Check the furthermost part of the bookstore. On the left, all the way to the back, down the stairs, past mythology and social sciences. It’s the shelf on the end, the one filled with paperback spines as bright and colorful as conversation hearts. Or maybe it’s between the tabloids and the chewing gum at the supermarket checkout, a display of purse-sized books splashed with images of hands clutching waists.
Whatever the case, what you’re looking for will be tucked safely away, curated into corners, never neighboring the “serious” literature. After all, it’s not literature, is it? It’s romance. A guilty pleasure, a pulpy secret, a frivolous bit of fluff. The romance novel is so present in American life—nearly a quarter of adult print fiction sold—that many of us already have an opinion before we’ve ever opened one.
In a speech included in her collection Words Are My Matter, fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin shared her thoughts on literary critics who judge genre fiction without bothering to take it seriously, saying they “will make fools of themselves, because they don’t know how to read the book. They have no contextual information to tell them what its tradition is, where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to do, what it does.”
I can’t say how many of us have made fools of ourselves over romance at some point in our literary lives, but as a writer and reader of romance myself, I see it all the time. It’s as common as a kiss. Strangers to the genre dismiss romance with the speed and frequency of a rakish duke inciting a scandal. Standing before the collection of works on TIME’s list of The 50 Best Romance Novels to Read Right Now, I have to ask: Why?
If we expect a great novel to tell us about humanity, romance holds a mirror to our wants and needs. If we want to study works that sit within a greater literary tradition, romance has one of the richest. And if the classification of “literature” implies an attention to craft, a specific point of view, a measure of scholarly rigor, or some broader thematic meaning beyond the text—frankly, I’ve read a hundred romance novels that offer all of those plus a full-frontal bonus.
Take, for example, one of the oldest traditions of the genre: the conditional inheritance, in which an heir or heiress can’t gain control of their fortune until they’ve wed. Frances Burney codified the trope when she published her romance of manners Cecilia in 1782, and we can trace a straight line from the sought-after orphan Cecilia to Georgette Heyer’s desperate, slutty Viscount Sheringham in Friday’s Child a century and a half later. Slide forward through time, through the marriage-of-convenience bodice rippers of the ’80s and ’90s, to the 21st century, where an R&B heiress marries the bagpipe player from her aunt’s funeral in Rebekah Weatherspoon’s Xeni and a chef fakes a relationship—and high-stakes cooking partnership—with a stranger in order to secure his grandfather’s approval and family fortune in T.J. Alexander’s Chef’s Choice. All of these books are in conversation with one another, brought into existence by writers whetting a shared set of tools over 350 years. A discerning romance reader knows a good romance because they know what those tools can produce in capable hands.
If we really want to get into it, we can talk about how Jane Austen may have pulled her most famous title from the final chapter of Cecilia, which includes the line, “The whole of this unfortunate business has been the result of pride and prejudice.” We can talk about Pride and Prejudice drawing the blueprint for thousands of romances about enemies softening into lovers and brooding loners falling for scrappy spitfires (including in my own novel Red, White & Royal Blue). We can talk about Austen’s Mr. Darcy and Charlotte Bronte’s Mr. Rochester and the Byronic hero, and how every contemporary romance with a moody, thawable romantic lead plays with our attachment to and expectations of that character.
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But I’d rather talk about the reason all this matters, and the delicious challenge of crafting romance: the intimate relationship between the work and the reader.
Romance is, above all, an emotional composition. It’s a magic trick that turns words on a page into pleasure chemicals in the brain. The tropes and traditions of the genre represent hundreds of years of practice to not simply mimic the sensation and aesthetics of longing and release but actually conjure them in the reader. For the spell to work, you need the reader’s total trust. A good romance writer has the skills, the instincts, the empathy, the vulnerability, and the genre-savviness to earn it.
The best romance writers know exactly how long to hold a pause to make your palms sweat or which adjective will suggest a slight hint of softness under a character’s steely exterior—just enough for the reader to see it, but not so much that the object of their affections will notice yet, of course. They understand the small embarrassments and victories of human connection. They lay details with precision and intent, from a specific in-season bloom on a tree in a garden-set love confession to the faintest brush of a hand. They can draw on a reference that cuts right to your heart. They command the rhythms of attraction and resistance. I mean, I’ve read romances that can make you feel actual chest pains with the painstaking removal of thoroughly researched, historically accurate undergarments.
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I often wonder if all this is why some are reluctant to take romance seriously. Even at its cheekiest or darkest or most satirical, it’s a genre made of sincerity. Opening ourselves earnestly to an emotional experience feels dangerous, and danger makes us nervous, and when we’re nervous, we laugh.
But if we don’t laugh, if we don’t turn away, if we stop pretending to be too cool or too intellectual or too ironic to acknowledge our own desire, romance has so much to show us about ourselves. Which is exactly what literature should do.
McQuiston is the author of Red White & Royal Blue, One Last Stop, I Kissed Shara Wheeler, and The Pairing.