The first time I ever “met” an author, I was eleven years old, pajama-clad, sitting in the back of my mom’s blue station wagon while Romancing the Stone played on the giant screen in front of me. The author’s name was Joan Wilder. She was a romance author. And she looked like this:

I was too young to pick up on all the non-glamorous things about Joan’s life. The image of the alluring, successful author was forever fixed in my head, and it stayed there eve...