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First, a definition. To be classified as belonging to the Romance genre a book must do two things. First, it must feature as its primary plot a romantic relationship between two or more characters. Second, at the end of the book the relationship must be happy. This second provision is known as the HEA (Happily Ever After) or sometimes the HFN (Happy For Now.)
I think I’ve spent my whole life reading Romance. While I didn’t pick up books that were explicitly marketed as Romance when I was young, my favorite parts of the stories I read were the romantic sub-plots. I was always an avid reader, gobbling up every book I came across. When I was 17 I managed to get a hold of one of my grandmother’s Romance books without my mom noticing. It was a Historical Romance set in Scotland, full of clans, and plaid, and the politics of the time, with two main characters who couldn’t seem to understand each other, until they finally did. I fell completely in love that day, with the characters, the setting, the story, the whole thing. It was all my favorite parts of my favorite books made into a concentrate, more potent than anything I’d ever experienced before.
Into adulthood, recreational reading took a backseat to college, then grad school. When I started reading for pleasure again I was a different person, trying to find the fierce, book devouring joy that was desperately needed in my adult life. I tried every genre I could get my hands on, loving my return to reading, feeling like a kid again. But one genre just worked for me every time, Romance. I kept returning to it over and over again. And now it makes up the vast majority of my reading life.
When I say I read Romance I’m met with a certain eyebrow raise and a slightly higher voice usually answers in some sort of polite incredulity. I smile and reply in the affirmative. There are all kinds of stereotypical ideas about Romance out there, and generally people are not afraid of expressing their disdain based on little research and no personal experience. But despite this haughty attitude towards the genre in general, I find the books are worthy of thoughtful analysis, of close reading, of asking what they’re doing culturally, where they belong in the larger conversations.
There’s an instinct I have to defend my love of this misunderstood genre. I want to over-explain the evolution of sex scenes over the decades, and how the priority of women’s desires, of consent, of pleasure, of mutuality feels like a balm in a world where sex is often portrayed as anything but. I want to wax poetic about the sentences of Sierra Simone, how she takes titillating and taboo conceits and turns them into heartbreaking sagas full of brutal humanity and beauty. (And Julie Garwood, and Lisa Kleypas, and Milla Vane, and Kate Canterbary, and Tarah DeWitt, and Kennedy Ryan, etc.) I want to talk about what it means to dive deep into a genre, to see the patterns across the genre, watch its shape change and shift with time, what it’s like to find stories that exist in the margins, that bend the rules or twist the usual story into something new and fascinating. I want to keep pointing at all the sub-genres, all the ways that Romance blends with other types of stories, making it available for every mood, every taste. I want to talk about hope as a spiritual practice, and how Romance helped me strengthen the muscles I use to hope, like a helpful coach, spotting you, teaching you the new movement until your body knows it without having to think about it.
When I was in graduate school I took a class that focused on adaptation. Adapting stories from one format to another is a common practice, yet it’s not as often discussed in academia as it is in the culture. In the 90s and early 2000s a movement of academics made arguments against fidelity. Previous academic work had essentially viewed adaptations as copies of an original and judged their success on how faithful they were to that original. This new movement said we should eschew this structure as it is not helpful and does not take into account the structural or thematic challenges of adapting a book into a film, or a poem into a play. At one point in class I asked a question, because while I understood the idea that this type of criticism wasn’t interesting, I wasn’t sure what else was left. If we weren’t going to look at an adaptation and ask, “How faithful is it?”, then what were we asking? My professor pointed me towards cultural studies which takes pieces of culture, could be a commercial, an ad, a poem, a blog post, doesn’t matter what it is, and asks, “What is this doing?”
Romance does so much.
So, this is the question that I will forever be asking. Of course there are other questions to be asked alongside this. There are situations where this neutrality isn’t appropriate or there’s more to be discovered. But as a starting point, it works really well. All it asks is that you be open, be curious.
If you’re curious about Romance, but have never picked one up, I have a list below of really great possible first Romances, including The Bride by Julie Garwood, which was the first Romance book I ever read.