Can One Pen Create Multiple Genres?

From the director of X.
From the producers that brought you Y.
The author behind X, Y, & Z.
Those commercials have always made me squirm. As if because I loved Dustin Lance Black’s award-winning Milk, I’m going to enjoy his screenplay to Virginia just as much. Or because James Cameron did such an amazing job with Titanic that I simply MUST love Avatar too. Unless it’s Nicholas Sparks writing the same book/movie over and over or a Stephen King movie (so we know what we’re in for)…those tags on movie commercials don’t really do anything for me.
Perhaps that is my problem. I’m not a genre writer. I can’t sit down and write similar stories following the same private eye or a fantasy trip through a jungle of vampires (not that there is anything wrong with those): they are just not me.
I’ll admit – I get nervous when a reader relates to one of my stories and then turns to read another. They may come to me saying how they were so touched by Proud Pantsand the addiction of my brother along with the relationship between him and my mother. But then they decide to read Well with My Soul and I find I want to warn them on the sex and religion between the pages of that book. Or the gay men that related to Soul sees the gay characters pushed to supporting roles in Patchwork of Me. (And we won’t even go into the other books that are written, but not out yet. Those may seriously send someone over the edge asking who is writing these books.)
I recently heard from someone who had loved Well with My Soul immensely and is reading Patchwork now. While he’s enjoying it, he told me it feels like a completely different author. It made me wonder if that’s a bad thing that I can change my voice and style (not to mention the amount of years that passed between writing those two even though they came out closely together) or if it is a good thing that I can be a chameleon when writing. I’m not really sure. Only time will tell.
But I do think it’s part of the reason those commercials have always bothered me touting the director, producer, writer from one project to another. Shouldn’t they be true to the individual project and not simply put their stamp on it so that we know it’s a <FILL IN BLANK OF WELL KNOWN PERSON> behind it?
These are the topics that get in my head at times and gnaw at me.
So naturally, I blog and share.