Spending time with bestselling author Diana Palmer, the pen name of Susan Spaeth Kyle, is not unlike reading one of the western romances that made her famous. She’s a consummate storyteller, and all her trademark literary qualities are on display: there’s tenderness, as she reminisces about her late husband; an abundance of folksy asides, as she reels off anecdote after anecdote about early encounters with rattlesnakes; and even a hint of danger, as she describes going white water rafting when she was four months pregnant and didn’t know it yet.
Speaking via Zoom from the rustic living room of her home in the North Georgia mountains, Palmer, 77, apologizes for her casual appearance. “I went looking for a nice dress in my closet a while ago,” she says in a gravelly Southern drawl, “but I don’t have any anymore.” Her hair is pulled back into a bun and her wire-rimmed glasses reflect the computer glare. “What will I wear at my funeral? They’ll have to bury me in my bathrobe.”
It’s not the only crack Palmer makes about her advancing years. Describing her tight-knit 2,112-person town of Clarkesville, she says, “It’s a great place to live and I hope I can live here a few more years.” Then, looking to the heavens, she adds, “Just a few more! I need to finish a couple more books.”
Palmer was born and raised in Georgia. The daughter of a college professor father and a nurse mother, she spent summers with her sharecropper grandparents and says she grew up “dirt poor” but didn’t realize it until she went to a wealthy friend’s house and saw how the other half lived. She had two dreams as a child: to be a cowboy and to be a writer. “I had little Roy Rogers–style boots,” she says, “and two holsters with cap pistols. We used to play cowboys all the time.”
The writing dream proved more attainable. After high school and a brief stint working at a factory, Palmer spent 16 years as a staff writer for her local paper. Simultaneously, at the urging of her best friend, she shopped around her first romance novel, Now and Forever. In 1979, while still at work, she got the call that the now-defunct MacFadden Romance was interested. “I remember just sliding down to sit on the floor,” she says, “and my coworkers stopped what they were doing to ask, ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’ ” She laughs. “That was 206 books ago.”
For that first book, Palmer says that “holding hands and kissing was the absolute upper limit” for the intimacy she could depict on page. But she’s actually grateful for the censorship, which taught her to build sexual tension between her leads. “I would write the love scenes out and then I would cut them off and only use the first part. I’d end up with characters who came across as explosively attracted to each other, almost dying from it. It actually worked out beautifully.”
Palmer’s latest, Lawbreaker, publishing in December from Canary Street, marks the 52nd installment in her Long Tall Texans series and features plenty of on-page steam. In it, spunky Texan Odalie Everett moves to Manhattan to pursue her dream of being an opera singer despite her debilitating stage fright. One of the only people she knows in New York is mob boss–turned–art dealer Tony Garza. Unfortunately, the pair can’t stand each other. “When you have that much antagonism between two people,” Palmer says, “the love is going to be even more intense when they finally get together.”
At this point in the long-running series, readers come to Palmer’s books not just for the central romance but to check in with the vast established cast of ranchers and roughriders, each with their own complex backstory and relationships.
This abundant community is reflective of Palmer’s day-to-day. Unprompted, she offers up in-depth portraits of many of her neighbors (including the duo whose chickens often wander onto her lawn) and waxes poetic about small-town life, arguing that while outsiders might expect a rural community like hers to be closed off or racist, she finds the opposite to be true. “I love everybody,” she proclaims, citing her Latino neighbors, queer extended family members, and warm relationship with local law enforcement, whom she often turns to for advice on her suspense plots.
The sheer number of characters in the mix in the Long Tall Texans books does pose a unique authorial challenge, however. “I get things wrong all the time,” Palmer says. “I forget an eye color or a character’s age. Fortunately, readers have been very forgiving with me.”
Palmer is humble about her achievements and frank about the amount of work it’s taken to get where she is: “I had a little talent” she says. “But you don’t need a lot of talent. You need drive.” In the early years, she would get home from work and head straight to her typewriter. After she quit her newspaper job, she’d put in up to 12 hours a day writing. “My son would try to interrupt me while I was working, and I’d throw things at him to make him go away. He got real good at ducking.”
Though Palmer is adamant that “there is no experience in the world like carrying a baby for nine months and then carrying him in your arms,” balancing her career with motherhood was a challenge. She credits her husband, Jim, who died of Covid in 2021, for his abundant support.
The pair met in 1972 while both were working at the factory, before Jim went back to school for computer programming and Palmer went to work at the paper. He proposed two days after their first date, and three days after that they were married.
A self-described nerd, Palmer says she knew the relationship would work when Jim told her that he, too, loved Star Trek. “It meant that he was tolerant. I would never, never have made it as an author without Jim. He was willing to do anything he could to help me. He would rock the baby and give him bottles while I was trying to work. He was never jealous or mad that I made more money than he did. He said it didn’t bother him a bit.”
Later, Jim encouraged Palmer to go back to school for her BA in history, which she earned at age 41. Theirs was the kind of happily ever after that most romance leads aspire to, but, strangely, Palmer’s heroine in Lawbreaker is a bit more traditional than that. Odalie feels she must choose between her artistic ambitions and romantic commitment. Perhaps this conservative streak comes down to Palmer knowing her audience.
“When young people come to my signings,” she says, “they’re there to get books for their mothers or grandmothers or even their great grandmothers. I like commitment. I like marriage. I like kids, all that stuff. In my day, that was the epitome of what being a woman was. It was about starting a family and raising your children to be good citizens and observe the golden rule. That’s my whole background, and it’s the background of most of the people who read my books. Jim and I were together for 48 years, and they were the best years of my life.”
Palmer flips her camera around to show off the portrait of him hanging over their mantelpiece—smiling down at her and wearing a big ol’ cowboy hat.
