Our guest this week, Mazey Eddings, started out as a massive romance reader. In fact during her most stressful times of life, she would read upwards of a book a day, drawn to that guaranteed happy ending that all romance novels require. But, as someone who has an anxiety disorder, ADHD, and is on the autism spectrum, she felt like she didn’t see the issues that she deals with on a day to day basis portrayed in the books she was reading. So in the middle of dental school she started writing scenes that later became her debut novel.

Mazey’s first book A BRUSH WITH LOVE hit bookstores at the beginning of March and features two dental students as they fall in love and deal with very adult struggles like extreme anxiety and familial guilt. Mazey also has 4 additional books in the pipeline over the next 3 years that feature other neurodivergent characters.

We talk about why romance is the perfect genre to explore happy endings for underrepresented groups, the amount of misogyny still found in historically male dominated fields, and about the trend of women in STEM within the romance genre that appears to be here to stay.

You can find Mazey Eddings on instagram at @mazeyeddings and at her author website, mazeyeddings.com

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Books, Series, and Movies Mentioned in this Episode:

Books mentioned

1- A Brush with Love by Mazey Eddings
2- The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
3- My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
4- The Name Of The Rose by Umberto Eco
5- A Room With A View by E.M. Forester
5- Devil in Winter by Lisa Kleypas
6- The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
7- Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert
8- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
9- Lizzie Blake's Best Mistake by Mazey Eddings
10- Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham
11- A Perfect Equation by Elizabeth Everett
12- The Grace Year by Kim Liggett
13- Yearbook by Seth Rogen (audiobook)

TV series mentioned:
1- Medici - (2016 - 2019) Netflix

Movies mentioned
1- The Lost Daughter (2021) Netflix
2- Nightmare Alley (2021) HBO Max