Last night, I went to a great event at the ever-fabulous Word Books. “Words of Love: A Night of Romance” was a panel discussion on romance novels, to celebrate Word’s new romance section. (Which is, as of last night, only one bookshelf, but it’s growing. They’re using reader recommendations to expand the section.) The panel featured three romance authors (Lauren Willig, Hope Tarr, and Sarah MacLean), two editors (Tessa Woodward from Avon Books and Stephanie Klose from Romance Times Book Review), and a blogger (Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches Trashy Books).
Before I get into talking about how smart and fun and awesome everyone at the event was, let me get something out of the way: I’ve been reading a lot of romance novels lately, and I’ve been loving them. I was never really a romance reader, especially not in high school, which I think is when a lot of people start. In high school, one of my best friends was a romance reader, and I remember when she showed me the boxes and boxes of paperbacks in her bedroom closet. Something about that stuck with me–something about the way people deal with their guilty pleasures. I had another friend who obsessively read and collected Dragonlance novels. He had an entire bookcase of them, down in his basement, and would kind of stammer and dismissively handwave if you asked him about it, but they weren’t, like, actually hidden. Not like the boxes of books in the closet, that you’d never know existed if you weren’t specifically let in on the big secret.
Anyway. Sometime in grad school I started reading Nora Roberts and Amanda Quick novels, mostly because I was travelling a lot and they were always available in airports. I was also reading a lot of Jonathan Kellerman and Nelson DeMille, but those eventually fell out of the rotation, while Nora Roberts stuck. Then I started reading Jennifer Cruisie–does anyone else remember this, that one WisCon panel where Nalo Hopkinson read a scene from Welcome to Temptation, the scene with Sophie and Phin down on the dock, and suddenly everyone who had been in that room decided they really needed to start reading Jennifer Cruisie? Or maybe it was just me. For the last couple of years I’ve been talking up romance novels at WisCon, arguing that some of the most feminist writing in the modern publishing world is happening in romance, but I was making this argument while still insisting that I wasn’t a romance reader.
A lot of my hesitation was the memory of those boxes of books. Not so much the part where they were hidden in the closet, but the fact that there were so many of them. I think I’ve been carrying around this idea that if I started regularly reading romance novels, it would turn into this house-filling book-collecting obsession. (Those of you who’ve seen my apartment know that I don’t need any more help filling it with books, it’s full enough already without acquiring a new mass-market paperback habit.) And, yeah, if I’m being completely honest with myself, part of it was that it does feel a little shameful. You know. Guilty pleasures.
Sometime in the last month or two, that wall finally cracked. There were a lot of factors, one of which was that I bought a Nook (which I adore beyond measure, a topic for another post), which lets me read romance novels without worrying about accumulating extra boxes and shelves of mass-market paperbacks. And I have to tell you, I am having so much fun.
I don’t want to feel guilty about reading romance novels. This was a major topic at the panel discussion, and the smart, funny, fabulous panelists were especially smart (and funny) on the question of why romance readers are supposed to feel bad about the books they read. There are a lot of negative stereotypes about these books: they’re all about sex, they’re cheap escapist fantasies, they’re poorly-written lowest-common-denominator trash, they encourage women to believe unrealistic things about relationships, they glorify rape, they glorify outdated gender stereotypes and archaic social conventions. (Did I miss one? Oh right: they have terrible covers.) I think a lot of romance readers acknowledge that at least one of them, the rape thing, was unfortunately true for a while, but the romance industry as a whole has mostly moved past it, and decades ago. (The cover thing is also at least partly true, but I would advise SF&F readers in particular to think long and hard before holding that against an entire genre.)
As for the rest of it, I think everyone just needs to stop being snotty and dismissive. (Assuming anyone actually is! All the romance readers I know have stories about friends, family members, and bookstore clerks being snotty and dismissive to them, but I’ve never personally experienced that.) Just in the last month, I’ve read a bunch of well-written romance novels that engage in really interesting ways with interpersonal relationships (not just romantic ones, but families and friendships too). I’m not going to say that there aren’t romance novels that are poorly-written tracts about the values of feminine obedience, but I get the sense that they’re not a majority presence in the field.
I think there are two major reasons why people who don’t read romance novels are dismissive of them, and why people who do read them are a little guilty-feeling. First, they have girl cooties. Romance novels are women’s books, in that more than any other sector in publishing they’re written, published, and read by women. (You’ll often see Nora Roberts described as a writer of “women’s fiction”, for instance.) I think this is why people who regularly read thrillers or military SF or epic fantasy series or police procedurals or legal mysteries feel perfectly comfortable looking down on people who read romance novels.
Second, and more pernicious, they’re just fun. Romance novels, the straight-up category romance, does in fact have a relatively predictable structure. The admirable heroine and the desirable hero meet, fall in love, encounter obstacles, overcome obstacles, have a happy ending. Romance novels always have a happy ending. The obstacles they face are not, by definition, going to be insurmountable. In many romances, they won’t even be particularly scary or serious. Romance novels are not plot books, they’re not issue books, they’re not atmosphere books. One of the writers at Word last night described romance novels as being essentially just intense character studies, and I think I agree with her. They do not create meaningful narrative tension–you know how it’s going to end.
You know what you’re getting in a romance novel, and what you’re getting is a really pleasant, enjoyable, fun reading experience. And this is part of the stigma–they’re fun. There’s no literary fiber. You’re having cake for breakfast instead of whole-grain toast. The more I think about that as a criticism, the less sense it makes to me. Reading is supposed to be enjoyable. Some people enjoy reading tense action thrillers with murder and danger lurking around every corner. Some people enjoy reading intellectually challenging beautifully-crafted literary fiction. Some people enjoy reading nonfiction about the development of armor and tactics in the Roman empire. Some people enjoy reading clever and witty character studies with guaranteed happy endings. If you find what you like reading, read it, and for god’s sake don’t feel bad about it. I’m not going to anymore.
Posted Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 9:37 am. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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I think this is why I’ve started saying, right up front, “I watch a ton of cop shows!” So we can get all the funny looks out of the way. Romances certainly get more abuse, though.
Your line about intense character studies seemed right on to me, and oddly is a lot of why I watch cop shows–have I already told you my theory that cop shows are the genre where men make emotional connections with each other?
I teach a genre fiction writing class at Writing Salons in Berkeley these days, and every time I have to encourage at least one aspiring romance writer to not be timid or apologetic for her reading/writing choices.
Yes! I really, really love this entry and cheered at every point.
Do you remember what they said about the “encouraging women to have unrealistic relationship expectations” criticism?
That’s my particular phobia about reading romances. My current guilty pleasure is Ilona Andrews, right? And I love her world-building, and she’s crazy-mad at plotting, but I feel like I have to spend several days shaking off her portrayal of “strong men” every time I put down one of her books.
One of my new favorite book series is the Bujold Sharing Knife series which is a deliberate blend of romance and fantasy. Both my husband (who, I’d argue, is not your “typical” guy – he loves Austen, for example) and I just loved them. She does have excellent characters, though. :)
Would you be interested in making a recommended list of romance books/authors for a future post? :)
Not specifically pertaining to romance fiction, but do you think the idea of a “guilty pleasure” is outdated?
Gosh, Ted, what makes you say so?
I think “guilty pleasure” is a rather timeless concept, even if the specific pleasures themselves go into and out of fashion.
Well, Susan concluded her post by saying that you shouldn’t feel bad about what you like to read, which I think could be read as an argument that the idea of a “guilty pleasure” isn’t useful. On the other hand, one could argue that there are indeed guilty pleasures, but that romance fiction (or whatever example one wants to use) isn’t one of them.
I don’t know that the idea of the guilty pleasure itself is outdated, but doesn’t it carry with it the idea that there’s something wrong with what you’re doing? I used the analogy of “cake for breakfast”, but that week after my pie class where I was eating pie for breakfast, that was a guilty pleasure. Pie for breakfast is unhealthy, so I feel guilty about how much I love it. But why should I feel guilty about reading a particular type of book? It’s not bad for me.
Jackie, on your question about unrealistic expectations… I don’t know. One of the panelists at Word the other night pointed out that it seems to be based on the idea that women are too stupid, as readers, to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. I think that might be a little too simple–there probably are women who get irrationally high standards for men from reading romance novels or watching old Katherine Hepburn movies, just like there probably are men who get irrationally high standards for women from watching too much porn or playing Tomb Raider. But I think those people aren’t the majority.
When I asked about guilty pleasures, in was in the context of reading. One can argue that no one should feel guilty about anything they enjoy reading, which is a bit different from arguing that no one should feel guilty about enjoying romance novels.
Regarding the issue of unrealistic expectations: I once saw a panel discussion of romance novelists, and one novelist told an anecdote about her husband saying, after reading one of her novels, “You know, men aren’t really like that.” And she replied, “But they _should_ be.” She said she was trying to make the world a better place with her fiction, and I was sympathetic to that, since that’s something a lot of SF writers are trying to do too. But then I think about Paolo Bacigalupi’s criticism that most SF is assuring people that the future will be all right, when it ought to be jolting them out of complacency. (And then there’s what Vonnegut said about SF being like porn because both are fantasies of an impossibly hospitable universe.) We all need wish fulfillment, but is there a point at which it becomes harmful to us? I don’t know.
For the record, Ted, I do think the world would NOT be a better place if men were “actually like” the men in romance novels. For much the same reason I think the “real world” would not be improved if women were “actually like” their portrayals in [insert preferred vendor of male fantasy here].
But I also think that that argument is a far cry from saying that existence and mass consumption of fantasies of the opposite sex are by definition a bad thing.
I second the call for a list of recommendations. You mention Nora Roberts, Amanda Quick, and Jennifer Cruisie… are those whom you would most recommend, for me, today, and which books would you start with?