Art & Creativity Quote by Jackie Collins

Collins is telling you, with a wink and a dagger, that the so-called guilty pleasure was always a reality report. Her intent is partly defensive (no, I am not making this up), partly provocative (yes, you might recognize yourself), and mostly a flex: the world of money, sex, and status doesn’t need embellishment, only translation. By insisting her characters are "toned down", she flips the usual accusation aimed at popular fiction - that it’s exaggerated - into an indictment of the culture that feeds it. The real scandal isn’t her imagination; it’s the behavior of the people who can afford to be outrageous without consequences.

The subtext is also about power. "In disguise" is not coyness; it’s strategy. Disguise protects her from lawsuits and gatekeepers, but it also protects the reader’s complicity. You get to consume the secrets of the rich and famous while maintaining plausible deniability: it’s just a novel. Collins positions herself as both insider and satirist, someone close enough to the scene to name its textures, but sharp enough to expose its absurdity.

Context matters: Collins wrote in an era when "serious" literary culture often sneered at commercial, female-coded storytelling. This line reframes her brand - glam, scandal, melodrama - as a kind of reportage from the velvet rope. It works because it collapses the distance between fiction and gossip, turning narrative into an alibi for truth-telling, and truth into a marketing promise: reality is wilder than anything you’ve heard.