Do I even belong in Romance?
I would call my relationship romance books tacit.
I intentionally did not read romance. Romance was for those women. I don’t even know what I meant by those women. But, I definitely meant I intentionally read everything but. I consumed books at a rapid rate and I am proud of myself for reading different genres, expanding what I was interested in.
In the spring of 2017, I started to have chest pains while at work. My very demanding boss, for once, allowed me to leave, only after one of the other managers mentioned that my situation might be dire. I came to urgent care that happened to have my primary physician on rotation. She brought me into a room, did all of the usual tests, then laid me down on the cot, and crushed her thumb into my chest (she asked permission first). She applied pressure and twisted her thumb. It hurt so much it brought tears to my eyes. I could not breathe while she did it and then she released the pressure and I could breathe again, my shoulders relaxed, my brain felt like it could finally get enough air, everything felt better.
My doctor told me that I was so stressed out that I had managed to inflame the muscles of my chest and that my now extremely cramped muscles were preventing me from taking a full breath. That my chest was hurting because my chest muscles were clenched as opposed to having some sort of cardiac problem. She prescribed me a massage, a glass of red wine, some relaxing music, and to read something that would take my mind off the stress of my job. I told her that I already read. That I read a lot. So we started talking about the types of things I read. Though she enjoyed me regaling her with the gross details of Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered by Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff, which I was reading at the time, she told me that I should maybe try some really fluffy romance.
At first, I thought it was extremely silly. I don’t really like romance, I thought to myself. But at her request/demand, I went and got a massage. And my chest relaxed a little. That afternoon because I didn’t go back to work that day, I drew myself a bath and poured myself a glass of red wine and took a soak in the tub. And my chest felt better. Spurred on by the fact that all of her suggestions have worked so far I decided to venture into the land of romance books. A cursory Goodreads perusal had informed me that I had already delved into romance without knowing so. My gateway drug was Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins. From there it was easy. I clicked on the list of other books that the series was in. I jumped around a bit. I reached out to my faithful book club buddy and the only person I would tell something so ridiculous as “my doctor told me to read romance”. Ford.
Ford, because research is really Ford’s thing, started the research into what we should be reading. How we go about expanding ourselves into learning about the genre that neither one of us really lived in before. We started with paranormal romance.
We already read paranormal YA. We’ve also read things that focused specifically on the experiences of vampires, werewolves, witches. So it seemed like the easiest jump. We started with Larissa Ione.
Larissa Ione isn’t your ease-into-the-genre, she is the genre. She jumps right in and gets you nice and dirty. And there was no turning back from there. Next, we went to the Gena Showalter, we moved around a bit and settled into a rhythm of reading their books interspersed with our other interests.
At the time, I had left the extremely stressful job that required me to read romance in the first place only to be able to continue with the job. I had switched to teaching at a university and my job was busy and yes there were stressors, but it was no longer causing my chest to contract and not release. So during my first teaching year, I didn’t really read romance again. The drive to the university is pretty long so I listen to a lot of books and I went back to the loveliness of other genres.
In May, classes ended for me, but not for my family and I was home alone in the middle of the afternoon again. I had picked up Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren on sale at Target, thinking to myself that it has been ages since I’ve read an actual physical three-dimensional book.
As prescribed by my doctor so many months ago, I came home, drew a bath, poured myself a glass of red wine, and cracked open a romance. And I was lost. It was funny and lovely and without any kind of pressure. It was light, fluffy, and I laughed out loud.
That summer I read everything Christina Lauren wrote. I downloaded my thoughts to Ford in a stream of consciousness 40-minute rant about 14 books that I’ve read in a two-week span. I couldn’t stop talking about it.
When I read Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient, I told everyone who would listen to pick up that book. I told people who wouldn’t listen to pick up that book. That book shifted the genre for me. It made me think about the types of romance books that I’ve been drawn to and the types that had originally made me recoil from the genre in the first place. The books containing complex three-dimensional characters that had deep meaningful stories, but it also contains a significant amount of adult material that I was interested in reading.
Fast forward to March 2020 the beginning of the pandemic and the start of the lockdown in the United States. Ford and I have been talking about what we can do to relieve some of the stress that we were feeling in this uncertain situation. Other people in our lives were looking to do the same. “The Stress Relief Book Club” was born. All we read are romance - fluffy, lovely Happy Ever Afters, or Happily For Now and it is just what the doctor ordered.
The more romance we read, the more I would notice that certain themes, characters, and scenarios were not present in now many many books we had read and researched. This is why Ford and I started writing, we started putting on paper what we didn’t see in other texts. Certain formulas were beginning to emerge and I wanted so much to subvert those structures.
There are days when I feel like I do not belong in a genre that I have not been devoted to my entire life. That’s classic impostor syndrome for you. But there are also days on which writing stories that belong in this genre, that break the norm is precisely what we should be doing. On those days I thank my doctor, draw a bath, pour myself a glass of red wine, and crack open another romance. -L.Sky