Cabot on romance, fiction and escape

Meg Cabot, bestselling author of “The Princess Diaries,” focuses on body image,anxiety and… Meg Cabot, bestselling author of “The Princess Diaries,” focuses on body image,anxiety and dorm-room homicides in her latest novel, “Big Boned.” In a recent telephone interview with The Pitt News, Cabot dished about her inspiration, future movie plans and why mysteries make for the best reading experience.

“Big Boned” is the third installment in Cabot’s latest mystery series, which follows the adventures of ex-teen pop sensation turned assistant dorm director and part-time super sleuth, Heather Wells.

Despite the absurdities of Cabot’s main character, she is surprisingly able to make Heather Wells realistic and believable. Cabot achieves this by presenting her with typical everyday problems such as weight gain and issues with her residents – problems that are far more ordinary than Heather’s other endeavors, like solving the murders that keep occurring at her workplace in New York College’s Fischer Hall, more commonly known as the “Death Dorm.”

“To me, mysteries are the perfect book,” Cabot said, adding that in “Big Boned” “there’s been a socially unforgivable crime, a murder, thus disordering the society the protagonist lives in, and she has to find out who did it and remove the criminal from society to make life orderly again.” But of course, the book isn’t all crime solving. “In the best mysteries, she also has a little romance along the way,” Cabot said. “What’s not to love?”

The plot of “Big Boned” appropriately begins with the murder of Heather’s less-than-amiable boss, Owen Veatch. His murder sparks two days of non-stop insanity for Heather, including everything from police interrogations, absurd behavior on the part of college administrators, chaos in her love life and the arrest of a wrongly accused graduate student.

On top of all the chaos, the tasks of clearing the grad student’s name and solving the seemingly motiveless murder fall into the lap of Heather, a development which eventually endangers her own life.

The idea for Heather’s job came from Cabot’s own experience working in a dorm at NYU. Her familiarity with dorm life inspired her to incorporate college students, an age group often bypassed by movies and modern fiction in favor of the high school set, into her books.

“I loved my decade working at NYU because, although I started out the same age as a lot of the students I worked with, you just never knew what was going to happen from day to day,” Cabot said. “It wasn’t like a normal office job. I worked with one other adult, and that was it. Everyone else was students. Every morning when I walked in, there was always some new disaster waiting from the night before and every day bright, fresh new adventures.”

By writing about college students, Cabot says she hopes to offer fans the opportunity to graduate from her young adult fiction series like “The Princess Diaries” into her adult fiction and grow up with the characters.

An author with a knack for happy endings, Cabot makes no exception with “Big-Boned.” Her fixation with fairytale-style endings, Cabot says, comes from a love of “escape literature” in her youth.

“I did not want to read about a life that was as bleak as the one I was living,” Cabot said. “I needed an escape from that. So, when I sit down to write, that’s what I look to provide for my readers, who I assume are looking for the same thing I am: The promise of a happy, and with hard work, believably attainable, ending.”

Known for writing girly fiction, Cabot is queen of her amorous and romance-filled genre. She has published more than 40 books and is the process of writing two new trilogies entitled “Airhead” and “Abandon,” as well as the 10th book of her “Princess Diaries” Series.

“The Princess Diaries” film succeeded in bringing Julie Andrews back to the screen and launching Anne Hathaway’s career. Are any more movie plans in the works for Cabot’s books? According to Cabot, negotiations for bringing Heather Wells and characters from her other series, “Queen of Babble,” to the big screen were halted by this year’s Writers Guild strike.

While script writing may be halted, fans can still read. “Big Boned” overflows with back-to-back events that hardly leave readers time to recover from the last big, plot-altering sequence.

With witty dialogue and a storyline that leaves readers with the same romantic optimism gleaned from watching a romantic comedy, “Big Boned” will whisk you from murder to true love in a truly diverting read.