Katherine Center is a best-selling author known for her contemporary romance novels. She wrote her first novel in the sixth grade, and after nearly a decade of rejections, she published The Bright Side of Disaster in 2006 and followed it with many others. Two of her books—The Lost Husband and Happiness for Beginners—have been made into movies, and The Bodyguard is her ninth novel. Center has been called “the reigning queen of comfort reads” by BookPage, and she refers to her books as “bittersweet comic novels,” often writing stories about heroines who face struggles in their lives but are still able to find happiness (Center, Katherine. “About.” KatherineCenter.com). Center’s novels focus on joy as much as sorrow. Firmly believing that reading and writing should be fun, she has written an essay on this idea and has also delivered accompanying talks called “Read for Joy,” which focus on the idea that the stories we read have intrinsic value in our lives.

Center wrote The Bodyguard during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, a time in which she struggled to find joy. In the author’s note of the novel, she writes that “It’s a story I wrote when my real life, like most people’s, was full of worry, and stress, and uncertainty, and fear, and isolation” (489).