Our best-friendship was cemented decades ago, while crouched behind a Dumpster in a Santa Monica alleyway. What better way to spend your first official boy/girl party than hiding alongside the only other partygoer who was too freaked out to play a game the boys had just invented? It was called “Hide and Go Get It” and we were broken into two teams, boys vs. girls. The rules were as simple as we feared, and you can probably guess which team was supposed to hide and which team was assigned to Go Get It. 

As the boys found the girls and claimed their prizes, we stayed hidden in the alley—two vigilant, twelve-year old girls holding clammy hands until the sun set and we could be sure that the last overly eager, sweaty-haired boy had given up his search. We quietly, but with a new best friend by our sides, tiptoed back to the party.

In our eighth-grade science class we sat beside each other when, for one week, the boys were separated from the girls for Sex Ed. The school nurse informed us girls about periods and cramps and ibuprofen, and then scared us straight with stories about herpes and genital warts and teen pregnancy. 

But where was the talk about sex? About what it feels like, about the pleasure? We were given plenty of reasons to say “no,” but what about the reasons to someday say “yes”? All the while, we watched John Hughes movies as a study on romance and passed around someone’s mom’s copy of Wifey. We scoured Cosmo and read articles about how to give the perfect blow job. Even before we had “a man” we were learning how to please him. Don’t worry, they told us, in “10 Easy Steps” we could bring our partner to orgasm every time. 

But something eluded us again and again. Where was the woman’s pleasure in all of this? Were teenage boys reading articles about how to bring a woman to orgasm every time? 

We internalized the message. We confused being desired with our own desire. It was an entirely puzzling and powerful lesson. It’s a message that followed us through sex and dating in our 20s; it followed us into marriage; and it’s at the very heart of Dirty Diana. 

The initial idea for Dirty Diana came from a personal place, but one many of us know well—the inside of a dying relationship. Two years into her marriage, Shana and her husband separated. They hadn’t slept together in over a year, and had begun drifting through their tiny Laurel Canyon house like strangers, eventually moving into new apartments and on to other partners. But still, they couldn’t completely say goodbye. Through years of hard work, they found their way back to each other, but it wasn’t easy. 

When Shana conceived of the Dirty Diana podcast she wanted to craft a sex-positive narrative that looked at marriage in an authentic way, and our dream scenario was that it also be fun, smart, and sexy enough to elicit real desire in listeners. In the spring of 2020, as the world folded in on itself, shutting down, and becoming nearly unrecognizable, we found ourselves writing the podcast scripts even faster, fueled by a craving for both escape and connection. We were overjoyed by the talent who signed on to join us—including Demi Moore as the titular Diana. What we’d originally hoped to record together in a studio one day, turned instead into locked-down weeks of recording over Zoom. We had actors in locations across the globe, from Los Angeles to Idaho, New York to London and Copenhagen, recording in their closets and at their kitchen tables.  Dirty Diana debuted at #1 on Apple’s fiction podcast list, won an Ambie Award for Best Scriptwriting and has been downloaded over two million times. Even better are the incredibly raw and personal responses we receive from listeners (along with a very validating number of fire, red chili, and eggplant emojis). 

We were thrilled by the podcast’s reception but anxious to delve even deeper into Diana’s world. We wanted to tell a more complete, intimate, and twisty love story in reverse. Instead of parachuting into a romantic meet-cute, we drop into a marriage on the brink of collapse. But how and why did Diana get here and will she find her way back? Can she reconnect with her own longing--and what would that mean for her seemingly comfortable marriage? 

For the past couple years, we have been lucky enough to huddle together not in a Santa Monica alleyway, but over our laptops, writing three Dirty Diana novels. We’ve passed drafts back and forth. We’ve had some good ideas, and plenty of terrible ones, and forever tried to make each other laugh and sometimes blush. We’ve talked endlessly about marriage and sex, and also about shame and secrecy. About the ways we all try, successfully and not, to recognize our own desires. And about how hard it is to figure all this out while inside of a relationship. And about how strange and fun it can be, too. Telling Diana’s mixed-up, imperfect story is a dream for us and a chance, we hope, for readers to share in a desire for connection, affection and intimacy. 

--Jen & Shana