I'm most proud of my stand-alones, obviously, but the mysteries have taught me an enormous amount and I'm grateful to them. In terms of your craft, are you more proud of your mystery books than Rubyfruit? And then Bantam bought it from this little tiny publishing house, and again it was not a hardcover, it was a trade paperback, and it kept going and going until it had sold millions and millions of copies. They still haven't really, which is fine with me-I don't care.

The response was overwhelming, and of course nobody reviewed it and none of the literary things looked at it. It kept selling out it sold 70,000 copies in this tiny little press. Was the positive response to Rubyfruit immediate, or did it take a while? But I realized that I could write a novel.

So I look at it in terms of craft-what did I learn? I used first person, and I learned from Rubyfruit that it's not really my thing. Rita Mae Brown: Well, obviously I look at it differently than the rest of you do, because it was the first novel I wrote. Watch: Virginie Despentes on Killing RapistsīROADLY: I'm sure you're sick of talking about it, but I do have to ask about Rubyfruit Jungle because it means so much to so many people (and means so much to me). To follow up this interview conducted in 2015, when Rubyfruit Jungle was being rereleased with a new cover, Broadly spoke to Brown about overcoming oppression, learning to love genre writing as a 'literary snob,' and the immediate, overwhelming success of her debut novel. She has written dozens of books, both stand-alone 'serious' novels, of which Rubyfruit Jungle was the first, and many mysteries, featuring a female sleuth named Harry and a cat named Mrs. From being raised by Republicans to living as a homeless NYU student to owning a ranch in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she currently resides, Brown has led a fascinating life as both an activist (she got kicked out of school for participating in a civil rights protest, and was notorious in the 70s for her willingness to speak out about being gay) and a staunch feminist (apparent in all of her books and interviews).

Rubyfruit jungle author rita brown