Our Juliet

To see who Juliet Blackwell is, all you have to do is look up at our banner. Yeah, right above these words. See Sophie (Clooney) there in the middle? She’s the one with the gun, of course. I’m on the far right, grinning my fool head off as usual. Martha, third from the left, looks like she has something up her sleeve (and she probably does – either a queen of hearts or a hand-made shiv).

But look at Julie, just to the left of Sophie.

She’s smoldering. Isn’t she? The camera lens melted right after that shot.

Julie is our resident sex bomb. And by saying this, I don’t mean to take anything away from all the other amazing things she is: She’s a wonderful, caring, involved parent. She writes well, and fast, and is really damn good at her job. She’s created a home in which everyone who visits wants to set down roots and stay forever. She’s generous with everything: her time, her clothes, her vodka. She's an artist, a real artist (and she wants to paint ME! Hello, yes please). Julie is the total package.

And that and she’s hot. Smokin’. There’s something about Julie that makes every man (and most women) turn to gaze after her as she passes. She gives a completely friendly “Well, hi!” along with her signature full-wattage smile, and those two things should add up to mere congeniality. But the WAY she does it implies, “I know a marvelous secret, and later on, I’m probably going to tell you, and you’re going to love it.” You just long to get closer, to have her whisper in your ear.

Perfect strangers trip over themselves to buy her a drink. Well-reviewed authors lose their words, stuttering and stammering when talking to her. When a man fails to notice her charms we don’t assume he’s gay (because gay men fall in love with her as quickly as anyone else); we assume there’s something wrong with him. We avoid him as if he was the one man in the world our dog ever barked at—something about him must be broken.

Julie writes about magic and mystery, possibly because she embodies magic and mystery. She’d be the first one I’d invite to a séance (as if my heart could take that—IT COULDN’T, by the way), and she’s definitely the first one I’d invite to my hot-tub pillow-fight pajama-party. And the best part is, she’d be there: committed, excited, ready to get a little work done and then to celebrate life in every possible way.

Two weeks ago, I finished a draft of a novel. I hit “send” to my editor. Then I stood up, sent her a text, drove to Trader Joe’s and bought the bottle of Laphroig I’d been promising myself for three months. We sat in her courtyard in the sun under trailing jasmine vines and propped our feet up on an extra chair as we talked. I never, ever wanted to leave.

Everyone wants to bask in the warmth of Julie's gaze. And when she picks you as a friend, you really, truly feel like you’ve won the prize you never knew existed but had always been trying to win.