Loraine Despres

Loraine Despres is a best-selling novelist and screenwriter. Her first novel, the rollicking Southern love story, The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick, a Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club featured selection. It became a national best-seller and is now in its 25th printing. It begins: “When you get to be a certain age, you realize that the only thing you have time for is doing exactly what you want.”

It engendered The Southern Belle’s Handbook, Sissy Leblanc’s Rules to Live By, which includes all Sissy’s rules such as, “It’s okay for a woman to know her place, she just shouldn’t stay there.”

Her next novel, The Bad Behavior of Belle Cantrell, about intolerance and love, is set in 1920, when prohibition was in full swing, women were clamoring for the vote, and the Ku Klux Klan was sweeping the country as a money-making pyramid scheme. It begins: “Belle Cantrell felt guilty about killing her husband, and she hated that. Feeling guilty, that is.” It was the main book selection for all the chapters of the Pulpwood Queens, the largest book club in America with over 280 chapters.

During her screenwriting days, Loraine wrote many screenplays, pilots, and MOWS. Her produced episodes include those for The Highlander, The Equalizer, Crime Story, Chips, Family, Knots Landing, Dynasty, The Walton’s, and Love Boat, but she is best remembered for writing that cultural icon the “Who Shot J.R.?” episode of Dallas.

She taught screenwriting at UCLA for seven years and worked as an International Screenwriting Consultant in Germany, Sweden, Spain, and Canada. Loraine served on the Boards of Directors of PEN USA and Women In Film. She can be reached through her website www.LoraineDespres.com.