Pink Books For Gray Days

Almost two decades ago, when I was Kyra Davis, I wrote a lighthearted mystery. I wrote it because I was sad and anxious, angry and more than a little bit scared by all the curveballs life throws at you once you start the actual process of adulting. I needed a way out of the dark.
I needed pink.
The blush of laughter, the hot pink of feminine power, the magenta of articulated rage. I wanted bubblegum-sassy dialogue, shocking pink comebacks and a full pink-hued sunrise of adventure and joy.
I wrote what I needed. My first book was titled Sex, Murder and A Double Latte. It was playful and entertaining. There was nothing serious about it except for how it seriously changed my life. I became an author who wrote fun books for those who needed them.
The emails I received from readers confirmed that. A woman whose husband was serving in Afghanistan wrote to say my book gave her a few hours of relief her from her worries. A mother of a premature baby wrote that she was reading my book aloud by her child’s incubator and my words were making her smile. People going through divorce, and grief and economic hardship, they all wrote to thank me for my pink covered book. In response I wrote more books in more uplifting colors.
The entire Sophie mystery series is little more than a bottle of candy covered Prozac.
Then I moved on to romance. Those books are rather angsty and hot, more crimson than fuchsia. I lean heavy into the emotional drama and excitement of sexual discovery. Oddly enough my romances have a more intellectual bent than my Sophie mysteries, partially because I find philosophy sexy (yes, really, I’m a freak like that) and partially because by the time I got around to the genre of romance I was in a different place in my life. When I started writing Just One Night, things were once again a little stressful. But this time I wasn’t feeling sad or scared.
I was feeling determined.
By then I knew how to get through rough times, I was taking control of my life and creating the outcomes I wanted. Publishers Weekly seemed to unknowingly pick up on my mood when they reviewed Just One Night, writing:
“Davis…skillfully creates an uplifting story in which sex is presented both as freedom and as a metaphor for power, and where raw chemistry is the clear winner over bland complacency.”
Freedom, power, chemistry over complacency. That’s where I was at. I just found a way to mold those feelings into a story about sex and relationships. I took that energy into the Pure Sin series as well.
The time between writing my first romance and my third was filled with events and changes. For one, I camped out on the New York Times bestsellers list for a while and gained financial security. Everyone in my family was doing well. I also married the love of my life.
Things were good.
They still are.
And so I wrote Just One Lie. A story about a woman who goes through all kinds of hell but through pure grit, intrepidity, self-improvement and then finally true love, she gets her Ride-Off-Into-The-Sunset-Happy-Ending. In fact, Just One Lie may be the only book I’ve ever written that has such an ending.
I wrote all of the above when I was Kyra Davis.
But still, I continued to evolve. My focus turned outward, I spent more time thinking about history and society and why things are the way they are. And my marriage continued to evolve and grow as well in all the best ways. My husband and I decided to take each other’s names. My husband is now Rod Davis Lurie and I’m Kyra Davis Lurie. We’re partners in the truest sense of the word and having that kind of relationship has both fortified and changed me. As Kyra Davis Lurie I feel compelled to write stories that draw on the history and societal dynamics I find so fascinating as well as the nuances and complicated relationships (platonic and otherwise) that shape us. That’s why I wrote The Great Mann.
But there are still plenty of days when the world gets a little much and I desperately need some frilly pink giggles. That’s why I’m grateful to always be able to step back into books I wrote when I was simply Kyra Davis, an author looking for joy.