Romance novels: the comfort food of books
4 ways romance novels provides an escape
Spend enough time in Romancelandia and you will hear the stories about how romance saved someone at a very difficult time. A loved one in the hospital, a horrible boss, tremendous hardship and personal trauma. I always got it in an abstract sort of way. And then it happened to me.
I went through my own Personally Challenging time, as one does. I felt stuck in a bad place, and I dreaded the immediate future, and I didn’t want to think about it because it made me feel sick to my stomach, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Now I love a glass of wine (or more) but I didn’t even want to drink.
What I wanted, ferociously, was a romance novel.
And not just any romance novel. I needed a light, sparkly, charming and heartfelt Regency romance.
It is a very particular craving for a very particular feeling and here is my attempt to explain why and how it all works.
I needed to be 200+ years away from this moment.
I couldn’t tolerate anything that reminded me of my immediate past, present or future. Enter: historical romance. Any genre of romance provides a sense of escape, but the historical romance is special. The romance genre as we know it began with historical romance—like those 1970s epic erotic novels by Kathleen Woodiwiss. In my 20 years on the scene, it has never been the hot, cool genre (hello paranormal, BDSM billionaires, new adult, contemporary rom com). But it has always been beloved. I think of it as the workhorse subgenre of the workhorse genre of publishing. Because sometimes the present world is just too much and we want to be hundreds of years away from it. Romance famously provides a sense of escape (and there is nothing wrong with that!). Nothing like a historical setting to deliver a sense of distance and escape.
I needed to be in a space that asked nothing of me.
A romance novel does not want to talk about my feelings. It does not want me to vent, explore, analyze or strategize next steps. The novel just wants me to relax in a hot bath and let my brain make the story play like a movie in my head. This is where romance novel writing is really special: it doesn’t want you to pause and marvel at fancy sentences. In fact, it’s best if you don’t notice the prose at all. It just wants to welcome you into the story, get you to feel all the feels and keep you moving through until the HEA.
At its best, romance writing is about giving the reader a really pleasurable experience without asking for anything in return.
With a well-paced and plotted novel, it’s hardly even a choice of whether or not to keep reading. The pages turn until the bath is too cold, the novel is over or you are falling asleep and about to drop the book in a cold bath.
I needed to believe everything was going to work out in the end.
Of course I knew that in my real life “this too shall pass” and blah blah it wasn’t the end of the world, etc, etc. But my body hadn’t quite caught up with logic and reason. And I couldn’t even envision what an HEA would look or feel like IRL for myself at that moment because I was just too overwhelmed with immediate crap of it all. But with a romance novel I had a good idea what it would look like, a definite idea of what it would feel like and above all, I knew I didn’t have to figure it out (as a reader, anyway. As a romance writer, it’s not the worst thing to always be thinking of the win win situation). Letting my brain relax gave my body a chance to relax.
And in the meantime, I wanted to be in someone else’s story.
And I was. I already forget their names or anything that happened in the stories. But I do remember feeling safe and saved.
Look, I’m fine. I had a bad patch—it’s life, it happens, everyone and everything is ok—and I read my way through it. I’m even glad for it because it reminded me how romance novels have the power to soothe. Not just on a spiritual level; I felt it in my physical body. How amazing is it that there is this thing that has such power to soothe and calm, and is available cheaply over the counter, has no bad side effects and there is essentially an endless supply of it?
I tend to get very emotionally invested in the stories I'm consuming, books, TV, or movies. My husband can attest to the fact that I am a very loud reader (lots of gasps, occasional tears, proclaiming my love of a character or, more often, my frustration at them). As a result, for the time that I consume the stories, these characters are very very real to me. And the guaranteed HEA of romance has been a huge source of safety and comfort, especially in recent years, because I spend a lot of time on the internet for work and to stay politically aware and the world around me is often quite awful. It's hard not to get caught under the tidal wave of despair when human suffering and power-hungry politicians who hate everyone who isn't exactly like them are all I see.
And when I consume media like, say, Succession, which is very cynical and has characters being awful to each other as a primary narrative engine, that doesn't give me catharsis (though I know for others it does). It just adds to the ever-present despair. Even if I get invested in a character, there's no guarantee they're getting out of the narrative happily, or with the important relationships they've built intact.
Guaranteed HEAs go a long way in helping me take a deep breath through moments of conflict in the stories with my newest, dear friends, because I know that despite the familiar feelings of despair, I won't be forced to sit in it for long. I know they'll be ok. There may be parallels to real world atrocities in the book, but the characters will fight back, will make things right, will make their world better for each other and themselves. I don't know if I believe that will be the case in real life, but the promise of romance is that somewhere, someone imagined that it could be. And the more people who imagine a complex world still ending with happiness, the more romances are written and shared, the better the whole world feels to me.
I agree with everything you said except not noticing the prose. Sometimes a turn of phrase or bit of writing will stop me in my tracks because it's so funny, or beautiful, or on point. I've had this experience with Joanna Bourne, Julie Anne Long, Barbara Metzger, and many others I can't think of at the moment.
Romance is great for making time and the outside world disappear.