. But we literally fell in love."

Parks fervently believes that her past has shaped her future. She grew up in a stable family and started writing as a teenager. "I'm close to my parents and I have the same values as them," she says.

After leaving school she went to Leicester University to read English language and literature, writing in her spare time and at weekends. She wrote her first novel, Playing Away, after securing an agent.

Today, Mr Parks is the director of Guildford Books Festival, and has taken an active interest in his wife's career. Yet she says in many ways they are so different.

"He's definitely more adventurous than I am. He has done all the strange snowboarding, heliboarding, jumping out and off things that just make my heart terrified.

"With us, the things that are different are surface things, but the things that we have in common are our family values, attitudes towards money and other things that really matter."

Parks' novels centre on relationships and key issues surrounding them - subjects have included infidelity, an unwanted pregnancy and bigamy - and she views the term 'chick lit' with some contempt.

"I don't hate it, I think it's a double-edged sword," she says. "I do some work with adult literacy programmes. I meet a lot of people who, if I said, 'I write commercial women's fiction', would look at me blankly. If I say, 'I write chick lit', they think it's something they could approach and then I hope that they'll be pleasantly surprised.

"The negative side is that there's no male equivalent and I just think it's really sexist. I am a feminist and I'm 44, well past being anybody's chick."

She agrees that chick lit has a stigma of being predictable. "People think it's going to be about a single woman who has too many Chardonnays and is desperately seeking love. There's more to women than that.

"There are no negative connotations about being a crime writer, so why does women's commercial fiction have to be reduced to chick lit?"

She recognises that there will always be some literary snobs who won't acknowledge the value of commercial women's fiction.

"People either love it or dismiss it and the people who dismiss it have never read it. That's the irritation."

She writes around one book a year, having published 13 novels in 13 years, working from home in Guildford, Surrey, and finishing her working day when Conrad, now 12, comes home from school.

Her books are less racy than they used to be, she admits, and she wouldn't dream of going down the Fifty Shades route to sell more copies.

"You need to be truthful to yourself. I think the reason EL James was successful was that she was truthful to herself and the worst thing you can do is try to ape someone else. That was right for her at that time.

"When that happened I was really chuffed that a lot of people tweeted that if you thought Fifty Shades was rude, you ought to read Adele Parks's first book, Playing Away.

"Marian Keyes tweeted, 'Yes, Adele's been writing really good filth for ages'."

:: The State We're In by Adele Parks is published by Headline Review, priced £11.99. Available now