Zane uncovered

BALTIMORE -- A conversation with Zane is no simple task. The pseudonymous author with 2.5 million erotica books in print will chat breezily about the bookstore she's opening here, the publishing company she's run since 1999, and her dramatic rise from uploading stories on the Internet to self-publishing to garnering a contract with Simon & Schuster's Atria Books. It's when the conversation turns to her husband of two years, her three children, and details about her life in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., that things get difficult. She retreats to monosyllabic responses, she changes the topic, or she simply doesn't answer.

Under this cloak of mystery the prolific writer works steadily, releasing eight novels from 2000's "Addicted" to "Afterburn," set to arrive in November. Sandwiched between the book covers are African-American architects, entrepreneurs, accountants, and chiropractors who practice a "Sex and the City"-style of freewheeling sexuality not found in romance or "sister girl" novels.

The subject matter understandably makes her want to shield herself and her family from overly affectionate readers. Zane gets correspondence from soon-to-be-released prisoners and women who "want to hook up with me," she says. Others disapprove of her merrily fornicating characters. But the majority of her diverse fans love her work so much that they don't ask for specific titles, says Rosalyn Elder, owner of Jamaicaway Books & Gifts in Jamaica Plain. They buy any piece of literature with the name Zane on it.

When Zane first hit the publishing scene, you couldn't look at Essence magazine's bestseller lists without encountering her name. The phenomenon quickly tumbled into Borders and Barnes & Noble, where her lusty novels sit next to the latest Harry Potter tomes on the bestseller racks. The books scaled the New York Times bestseller list. No wonder her editor at Atria, Malaika Adero, calls Zane the Terry McMillan of erotica, after the author who turned black novels into mainstream fare in the '90s.

Consider this summer Zane's coming-out party. Last month, she completed her first book tour, riding to Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Washington in a 45-foot recreational vehicle with the words "The Love Bus" emblazoned on its side. The appearances sometimes devolved into impromptu games of cat and mouse as fans pestered her for more information: "Are you from the area?" an audience member called out at a bookstore in suburban Maryland. "Yeah," Zane curtly replied. Her readers discovered much more in profiles that turned up in Entertainment Weekly, Black Issues Book Review, and The New York Times. The face Zane once refused to unveil for the sake of privacy now boldly appears in photographs accompanying articles and reading announcements.

To some, Zane's unveiling is complete folly. "If she had called me," says Reginald Martin, coeditor of 1992's groundbreaking erotica anthology "Erotique Noire," "I would have advised against it, because part of her attractiveness was her self-mystification. . . . It's better that the readership doesn't know her name. It's better that they don't know anything about her real life, because it gives them a comfortable distance from her."

But Manie Barron, a literary agent at William Morris, believes the steady leak of information about Zane's real life will help the fans who arrive at readings with armloads of her novels develop a stronger bond with her. "The characters that she writes about, as is the case for most romance-oriented fiction, [are] about satisfying a fantasy," Barron says. "So now that you find out this is a suburban mother, a soccer mom, the readers can then relate to her in another way: `She shares my fantasy. She's just as normal as I am.' "

One thing Zane hasn't revealed is her identity, but her birth name -- Kristina LaFerne Roberts -- is not difficult to find. Reverse the spelling of her publishing company, Strebor, and you get the name "Roberts." Google "Zane Roberts erotica," and you arrive at a site of "Miscellaneous Anthologies," which gives up the info.

Zane receives the news about her name while sitting on a couch in her soon-to-open bookstore, Zane's Endeavors Books and Gifts, housed in a former bordello in Baltimore's funky Fells Point neighborhood. She rolls through a range of reactions, from "How did you find out?" to "I don't see any reason why my real name should be out there if I don't want it to be, quite honestly."

The 37-year-old author says she knows about the anthologies website and almost filed a cease-and-desist lawsuit against it. Later she turns blase. After all, she says, Roberts is not her married name. If that name does become public, she threatens to retire the Zane pseudonym. "My privacy," says Zane, "is more important to me than my writing. Always will be."

Revealing herself
What made her want to become a more public figure? Zane blames the demands of her role as publisher of Strebor (pronounced Stray-bore), which Simon & Schuster began distributing in 2002. Strebor's stable of 34 authors produces work in every genre except erotica (Atria began publishing Zane's books in 2001). "Myself," she says, "I probably could have remained a writer and remained completely faceless, but . . . if you're a publisher you really do have to go to certain events and do certain things."

There's no interesting story behind how Zane chose her pseudonym. She plucked the name out of thin air while visiting a chat room; it was one "that I've always liked," she says in a Southern accent that heavily rides the vowels. With her round face, rotund body, and conservative blue pantsuit, she looks nothing like the nubile honeys you imagine populating her work. Although she's talkative and friendly, she sits for most of the interview in one position with her back resting on the arm of a couch. Only when the conversation winds down 1 1/2 hours later does she start revealing herself to her interviewer.

She says, "Some people want to be famous; that's something I've never wanted to be."

She says, "I'm a homebody. I'm family oriented."

A portion of her days is spent caring for her kids; the most she'll reveal is that she has a 17-year-old son, a 9-year-old daughter, and a 15-month-old son. Zane seems to fit the "write-what-you-know" category. Like the main character in "Addicted," she's an entrepreneur who gave birth at a young age. Unlike the "Addicted" character, Zane didn't immediately marry her husband, Wayne, whom she's known since she was 10 years old. A self-described "preacher's kid," Zane is the daughter of a retired theologian who taught at Howard University and other schools. Her mother is a retired schoolteacher. Their child graduated from Howard with a chemical engineering degree and a lot of ambition.

Editor Blanche Richardson first corresponded with Zane when the author submitted stories for Richardson's 2001 anthology "Best Black Women's Erotica." She calls Zane "very confident. It was the sort of confidence that came from innate intelligence as well as [from] somebody who's really done their homework. She knew what she was all about. She knew what her writing was all about. She knew where she wanted to go with it."

That confidence apparently seeps into her personal life. Zane paints herself as a proud member of a new generation of educated women whose idea of fulfillment does not necessarily mean men, marriage, or children. "Men used to be very intimidated by me," she says, chuckling at the memory. "They used to say to me things normally you would hear a woman say to a man, like, `I don't think you care about me,' `I think you're just using me for sex.' "

Her female friends are professional women, often single and feistily independent. "They don't really want the fairy tale," Zane says. "They want to have someone when they want someone, but they're not looking for a man to define them. . . . There's a lot of women who are kind of needy who have to have men and will do anything to keep them. I have a friend who's an OB-GYN. Men in the beginning with her would say, `Oh, that's cool that you're independent,' but after a while they don't want her to be independent. They want us to be totally reliant on them, and it's not like that anymore." Zane's novels capture this spirit in its extreme form.

Resonating with fans
Ask people in the industry why Zane's novels sell so well, and most use the word "raw." Zane had never read a line of erotica before she started writing, so she bypasses the florid prose and euphemisms of the genre's past. "We don't say, `Oh let me see your privates,' " says Zane. "To me, people don't talk that way. But that's the way traditionally it's been done." She credits her success to more than scintillating sex scenes, however. The glue holding her novels together, she says, are strong characters and solid story lines.

The combination resonates with fans such as Mara Wilson-Savoy, a 36-year-old recent nursing-school graduate who stands on line at a bookstore in the Maryland suburbs with her young son waiting to get a few books signed. Wilson-Savoy criticizes Zane's stories for occasionally being "repetitive," but she says the books "made me broaden my horizons" by making her think "about sex and getting to know yourself." Both she and her husband read them.

The novels play an active role in brushing away the cloud of conservatism that shadows black female sexuality, says Richardson. "We have been denigrated in terms of our sexuality since slavery, when we had no control over our bodies," Richardson says. "That's a legacy that has stayed with us until today. We've been hesitant to speak openly about our sensuality even though we know everybody does it. On us it looks a little different. We're looked at as easy, bad, sluts. We tend not to verbalize it or reinforce it in our literature lest we play into those stereotypes."

That luggage is one reason why it wasn't easy becoming Zane. Yes, this country supports a $10 billion porn industry, but it also made "The Passion of the Christ" the box-office phenomenon of the year. Editors who received "Addicted" told her nobody wanted to read a book about a black nymphomaniac, says Zane. In an e-mail to the aspiring author, Sam Fulwood III, a newspaper columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, told her: "Zane I don't think any publisher in New York would touch your work with a ten-foot pole. It's too graphic and explicit. I can't introduce you to the people I know because I'd be too embarrassed." None of it was enough to break Zane's self-confident stride.

She rattles off the date she wrote her first piece of erotica: November 1997. The short story, "First Night," became the first one featured in her 2000 collection, "The Sex Chronicles." Eager for feedback, she e-mailed copies to a few friends. "The next thing I know," says Zane, "I was getting e-mails from perfect strangers, saying, `That's the hottest thing I ever read.' " She wrote more, uploading three stories to an AOL space. "Within three weeks I had 8,000 hits and it just grew, grew, grew," says Zane.

Finding an electronic spot to display her bawdy work proved difficult. AOL shut her down. She used the black-erotica section on the American Civil Liberties Union's site until that section, too, got the ax. So she created her own website, www.eroticanoir.com, to feature not only her work but that of others toiling in the genre. (The site is temporarily down.)

As Zane released the first two of three self-published books, she continued working; she won't divulge the job, but the Black Issues Book Review profile reveals she worked as a paper-industry sales executive. Her friends and family knew nothing about her other career as a writer.

"Even after I put `The Sex Chronicles' and `Addicted' out," says Zane, "and had long gotten to the point where I could have quit my regular job, I still worked. So I had to do all of this on the side. I was so stressed out, I had chest pains. It was just from anxiety."

Zane finally broke the news to her mother by showing her a copy of Essence. At the time she had two of the top five fiction books on the bestseller list. Of course her mother wanted to read them. "I gave her a copy of `Addicted,' " says Zane. " `Addicted' has some sex, but it's not really that bad." In the end, it was the "foul language" that dismayed her mom, who told her daughter she wished she wrote books that all their friends and family could read.

Some family members are clearly supportive. Her mother and two older sisters -- Charmaine Parker, 48, a former journalist who now edits at Strebor, and Carlita Marsh, 40 -- are on site for the reading at the Maryland bookstore. They and Zane's husband, Wayne, accompanied her on different legs of the book tour. At this moment, Zane is waiting for Wayne to arrive with books for a pre-opening reading at Zane's Endeavors later in the evening to celebrate the release of "Dark Dreams: A Collection of Horror and Suspense by Black Writers." Her eldest son also plans to attend.

As for her theologian father? To this day, Zane says, he hasn't read one of her novels.