From the English Classroom to the Bestseller List: How Trinity Shaped Annabel Monaghan’s Writing Journey

Annabel Monaghan, T ’91, didn’t set out with a tidy, linear plan to become a bestselling novelist. In fact, for a long stretch of her adult life, writing seemed like the dream she had quietly shelved. But the foundation for the career she has now, writing contemporary romance novels like “Nora Goes Off Script,” and her forthcoming “Dolly All the Time”, was laid years earlier in classrooms at Duke. 

An English major, Monaghan remembers her time here with a mix of awe and nostalgia. “Reading and writing is all I ever wanted to do,” she said. “Duke had such a good English department. Reynolds Price was teaching, which was super exciting to me.” 

She immersed herself in literature courses and was drawn to American writers. But the class that stayed with her most was a writing workshop.  

Monaghan liked the creative nonfiction class taught by Christina Askounis so much that she took it twice during her time at Duke, an unusual move that the department nonetheless allowed. “That was the best class that I took at Duke,” she said. “Every week we met for three hours and workshopped essays.” 

After graduating, Monaghan followed many of her Duke classmates to New York City with a vague but persistent idea: she would become a writer. Reality intervened quickly. 

“All my friends from Duke were moving up to New York, and I thought, ‘well, I’ll move up to New York, and I’ll be a writer,’” she said. “And what I didn’t understand is that to live in New York, you need money.” 

Through campus recruiting, she took a job at Goldman Sachs in a two-year program. Her plan was to write at night after work, but that didn’t last long. When it came to finance, she was working all the time.  

Monaghan stayed on the business track for years, eventually earning an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and working in investment banking.  

By her own telling, it wasn’t exactly a perfect fit. “I was not a good investment banker,” she said. “I think all the people I worked with would tell you that’s true.” 

Her writing life didn’t begin in earnest until much later, after she stepped away from finance to raise her three sons. When her youngest was a baby, Monaghan wrote her first young adult novel, at age 37. 

From there, the path unfolded gradually. She published more young adult novels, but the real traction came from something closer to those Duke workshops: personal essays.

“My time at Duke was a really important time for me. I felt like I was someplace very special.”

“I started writing a column for adults. It was a lot of ‘haha mom’ stuff,” she said. “It was similar to what I was doing in that class at Duke, personal essays that would relate to other people, to moms.” 

The column ran for a decade and gained a wide online readership, appearing in outlets including “The Week” and “The Huffington Post.” Looking back, Monaghan sees that period as an apprenticeship of sorts. 

“In retrospect, what I was doing was getting comfortable with my grownup voice,” she said. “I gained an audience because of it as well.” 

During the quiet of the pandemic in 2020, with two of her sons at Duke and one still at home, Monaghan finally wrote the kind of novel she had been building toward: “Nora Goes Off Script”, a romantic comedy about a divorced mother whose life unexpectedly intersects with a movie star. 

“It felt like this was my real career,” she said.  

Since then, Monaghan has published a novel per year. She has a loyal readership drawn to her humor, emotional honesty, and characters who feel lived in, who can be shares with the readers’ sisters, their mothers and their friends.  

Unlike much of the romance genre, her protagonists are often women in their late 30s or 40s, navigating careers, families and second chances. 

“I didn’t have anything to say when I was young,” she said, when asked about writing “older” protagonists. “I just didn’t have a point of view on anything.” 

That perspective, which has been shaped by time, family life and plenty of detours, has become one of her strengths as a writer. 

“I think that reading and stepping into somebody else’s shoes is really the only way we have to experience how people live and see other perspectives. That’s more important than ever.”

For Monaghan, it all circles back to the value of the education she received at Duke. At a time when humanities degrees are often questioned, she points out that her English background ultimately proved more relevant to her career than her MBA. 

“I also have an MBA, and the only thing I’m doing to make a living now is using my English degree,” she said. 

She still remembers reading Reynolds Price’s novel “Kate Vaiden” while Price himself was teaching on campus. “I still have my copy. It’s all underlined with notes in the margins,” she said. “My time at Duke was a really important time for me. I felt like I was someplace very special.” 

Now, decades later, that experience echoes in the stories she writes, and in the readers who see their own lives reflected in them. 

More broadly, she believes reading and storytelling serve a purpose that feels increasingly urgent in a technology saturated world. 

“I think that reading and stepping into somebody else’s shoes, whether it’s fiction or biography, is really the only way we have to experience how people live and see other perspectives,” she said. “That’s more important than ever.” 

Monahan’s newest novel, “Dolly All the Time”, about a single mom who finds herself in a “Pretty Woman”-eque situation with a local millionaire, comes out on May 26 with Penguin Random House.