I was around four years old when I learned to make the alphabet tell me stories. Since then, I’ve been a voracious reader. My small village’s library had a limited selection of books, but I read everything on their shelves. If the book had sentences strung together, I would read it. I still read just about everything: literary fiction, women’s fiction, chic-lit, sci-fi, paranormal, urban fantasy, erotica, thriller, mystery and tons of non-fiction and memoirs.
It’s the characters of a book that hook me. I don’t have to like them, but I have to care about their emotional lives or struggles. And the genre that does emotions better than any other is the romance genre. Any kind of love thread, even unhappy ones, hooks me in a few seconds.
Of course, if it has a happily ever after (or HEA) ending, I’m happy as well, which is why I love, love, love reading romance novels. This often surprises people. Many people think it a conflict to be a science nerd and a romance lover. They would be floored by how many math and science nerds I’ve sat next to at romance writing conferences.
While I was doing my MFA in creative writing, I often caught grief for liking genre fiction. A few of the MFAers were sci-fi fans but would defend their genre with “There’s a lot of good sci-fi out there,” as if there isn’t a lot of good romances, mysteries, or thrillers “out there.”
So why is it that my favorite genre is met with such disdain and contempt?
According to the new POV Documentary Guilty Pleasures:
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“In 2012, the romance genre took the largest share of the consumer book market worldwide,12.9% ($1.358 billion), beating out religion/inspirational ($759 million), mystery ($682 million), science fiction/fantasy ($559 million) and classic literary fiction ($445 million). ”
I’m obviously not alone in my love of romance.
Guilty Pleasures premier in the US on July 12th and looks like what I’ve been waiting for a long time: “… a much closer and more perceptive look at the world of the romance novel.”I’ve already marked my calendar.
The film’s website promises that: “Guilty Pleasures discovers not so much a business as a global community of shared imagination, a community whose yearning for romance fiction’s Holy Grail — true love — seems to know no barrier of language or culture, nor show signs of abating any time soon.”
I hope the film convinces a few people to try a romance book or two. Not that the genre needs more readers, but I believe there are many readers out there who need more romance—more happily ever after.
2 comments
I’ve always found it odd that pundits feel compelled to warn women that romances aren’t realistic….yet they don’t feel compelled to warn men that James Bond stories aren’t realistic.
Yeah! Makes me feel like I’m condescended to twice. Once for reading fiction that usually caters to women. And once for being too stupid to understand that it’s not “reality.”
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