My romance with romance, part one

Let's talk teenage dreams

It’s been a long, winding road for me and the romance genre, from hiding stacks of historical romances beneath my other library books to becoming my book club’s most vocal romance advocate. And this February, in honor of the season of candy hearts, red roses, and romance think pieces that I dread and anticipate in equal measure, I’m tracing my relationship with the genre in a three-part series.

We start in the late 2000s and in the midst of the YA boom where, like probably every other teenage girl in the US, I had a brief, intense Twilight phase. This lasted up until the release of Breaking Dawn and its bitterly disappointing ending. But there were other vampires for me to console myself with. And werewolves. And demon hunters. And even a brief phase when publishing was all about mermaids. This was a time where I was arguably more invested in the outcome of various love triangles than in whether or not our heroes would defeat the Big Bad and at what cost. After all, it was a pretty safe assumption to make that they would be triumphant. But which boy would our heroine pick after she was done taking down immortal evil? Teenage me was deeply invested, even if I ended up rooting for the wrong end of a love triangle more often than not. (When I did finally discover romance, the relative rarity of love triangles in the genre was a huge relief. Now I’m a tiny bit nostalgic for them, although not quite enough to actually seek one out.) Romantasy is wildly popular right now and in a lot of ways, it feels like the grown up version of all the YA fantasy I devoured as a teenager.

But it wasn’t all angsty werewolves and magical swords. The books that shaped my love for contemporary romance were smaller-scale and quieter, deeply grounded books about girls finding their place in the world and the brooding boys with soft hearts who fell for them. Sarah Dessen’s transformative summers, Stephanie Perkins’ Parisian boarding schools, and Morgan Matson’s epic road trips captivated me. They felt just grown-up enough to be exciting but in a way that remained relatable, even if I never did spend a life-changing summer in a small seaside town. Dessen, in particular, was one of the definitive authors of my teenage years and while there are things about her books that haven’t aged well, her characters feel as real to me as anyone I knew in high school. These are the books that I still own and their combination of rich characterization and serious swoon is what I still find myself looking for in contemporary romance.

The first romance I ever read, even if I didn’t recognize it as a romance at the time, was by Eva Ibbotson and the more romance I read, the more I realize how much her books inform my taste. Ibbotson is probably best known for her children’s and middle grade novels but she wrote several adult historical romances that are some of my all-time favorite books. Her writing sparkles with wit and romance but there’s always substance beneath the shimmer. Her heroines are incandescent with their yearning—for art, for learning, for life itself—and her talent for writing settings has had me wanting to book a trip to Vienna for years. These books’ elegance, their sense of humor, the warmth and compassion that spills off the pages, the tinge of fairy-tale that hangs about them…they’re imprinted on my brain permanently and a little part of me is always chasing that Ibbotson magic. (Laura Wood’s Under a Dancing Star and Diana Biller’s Hotel of Secrets are the closest that I’ve gotten.) If you’re intrigued, I’d suggest starting with either The Morning Gift or A Countess Below Stairs (published as The Secret Countess in the UK) and if you want to buy them, go for the lovely UK 2020 reissues and not the US editions and their baffling cover choices.

And finally, my life as a romance reader was undoubtedly shaped by the copious amounts of fanfic I read in college and my early twenties. I could probably write an entire newsletter on the way fanfic and romance have shaped each other but for now, I’ll stick to the way it shaped my reading life. Fic was my introduction to tropes, from the everyday to the out-there, and to what makes a particular trope work for me. My love for an agonizingly slow burn marriage of convenience almost certainly stems from a fic or two where it takes the main characters at least twenty chapters to kiss. Fanfic also pushed my personal steam tolerance from moderate to very high and while I wouldn’t say that I’ll read anything, I’ll read quite a lot. Last, but certainly not least, it taught me to celebrate the specific and the niche. The things written just to bring the author joy. There’s a very particular kind of delight in watching the 1993 Branagh Much Ado About Nothing, wondering yet again why Hero has to end up with Claudio, and finding a whole clutch of fanfic where she ends up with Don John, obviously inspired by both the pleasures of a good villain redemption arc and the fact that Don John is played by a very handsome young Keanu Reeves in the 1993 movie. (Side note: I would absolutely read a Hero-focused Much Ado About Nothing retelling.)

Next week, I’ll talk about discovering historical romance and tentatively finding my way into contemporaries and I’ll probably have a lot of feelings about Lisa Kleypas. Let me know what your first experience with the romance genre was in the comments!

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Currently reading: House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Maas, speaking of books that feel like grown-up versions of what I was reading as a teenager…

What’s bringing me joy lately:

• The announcement that Kacey Musgraves has a new album coming! I’ve listened to her new single a few times now and I’m on board for this era of Kacey.

• I know that I talked about it last week but since I last wrote, I’ve caught up with The Traitors and am kind of obsessed? Just the way Alan Cumming adds about five extra r’s to the word murder is priceless.

• Weeping at The Iron Claw in my local AMC. It’s extremely sad but also extremely good. I also never knew that Zac Efron had this kind of performance in him and being surprised by an actor—in a good way—is one of my favorite kinds of cinematic experiences.