To much media fanfare and growing public anticipation, the Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper's Rivals (1988) began on 18 October. Cooper's novel, first published in 1988, is a key "bonkbuster" text - a largely forgotten genre of women's writing from the 1980s. Bonkbusters have three key components: they're full of sex (the bonking) and wildly over the top in terms of storylines and characters, and they were extraordinarily popular (the buster part).
However, like its televisual sister genre, the soap opera, the bonkbuster receded into the background of popular culture in the 21st century. So why is the bonkbuster having a cultural moment in 2024? What is the appeal of adapting a text like Rivals ? We have been researching the bonkbuster genre for a couple of years, looking at its authors, themes and publishing history and talking to readers about their experiences with the genre, both at the time and now. Also known as the "sex-and-shopping" novel, the bonkbuster was a phenomenally popular genre of women's writing in the 1980s and 1990s.
Besides Cooper, authors like Jackie Collins, Shirley Conran, and Judith Krantz wrote about sex, marriage, friendship and scandal, against a luxurious backdrop of 1980s commercial excess. 'A Milky Way when you've got a fridge full of posh chocolate' Cooper's Rivals is fairly typical of the genre - one of the readers in our study, Samantha, aptly described it as: "a full-fat, fun, frothy novel set around class, privilege and horses". It's the .
