For folks who weren’t able to attend for financial or scheduling reasons, I promised I would share the syllabus, so I’ve included that here below, along with a few notes on why and how I chose the readings I assigned. These are really brief summaries of what were really stream-of-consciousness lectures that altered in response to class interest and commentary, so let me know if I can clarify anything below!

A few notes about the class overall:

• It was a seminar-structure, so I assigned readings and opened class with a 30 minute lecture before facilitating an hour-long semi-structured discussion around the topic of the week. Every week, I asked folks to share what struck them about the required reading.

• The class didn’t have a target population beyond “people who are interested in thinking harder about romance,” and that is exactly who I seemed to attract: people with varying levels of familiarity and comfort with reading romance who were interested in talking about romance with other people.

• My goal was to offer a survey of romance genre fiction and introduce ways of thinking about romance that draw on other disciplines and scholarship because that is sort of the thing I do best. I mentioned in my first week that I’m not an author, a romance academic, or a romance historian, and so I felt just a little bit of imposter syndrome at having been asked to teach the class at all, but I think the thing I wanted to do— the thing I’m probably most qualified to do— was show people more of a rigorous critical sensibility and how that sensibility shapes how romance can be understood. I hope that comes through in the syllabus!!

• In choosing primary readings, I wanted to go for a mix of books that I love and books that I think generate a lot of conversation/won’t work for everyone. It just makes for a more fruitful conversation!!

• It was my first time teaching something like that, but folks seemed to enjoy the class (???) so I’ve been given the chance to potentially teach it again or something similar in the future. I’d love to! Let me know if you are interested!

Week 1: Historical Romance

• Primary Reading: The Queer Principles of Kit Webb by Cat Sebastian

• Supplemental Reading

  • Butler, J. (1999). 23. Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion. In S. Thornham, Feminist Film Theory (pp. 336-349). Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474473224-035

  • McAlister, J. (2016). “You and I are humans, and there is something complicated between us”: Untamed and queering the heterosexual historical romance. Journal of Popular Romance Studies. https://www.jprstudies.org/2016/07/you-and-i-are-humans-and-there-is-something-complicated-between-us-untamed-and-queering-the-heterosexual-historical-romanceby-jodi-mcalister/

  • Halperin, D. M. (2019). Queer Love. Critical Inquiry, 45(2), 396–419. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26621858

• Notes: The goal of this week was to tee up the premise of the class. Supplemental readings were used to talk directly about the subject of historical romance, queer romance, and queer love, but I was also interested in the Butler (1999) piece as an example of an interesting piece of critical writing. Butler’s arguments around subversion and their rebuttal to bell hooks in this review of Gender is Burning are both relevant to the content of the lecture and frame what I want to accomplish over the course of the class: giving people the vocabulary, skills, and critical eye to more specifically and rigorously articulate what does or doesn’t work about a novel.

• In the future, I’d shorten this reading list to just the Butler piece— the layout of the class is such that people were signing up right until the day before and the amount of supplemental reading was totally unrealistic given the time constraints and my propensity for freewheeling when given open lecture time.

• Other Reads I Would Have Assigned if I Had Time: Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas, Again the Magic by Lisa Kleypas, The Jade Temptress by Jeannie Lin, An Island Princess Starts a Scandal by Adriana Herrera, Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale

Week 2: Fandom and Romance

• Primary Reading: You, Again by Kate Goldbeck

• Supplemental Reading:

  • Prologue-Ch. 2 of The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

  • Ch. 1-2 of Not Another Love Song by Julie Soto

  • Sandvoss, C. (2007). The Death of the Reader? Literary Theory and the Study of Texts in Popular Culture. In J. Gray, C. L. Harrington, & C. Sandvoss (Eds.), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (pp. 17–32). New York University Press. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.18574/nyu/9780814743713.003.0005/html?lang=en&srsltid=AfmBOorFkysBZJlcKBJhHRal4Oik-5zPOc3ohVk-26NNa2bqp3tuacpk

  • Leone, M. (2012). 2012 - Petition and Repetition: on the Semiotic Philosophy of Prayer. Monographic Issue of Lexia, 11-12. https://doi.org/10.4399/978885485105433

• Notes: Arguably this was my favorite week of class? Fanfiction and romance genre fiction have existed for nearly the same amount of time, but have crossed paths more often in recent decades, so it merited a separate week of discussion.

• In assigning these readings, I set myself up to lecture about three things: (1) outlining the way an archive works in fanfiction and, consequently, in romance, as a thing that responds to and alters in response to itself rather than a thing that is subject to the original work it is derived from, (2) the notion of “authority” in a text: namely, the utility of not just regarding authorial voice as sole arbiter of what is “true” in the world of fiction (a la Barthes & Death of the Author) while remaining cautious of the limitations of reader experience alone as a metric of quality and efficacy of a text, and (3) a working conceptualization I have about fanfiction as a form of prayer— that is, a thing that declares a relationship to a maker, declares the possibility of change (a kind of dissatisfaction with god), and imagines other ways of being (a kind of worldmaking).

• In talking about fanfiction this way, I wanted to draw out qualities in romance— its archival nature, the way that the genre’s more commercial origins shape the nature of ‘authority’ in the author-reader relationship, the way that repetition proves generative in both spaces.

• Other Reads I Would Have Assigned If I Had The Time: The Hating Game by Sally Thorne, Beautiful Bastard by Christina Lauren

Week 3: Contemporary Romance

• Primary Reading: 7 Days in June by Tia Williams

• Supplemental reading:

  • Waldman, K. (2019, October 31). Carmen Maria Machado’s Many Haunted Stories of a Toxic Relationship. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/carmen-maria-machados-many-haunted-stories-of-a-toxic-relationship

  • Iaccarino, M. (2025). The Otherwise of History. Saidiya Hartman’s New Radical Aesthetic of Historical Representation. De Genere - Rivista Di Studi Letterari, Postcoloniali e Di Genere, (11), 247–257. https://degenere-journal.it/index.php/degenere/article/view/249

  • First few pages (through prologue) of In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

• Notes: The supplemental readings this week attend more closely to the world of 7 Days in June to present an interpretation of the novel as a kind of critical fabulation, a concept Saidiya Hartman used to talk about historical life. I was interested in blurring the porous boundaries between “reality” and “fiction,” especially in the context of articulating “memory,” and set up Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House as a text to supplement that point of view.

• I find contemporary romance difficult to pin down, so this week I tried to express something more specific about the novel, rather than general about the subgenre, as I did the previous week. Fortunately, 7 Days in June is an enormously generative text.

• Other Texts I Would Have Assigned If I Had The Time: Kiss an Angel by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Reel by Kennedy Ryan, Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert, You Deserve Each Other by Sarah Hogle

Monday, Feb 9: Paranormal, Monster, Sci-Fi Romance

• Primary Reading: Slave to Sensation by Nalini Singh

• Supplemental reading:

  • McCormack, D. (2022). The Monstrous and Critical Posthumanism. In Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism (pp. 249–274). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04958-3_18

• Notes: Used the supplemental reading to frame the lecture, which was about Paranormal Romance and monstrousness as an uncertain, ambiguous, unknown quantity that can be politically and narratively fruitful. The conversation this week was more far-ranging— Slave to Sensation was a divisive text for folks, and we ended up talking a lot about the in-world gender politics and consent politics and reader reactions to those realities.

• Other Texts I Would Have Assigned If I Had The Time: I have a whole post on Monster Romance on my insta!

Other Readings That Came Up:

• Toscano, A. R. (2012). A Parody of Love: The Narrative Uses of Rape in Popular Romance. Journal of Popular Romance Studies. https://www.jprstudies.org/2012/04/a-parody-of-love-the-narrative-uses-of-rape-in-popular-romance-by-angela-toscano/

• Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of Relation (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10257

  • Specifically the chapter For Opacity

My villain origin story, if there ever was one, is probably related to the egregious overuse of feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey’s notion of the ‘male gaze,’ in popular discourse. The concept is first articulated in Mulvey’s seminal 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ which draws on Freud and Lacan to peel apart the dynamics of spectatorship in film. It’s a weird essay, full of castration anxiety and phallocentricity and all of the ooey gooey psychoanalytic stuff that I have a hard time buying and a hard time staying away from when thinking about media.

The gist of it is that Mulvey is interested not just in the gazes of characters within the content of a film, but the gaze of the viewer or audience member upon the film. She references the Freudian notion of scopophilia, or a desire to look or observe, especially at a thing you aren’t permitted to see, in order to make sense of the role of a spectator. Crucially, Mulvey asserts that heterosexual men, as viewers and makers of a film and as members of a dominant class, are able to subject women on screen to their gaze, rendering women as passive, sexualized, flattened objects within a film narrative and, by extension, within a society. Where men in film are allowed to act, to change, and to drive the action of a narrative, women are relegated to producing visual spectacles.1

It’s hard to overstate how formative this essay was in the subsequent five decades of media studies, film studies, and philosophy. Numerous extensions and critiques of Mulvey’s work have been offered since: Black scholars in particular, have named the complicated racial dynamics of viewership that go undiscussed in the essay; queer scholars have written at length about the complexities of gazing as a queer person, which displaces and reshapes the patriarchal order accepted implicitly by the essay. Related concepts like the colonial gaze, the white gaze, or the oppositional gaze flooded academic publishing as a result. Everywhere, theorists were profoundly influenced by Mulvey’s suggestion2 that the act of gazing constituted oppressive assertion of power, or mastery, over the object being looked at.

Mulvey’s work is a load-bearing pillar of media analysis and feminist theory, but like other highly influential pieces of feminist writing3, the concepts have become popular enough to breach containment and take on a decidedly “feminish”4 flavor. With every passing day, the ‘male gaze’ has taken on a bland, tired spin wholly disconnected from the 1975 piece that gave it life.

‘Male gaze,’ these days, seems to be shorthand for “when men look at things,” or perhaps “when men do things,” or maybe just “when men.” It’s a horribly essentialist, uncreative point of view that doesn’t allow for the possibility that gender socialization isn’t fixed and incontrovertible, but cumulative, evolving, always in flux.

Worse, still, the concept has reached a saturation point where Mulvey’s ‘male gaze’ has become, maybe, the only way to think about the act of “gazing,” at all. Never mind that Foucault and Lacan and Freud and Kristeva and about a billion other writers have wrestled with different ways to think about the gaze forever.

regard!

A few months ago an enormously popular adult film actor left a really thoughtful comment5 on my Frankenstein (2025) review and it led me to her TikTok page. She’d just 6 posted an equally thoughtful reflection on 10 years of being a ‘mattress actress,’ a job that she said required her to be an “empty vessel,” for the projections of other people, but also granted her the skill to look at other people, her scene partners or the camera, as if they are enough. To see the yawning desire in another person to be seen as worthy or deserving of intimacy or closeness and grant it by virtue of her gaze and attention alone. It’s a skill that became transferrable. She spoke beautifully about regarding her sister, her mother, the other people in her life with the sense of “enough-ness,” she’d previously only performed on camera.

The phrasing really struck me. Any therapist-in-training could tell you that a core competency in clinical training is the mastery of what humanist psychologist Carl Rogers referred to as unconditional positive regard, or the ability to see another with complete openness and non-judgment. It is one of the easiest, hardest, and loveliest part of therapy, and its effect can be profound in both directions, for therapist and client. I know it. I’ve felt it. I see it all the time. The way we look can be deeply life-giving, connective, animating, for both observer and observed.7

It’s one of the reasons why I have a hard time believing that the act of gazing is, necessarily and exclusively, subjugating. Aren’t there other ways to gaze?

Interestingly, Lacan conceives of the gaze as the object in the visual field, rather than the act of looking itself. Philosopher Todd McGowan, interpreting Lacan, contends that the gaze is a marker of our “non-neutrality,” or the “point at which the subject’s desire warps the image.” The gaze is a distortion of what is presented in our visual field, the point at which something takes on extra significance.8

Romance novels understand this keenly. Take this line from The Luckiest Lady in London, by the inimitable Sherry Thomas:

She was recovering from a case of sniffles brought on by a sudden onslaught of autumnal weather. Her nose was red. The rest of her face, too, was somewhat ruddy. And the somber blue of her cloak did her complexion no favors, making her appear even more splotchy.

All this Felix perceived. But he could see only loveliness, endless, endless loveliness.

Love was not blind, but it might mimic a deteriorating case of cataracts.

The narrator, Felix, is a Machiavellian prince struck down in his prime by deep adoration for his own wife— embarrassing! His assessment of her appearance is clinical at first, an evaluation of the weather, the colors of her skin, the attire she wears. It all gives way, however, for the thing that he actually sees. Her loveliness, endless, endless loveliness. Sherry Thomas illustrates, here, how distortions to a narrator’s visual environment are some of the first, most powerful ways for a romance writer to begin scaffolding a romantic connection for a reader. If love is “favoritism par excellence,”9 then the senses are the entrypoint into that favoritism, selective attention, that distorted experience of the world.

In Heated Rivalry (TV), it’s Shane Hollander’s look at Ilya Rozanov in the very first seconds of the show that tip us off to the connection between the two of them. Shane reaches out once to shake Ilya’s hand. Then twice. It’s a far cry from his typical expression, where he’s often spotted looking vaguely off into the middle distance. Ilya eats up his visual frame, distorts his vision so completely that no one else— not Rose, not any other man— can be anything but set dressing. In the book’s take on the same scene, Ilya looks at Shane and gets caught: “His skin, however, was flawless. Distractingly so. Smooth and tan with— and this was his most striking feature— a smattering of dark freckles across his nose and cheekbones.” It’s a level of sensory detail and attention we’ve yet to see in his perspective until that point, the exact moment where Ilya’s budding desire for Shane warps the image.

Lacan’s notion of the gaze offers something different from Mulvey’s formulation: that the gaze is the point where we lose or cede authority or mastery or power over the subject of viewing. It’s the point where we realize that we can’t assert control over our visual field, that our visual field takes on meanings and distortions and shapes that exist because of us. More specifically, because of something within us that is unconscious, unknowable, and beyond our grasp. We can’t know why Ilya is obsessed with Shane’s freckles, why this particular beautiful man compels him in a sea of beautiful, muscly men. All we know is that he does, and that it changes him forever. 10

spectate!

In one of my favorite parts of the Heated Rivalry press tour, Hudson Williams was asked about his familiarity with the source material before auditioning for the part11:

I wasn’t even very familiar with how these women-catered romance genres, how fucking vulgar they are. Not in a bad way, by any means, but they get into it. They get so nasty and so descriptive. It’s beautiful, I love it.

His use of “vulgar,” really charmed me, as has Jacob Tierney’s declaration in an interview that the Heated Rivalry books “are porn.”12 To call a romance novel vulgar and pornographic is, by all accounts, indication of the speaker’s disapproval and disdain for the genre, but few people who’ve followed Tierney and Williams online or watched Heated Rivalry could accuse them of that. In fact, Tierney and Williams seem to have hit on something deeply honest about romance.

It’s a frequent point of defensiveness from within romance that romance isn’t porn.13 I’ve written before about the SWERF-iness of this sentiment14 before, but it’s also worth noting that there are elements of romance that are pornographic. In episode 1 of Heated Rivalry, there’s a scene where Shane gets on his knees and blows Ilya . It’s a great scene - it’s the first time Shane has sex with a man. It’s the exchange that sets the tone for the next several years of their sexual relationship. You can, quite literally, hear the slurping noises.15 There’s a scene in episode 6 where Ilya blows Shane and someone on Twitter described it as Ilya “bobbing for apples.” It’s one of the most playful, easy moments of sexual chemistry in the show, evidence of their growing intimacy, the comfort of their relationship, and it’s also doing all kinds of interesting work for Shane, a character with a begrudging fondness for exhibitionism.16 These scenes are explicit, unveiled, and also really fucking hot.

That the show is willing to present the sensory pleasures of sex to a viewer has opened it up to significant scrutiny. Publication after publication has released its own point of view on the overt sexuality of the show, wavering somewhere between frank appreciation and dismissiveness. It speaks, in part, to the intense sexual conservatism of our time compared to even the recent past. In part, it speaks to a lack of understanding of genre fiction itself.

In Vulgar Genres: Gay Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction (2021), Steven Ruszczycky, articulates what has been culturally understood as the key distinction between pornography and literature:

Where [literary writing] engaged the reader in the disinterested contemplation of beauty, [pornographic writing] turned one’s attention toward the self-interested pleasures of the flesh. Beyond being mere description of particular textual properties, the distinction between literature and pornography also served the ideological ends of class differentiation… (p.2)

In effect, serious literature traffics in the figurative, where genre literature traffics in the visceral, the literal. This distinction is drawn along classed, gendered lines. Pulpy magazines for the poor, the unsophisticated, the naive, the sentimental. Hard bound classics for the wealthy, the elite, the cultured, the cerebral. The distinction is, for many romance readers, rightly understood as derogatory. The defensiveness that springs from it isn’t unsubstantiated.

But we have to remember that romance is vulgar. It is base to watch a show where you can hear blowjob noises in the first episode. It is pornographic to watch a man spit into the palm of his partner so they can lube up for sex. These scenes are intended to arouse and titillate and excite. And there is such tender, full beauty to be found in vulgarity. Our tendency to immediately grant vulgarity a negative valence speaks to our own aversion to the body and its animality.

The body is disgusting, filthy, messy. Sex is vulgar and base. So what? Who do we serve by pretending that nastiness isn’t (1) narratively useful, powerful, and compelling; (2) honest?

watch!

I’m sure, like me, you’ve seen the discussions online of the epidemic of cishet women fetishizing masses of gay men for sport.17 Even before Heated Rivalry burst onto the scene, this was a constant topic of discussion in M/M romance spaces, but the astronomical popularity of the show seems to have pushed this line of thinking back into the foreground. The idea that women may derive pleasure from watching men be intimate with each other seems, in a uncanny extension of the ‘male gaze’ discourse, tied unavoidably to objectification, subjugation, and dehumanization. Never mind that one of the most engaged viewerships of the show is lesbians.18 Never mind that even ostensibly cishet individuals can have deeply complex relationships with gender, sexuality, and embodiment. Never mind that this is an interesting story even for people like me, who don’t usually read or watch M/M at all.

The reality is still that we are ill-equipped to see the gaze as anything but violent and oppressive. We are equally ill-equipped to see desire and pleasure as anything but violent and oppressive.

It’s getting harder to ignore that everywhere I look, people are finding themselves suspicious of the body and sensory pleasures derived from it. Every embodied experience becomes evidence of pathology, violence, bad faith, degradation. To look and enjoy is necessarily voyeuristic. To perform is necessarily exhibitionistic and narcissistic. To be vulgar is to be déclassé. Maybe by virtue of the fact that I spend a lot of time online in the digital sphere where nothing is real and everything is important, the realm of the physical seems to be receding further and further into the periphery to make way for absolutely nothing at all. No mess and, relatedly, no meaning.

The idea that the pleasures of the flesh are mutually exclusive from meaningful contemplation is the product of a world that wants badly for us to self-alienate. Truthfully, figuring out what I find pleasurable, beautiful, hot, worth looking at has been one of the most fruitful projects in my life. The distortions in my visual field force me to surrender to the unknowable thing in me, that opaque entity that sees two people fall in love and says, every time, “Yes, that. More of that.”

17

18

I only got around to watching Avatar: The Last Airbender in 2020 when all of the seasons dropped on Netflix and I, like many others, suddenly had a bunch of free time to spend at home and nowhere else. I was, maybe predictably, a Zutara stan. I find the tension of opposition so interesting— in my last substack I referenced the setting of enemies-to-lovers novels as a void, a place of “lively tension,” or “empty jubilation,” echoing physicist Karen Barad.

In part, the dynamic appeals because I like dialectics, which refers to the process by which many opposing views/forces/ideas are held and explored in service of arriving at a truth (or many truths) through repeated inquiry1. Katara and Zuko are thesis and antithesis, water and fire, and it’s through their proximity to each other and their opposition to each other, that both of them become different. I would even say they become more truthful versions of themselves. Honestly, it’s just interesting when characters are at odds with each other. It’s fun to read stories where opposing forces become entangled. The things that become revealed by the process of enmity and reconciliation are often rich and textured.

I know, now, that many people have strong reactions to Zuko as a character and Zutara as a pairing. While there’s considerable praise for his eventual redemption arc, most of which is contained in the last season of the show, there’s also a really robust criticism of the Zutara pairing as one that romanticizes settler-colony relationships.2 I think there’s merit to the concern that much of hetero fiction is preoccupied with the redemption and transformation of powerful, often violent, often cruel people: Reylo, Dramione, Darklina, Zutara, and on and on and on. I understand objections from people who see these portrayals as imbuing such figures with false-consciousness— that is, manufacturing humanity in figures who would not do the same for you and, in truth, probably do not have too much humanity3 to begin with.

And still! I am compelled! Why! I have a few theories. My more cynical reading is that desire for an oppressor, expressed in these kinds of ships, is desire for proximity to power (I talked about this more in my essay on heteropessimism, though in kind of a hopeful way) or the security that can be granted by proximity to power.

My other reading is that the utility of keeping the “oppressor,” close is the continued reminder that we could, at any point, through any amalgam of choices and structural forces, become him.4 Oppressors are often skilled in eliciting sympathy, are often convinced of their own righteousness, are often steadfast in their own victimhood even when presented with contrary evidence. Part of the utility of making the oppressor a figure who can be transformed— not just reformed— is that we become reminded of the fact that we can be transformed too. It is easy and convenient to think that villains are far away. It is easy to think that good people go on doing good things in perpetuity. In actuality, borderlands between victim/perpetrator and oppressed/oppressor are, at least historically speaking, troublingly porous.5

I find it useful when critics of such dynamics point out that these stories don’t go far enough or do enough to transform its characters. The reality is probably, also, that readers work too hard to make these kinds of dynamics seem ultimately “hopeful,” and optimistic. There is also a world in which these kinds of enmeshments between people happen and a mutually assured destruction follows, which the darker side of fic and romance also explores. That, too, can be narratively interesting in a kind of fatalistic way. What I mean by this is that it is perhaps useful to let go of the idea that people in romance novels must be “good people,” or, at the very least, the arc of all romance must skew towards goodness in the end.

Admittedly, it’s easy for me to talk about this in fiction and in the context of fictional power structures. That is, of course, one of the utilities of fiction. My empathy stretches longer, my judgments are softer, my ability to speculate on the possibilities inherent to intimate relationships is greater. The reality is that fictional violence offers a degree of removal— by necessity. One can close a book, return it to the library, and never think about it again. Real-world violence, however? Inescapable and relentless in its reach.

I don’t feel any particular way about people who enjoy these kinds of ships, mostly because I’m not too invested in the idea of ships as evidence of good-or-bad politic. One can hold all of the “correct,” opinions and never act on them meaningfully. One can also have truly diabolical taste in fiction but also invest deeply in their communities at every given opportunity. Intellectual currency online is, of course, only equipped to evaluate one of those things.

It’s also true that when I watch ATLA, I find both Zuko and Katara to be deeply sympathetic characters, together and apart. I don’t identify with just one or the other— if I’m self-inserting, here, I’m self-inserting as both because I’ve seen myself in both. It serves to be curious about that, rather than judgmental, I think.

part I: classical physics1

A few weeks ago I polled people on Instagram for their holy grail enemies-to-lovers romance novels and was surprised to find that the responses didn’t vary all that much. For all that enemies-to-lovers is much beloved online, the consensus seemed to be that there just aren’t very many good ones, at least in true romance novels. Most of the recommendations were for fantasy novels with romance subplots (namely: The Cruel Prince, which rocks, but is not a romance novel, really.)

I was thinking about enemies-to-lovers because I’ve been watching2 a lecture by the feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad called On Touching: The Alterity Within3. The lecture is a kooky one, possibly not one that a faculty member of a physics department would find charming or persuasive. Barad’s work is unruly in its interdisciplinarity. They talk about quantum field theory and electrons and the void and they talk about transness, queerness, and philosophies of selfhood all in the same breath. In particular, I was taken by the opening of the lecture (emphasis my own):

A common explanation for the physics of touching is that one thing it does not involve is . . . well, touching. That is, there is no actual contact involved. You may think you are touching a coffee mug when you are about to raise it to your mouth, but your hand is not actually touching the mug. Sure, you can feel the smooth surface of the mug’s exterior right where your fingers come into contact with it (or seem to), but what you are actually sensing is the electromagnetic repulsion between the electrons of the atoms that make up your fingers and those that make up the mug. Electrons are tiny negatively charged particles that surround the nuclei of atoms, and having the same charges they repel one another, much like powerful little magnets. As you decrease the distance between them the repulsive force increases. Try as you might, you cannot bring two electrons into direct contact with each other. The reason the desk feels solid, or the cat’s coat feels soft, or we can (even) hold coffee cups and one another’s hands, is an effect of electromagnetic repulsion. All we really ever feel is the electromagnetic force, not the other whose touch we seek. Atoms are mostly empty space, and electrons, which lie at the farthest reaches of an atom, hinting at its perimeter, cannot bear direct contact. Electromagnetic repulsion: negatively charged particles communicating at a distance push each other away. That is the tale physics usually tells about touching. Repulsion at the core of attraction. See how far that story gets you with lovers. No wonder the romantic poets had had enough.

So intimacy, contact, touch, interaction, here, is not so much about opposites attracting as it is about repulsion. We feel other objects because electrons are acting on other electrons, holding them just out of reach. Oddly, we feel close to things because we are being held at an infinitesimal distance.

Barad is being coy when they say “repulsion at the core of attraction,” but because I am evidently wearing romance goggles at all times, there’s a note to it that rings true. I’m thinking about how in The Cruel Prince, repulsion is a load-bearing pillar in the relationship between trickster fae prince Cardan Greenbriar and human menace Jude Duarte. The earliest stages of their courtship can really only be described as bullying. The middle stages are best described as a case of Stockholm Syndrome. Even during their eventual marriage in the third book, they can’t quite seem to make up their minds on if they’d rather kiss each other or kill each other.

“In the mortal world, when I thought you were my enemy, I still missed you.”

“My sweet nemesis, how glad I am that you returned.”4

The beauty of Jude and Cardan’s relationship is realized in the third book, Queen of Nothing, when Cardan says, “We have lived in our armor for so long, you and I. And now I am not sure if either of us knows how to remove it,” before they have sex. Jude can’t quite tell if it’s a riddle or a sincere concern. Regardless, after sex, Jude comes up with an answer: “I think of his riddle. How do people like us take off our armor? One piece at a time.”5

Part of the magic of their romance is that Holly Black never requires them to stop being enemies for their happily ever after to be persuasive. Cardan loves his ruthless, manipulative wife. Jude loves her slippery, crafty husband. A reader can leave the trilogy assured that they will bicker for as long as they love each other, content to be both enemy and lover in the ever-after.

It’s hard to write Judes and Cardans. I’ve seen plenty of people complain about how unearned the conflicts can feel between characters in self-described enemies-to-lovers romances, especially outside of the frame of fantasy6. I disagree with the idea that viable romantic enemies only exist in the land of fae. It is probably more fair to say that enemies-to-lovers requires skilled authors who don’t fear writing characters who are earnestly mean to each other. It requires authors to write dialogue that walks a knife’s edge: cruel and yearning, sincere and sour all at once. It requires, perhaps more than other romance conceits, that readers suspend disbelief and truly embrace the textures and stakes of fiction without demanding it comply with ‘reality.’

part 2: quantum field theory

In actuality, this somewhat intuitive explanation of how touch works is pretty insufficient. Physicists eventually arrived at the conclusion that classical physics was unable to effectively describe the dynamics at play on the subatomic level. If, for example, electrons actually were little spheres with negative charge that orbited a nucleus and repelled other little spheres with negative charge, matter would be tearing itself apart all the time from the force of repelling itself all the time. In Barad’s words:

all the bits of negative charge distributed on the surface of the sphere repel one another, and since there is no positive (unlike) charge around to mitigate the mutual repulsion each bit feels, the electron’s own electromagnetic self-energy would be too much to bear—it would blow itself apart.

Quantum mechanics emerged as a more complete description of the strange behaviors of subatomic particles that classical physics was ill-equipped to discuss (i.e. quantum entanglement, quantum interference, quantum tunnelling).

Quantum field theory, which is Barad’s area of research, was born out of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and Field Theory, to explain things that each theory was not fully describing. A few things of note:

• Atoms are usually described as floating in space, or the “void.” Barad suggests that the void is not, as it may sound, an empty thing. Rather, the void is a vessel for possibilities. It’s a place for something called virtual particles to be/not be in an infinite number of configurations (they are, after all, virtual but ‘real’ in the way that ghosts are ‘real’.7)

• Particles are not discrete entities from the void, as described in classical physics, but rather they are entangled with it.

• Electrons are also not really little spheres with negative charges. They probably do not have a substructure (physical form) of their own at all. It is probably more accurate to say that electron particles are observed oscillations or excitations in an electron field. So if the electron field is the head of a drum, an electron is the oscillation that the drumhead makes from its “rest” state when struck. Or if the electron field is a guitar string, electrons are the oscillations the string makes from its taut state when plucked. And there are all kinds of fields! Neutrino fields and Higgs fields and electron fields and on and on. Matter is fields all layered on top of and interacting with each other.

• It’s helpful to think of electrons this way because then we can reconcile the “same-charges repel” piece of this. We aren’t looking at two electrons pushing back on one another. It’s just one big electron field, with many little particle observations, so it cannot repel itself, really.8

Conceptually, Quantum Field Theory is uniquely equipped to describe the strange ways that matter comes into and out of being. Electrons are constantly interacting with virtual particles in a big quantum stew. Electrons expel virtual photons and then swallow them back in. Or sometimes, electrons expel a virtual photon, which splits into a virtual electron-positron pair that annihilates itself into becoming a virtual photon again, which is swallowed by the electron again. And on and on and on– there are infinite possibilities here, fueling the frenetic energy of an electron field. The thing to takeaway from this is that Barad refers to this process as self-touching. Electrons are constantly engaged in the process of self-touching, but in doing so encounters an infinite sort of alterity9 of self. I like this bit of Feynman that Barad draws on to summarize (bolding is my own, italics are Barad):

Richard Feynman, one of the key authors of quantum field theory, frames the difficulty in explicitly moral terms: “Instead of going directly from one point to another, the electron goes along for a while and suddenly emits a photon; then (horrors!) it absorbs its own photon. Perhaps there’s something ‘immoral’ about that, but the electron does it!” (Feynman 115–16). Hence, the infinity associated with electron’s self-energy, and other related infinities, wind up installed in quantum field theory as intrinsic “perversions.” Apparently, touching oneself, or being touched by oneself—the ambiguity/undecidability/indeterminacy may itself be the key to the trouble—is not simply troubling but a moral violation, the very source of all the trouble.

The thing Barad is hung up on as a queer theorist is the idea that matter is constantly touching itself, and in doing so encounters within itself an infinity of possibilities for being. The “self,” then, is a queer, polymorphous entity. Within the “self,” there are strangers to be discovered and emerging in discovery all the time. In their words, “Matter is an enfolding, an involution, it cannot help touching itself, and in this self-touching it comes in contact with the infinite alterity that it is.”

Their writing on the alterity of self evokes Edouard Glissant’s work on opacity, for example, which captures the degree to which the self is unknowable, irreducible, beyond understanding, even to oneself10. Particularly relevant to our quest through the landscape of enemies-to-lovers is their description of electrons transforming into other subatomic particles as the process of self-touching, which evokes scholars like Maurice Merleau-Ponty who, regard bodies “not only as fleshy and material but also as ‘wordly’, as being in an intimate and living relationship to the world, which is a world made up of other bodies.” In other words, our experience of our bodies is tactile and social, developed because of and in the form of our relationship with other bodies. Where Barad speaks of electrons touch-touching themselves, Merleau-Ponty writes, “I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching.”11 All of this is to say yes we’re talking about Physics, but we are talking about the familiar things, too.

“Please, I beg of you, cut the armchair physics, get back to the romance!” But I am! Even now, I am talking about romance all the time!

Take The Hating Game by Sally Thorne. Josh and Lucy are executive assistants to the CEOs of Bexley Books and Gamin Publishing, who have agreed to become Bexley & Gamin to survive an economic downturn. She is warm and bubbly and oh-so-sweet. He’s stern and prickly and cold. By the time the novel starts, Josh has aided Mr. Bexley in cutting 30% of the workforce of Bexley & Gamin in the process of merging the two companies. Lucy’s best friend at work is counted in that layoff, imploding their friendship and leaving Lucy alone with a brand new nemesis.

The novel opens with the two of them glaring at each other across their shared office space. The setting, here, is the void: “The tenth floor is now a cube of glass, chrome, and black tile. You could pluck your eyebrows using any surface as a mirror—walls, floors, ceiling. Even our desks are made from huge sheets of glass.” The city in which the novel takes place is unnamed. Brief detours are made to a wedding a few hours from the city where they live and to Lucy’s apartment and Josh’s apartment and to a paintball field but, really, this is an office romance.

When people talk about loving enemies-to-lovers, often the first thing they mention is the tension. I love that invisible/visible tether that connects people and makes us feel like something is happening even when nothing is happening. It evokes Barad’s description of the void: “The void is a lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming… The blank page teeming with the desires of wouldbe traces of every symbol, equation, word, book, library, punctuation mark, vowel, diagram, scribble, inscription, graphic, letter, inkblot, as they yearn toward expression. A jubilation of emptiness.”12 If the field is the office and if the void is the lively tension upon which it rests, Lucy and Josh are particles entangled within it, bursting into expression in fits and starts.

The setting is a battlefield for Lucy and Josh, who have taken up the project of aggravating each other like they’re being paid to do it. They are at odds all the time because they are together all the time and unable to escape each other (Lucy refers to Josh as her “cellmate,” in the first chapter). The first interaction13 Thorne writes is Lucy and Josh playing The Mirror Game, where Josh and Lucy are purposefully mirroring one another to irritate each other, wordlessly dissecting the other person’s exact move. It’s one of a thousand different games they’re constantly embroiled in with each other.

Lucy cannot stand that Josh does not seem to like her. She, who would bend over backwards to accommodate others, has met a person who isn’t swayed by her charm. Worst of all, this is a person who she finds funny and attractive and clever. For Lucy, who is so heartbreakingly lonely and abandoned at the start of the novel, this is confirmation of the fact that she is destined to be alone. I think of her delirious sickbed confession in the middle of the novel all the time: “I’m so scared. It’s all going to end soon, one way or another. I’m hanging on by my fingernails. I have no idea if their14 investment in me will ever pay off. And I’m so lonely sometimes I could cry. I lost my best friend. I spend all my time with a huge frightening man who wants to kill me, and he’s probably my only friend now, even though he doesn’t want to be. And it breaks my heart.”

Josh, whose narration we never get, is harder to read but no less affected: “I touch his pulse. It touches me back.” Josh, who grew up in a house where he tried and tried and tried but was never enough, responds to his circumstances by presenting a tightly managed facade where he doesn’t need anyone at all. He finds his love for Lucy daunting because she might decide, like his father, like his ex-girlfriend, to confirm his worst fears about himself– that he isn’t enough. And to be found insufficient? By a woman he is borderline unreasonably in love with? It’s the kind of heartbreak he can’t fathom.

The thing enemies-to-lovers does so elegantly is force a character to contend with their worst, most unseemly parts early and often. Their core wounds are coaxed out for inspection by a terrifyingly attentive eye (I think so fondly about a line where Lucy, at Josh’s apartment for the first time, thinks to herself “I look lustfully at his filing cabinet. If he wasn’t here I’d read his electricity bills.”) To fight and to fight well is to deeply understand what your opponent guards most closely15: their control, their pride, their loneliness, their desire16. To fight well is to strike at parts of your opponent that they may not have known existed within them– the alterity within.

In likeable Lucy, Josh provokes the existence of an angry and impolite stranger. With him alone, Lucy is this raw and unfiltered thing. In cool, self-sufficient Josh, Lucy provokes someone more playful and uninhibited.They wrest vulnerability from each other in ways that verge on threatening. They’re electrons spitting out virtual photons split into virtual electrons and positrons17. In her words: “Lucy versus Joshua, total annihilation.”

The thing about a subatomic look at enemies to lovers is understanding that these pairs are not oppositional– they are made of the very same stuff18. They are excitations in the same field, overlapping in ways that appear like enemies at some angles and lovers at others. Lucy makes multiple entreaties to Josh to be friends. She asks, over and over, why he won’t just be friends with her? Josh is ruthless in his distaste for friendship. If he can’t love her, he must be her enemy: “He wants me to hand over everything. He won’t take anything less from me.” It’s revealing– enemies aren’t held at arm’s length, really. They trouble us because they are entirely too close.

part 3: mattering

In The Cruel Prince and The Hating Game, but also, to be sure, in other acclaimed enemies-to-lovers romance like You Deserve Each Other by Sarah Hogle and Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas, there’s a crucial moment where the enemy kind of does move from enemy to lover. For me, it’s the moment when all the characters arrive at the realization that they aren’t fighting with each other, they’re playing with each other. That means they aren’t pursuing victory or conquest or an end. They’re pursuing endless, infinite, tumultuous play into the ever-after.

In The Cruel Prince, it’s the moment when Jude realizes that Cardan hadn’t exiled her to be cruel, but as a jest that he hoped she would quickly solve. In The Hating Game, it’s when Lucy realizes that Josh is shy and when Josh realizes early in the novel that Lucy hasn’t understood the terms of their play. In You Deserve Each Other it’s when Naomi gets Nicholas to tell his mom to fuck off and when Naomi stops believing that they’re on opposite sides. In Private Arrangements, it’s when Camden throws down the gauntlet and gives her the divorce she wants. It’s when Gigi chases Camden across an ocean and seizes him back.

I’ve read my favorite enemies-to-lovers romances about four billion times. A byproduct of that is being able to flip to any one page and reorient myself to exactly where I am. I’ve read The Hating Game backwards, actually, and it has still compelled me. I can move through “beginning,” “middle,” and “end” like I’m shuffling cards in a deck and, in the process, I often feel like I’m reading all of the book at once. No one is enemy or lover anymore. Only some uncanny superposition of both states.

The terms of engagement have shifted. Characters go from being defined by their repulsion from the Other to being defined by their capitulation to the possibility of being made endlessly vulnerable and open and different and strange by entanglement with an/other.

I keep coming back to something Barad says at the end of the lecture: “In an important sense, in a breathtakingly intimate sense, touching, sensing, is what matter does, or rather, what matter is: matter is condensations of response-ability.” It’s romance fundamentals, really. In a breathtakingly intimate sense, touching, sensing is what good enemies-to-lovers romance does. It’s what it is. It’s what keeps us on the edge of our seats, brimming with possibility. Hard not to love that.

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Obviously, far be it from me to tell anyone how to write about or feel about romance, but it is always sort of startling to encounter people who so clearly love romance but can’t seem to talk about it without treating it like an unfortunate and inconvenient lapse in judgment. Part of my irritation stems from the fact that shame (which is what I’m choosing to call this particular way of talking about romance) forecloses on the possibility of reading with care. She– and others– ask “why does this silly, frivolous thing hold my attention when I don’t approve of xyz about it?” but I don’t think they’ll arrive at meaningful answers to that question until the impulse to denigrate one’s own interests is challenged.

When I talk about reading with care I’m referencing the work of Karen Barad, a theoretical physicist & feminist theorist whose work I’m wading3 through right now. Barad developed a method of work they refer to as diffraction.4 In the simplest terms that I can offer, Barad contends that there is no standard account of quantum physics– rather, there are many competing interpretations of quantum physics, and so it serves Barad to read competing interpretations and observe patterns of difference in the construction of these interpretations. Such readings offer a more generative, rather than destructive, way of examining a body of work.

Barad is drawing on criticisms posed by Bruno Latour, a philosopher and anthropologist in his seminal 2004 essay "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" It’s a commentary on Latour’s own career spent critiquing the perceived unimpeachability of scientific knowledge, and his feelings of frustration regarding how his critique ends up in the same mushy stew as anti-science conspiratorial thinking which he finds abhorrent. The essay was deeply influential in the postcritique movement,5 which argued for other modes of reading beyond criticism because critique, as a method, seems to have outlived its usefulness. And so Barad presents diffraction as a more fruitful form of feminist analysis.

Barad is talking about quantum physics, but they’re also talking about basically everything else, as is the nature of theoretical physics. When lecturing, Barad makes a point of noting that their work is not merely analogical, but quite direct and literal.6 It’s from this brief detour that I come by my own position: that what passes for criticism in much of the book space is really inadequate because people find it difficult to read in generative, careful, even loving ways. Even when they supposedly love books.

Critique With Care

Recently my friend Jess made the observation that Booktube evolved out of beauty/makeup Youtube, whereas Film Youtube evolved out of education content, which sort of rewired my brain. It crystallized one of the primary issues with how we talk about books– romance, in my experience– online: books become commodities that we review in the way we review household appliances, but we’re still trying to pass off household appliance reviews for critical analysis. How many chili peppers? How many drying settings are there? What content is addressed in the book? How quickly does this cook rice? Was this “safe”? Is there an automatic “off,” if unused for 15 minutes? Is the representation “good,” or “problematic”? Is the plug compatible with European outlets? Is the cover discreet? Will this curling iron work on low porosity hair?

One of the many downsides of a commodity-centered approach to books is that the question rarely moves beyond “Should I buy this thing or not?” which I find tiresome and limiting.7 We’ve forged a culture wherein people are extremely skilled at selling a product, manufacturing artificial need, arriving at the point of sale. We are, however, sort of shit at expressing true love of a thing, articulating its beauty, revealing want well beyond the closing of the book. Even the more “social justice,” and “leftist,”8 approaches to criticism in bookish spaces seem mired in the desire to determine if your dollars are spent in the most ethical possible place.

I’m not trying to be naive about the fact that money is wrapped up into all of this by virtue of the world we live in. I am trying to say that counterproductively, much of this supposedly activist work inevitably ends up directing dollars and attention directly to the object of criticism– Silver Elite, ACOTAR, Fourth Wing, Colleen Hoover etc. etc.

I have my suspicions of why this is the case. In part, the rush of getting views for something is a hell of a drug, and this kind of content is a surefire way to get engagement. It’s hard for an audience not to be drawn into such content by good ole rage bait or even the quiet fear that one might have enjoyed a thing that is Bad. In part, I think it’s really fucking hard to talk about loving something. It’s vulnerable and exposing. It’s taxing to train the eye to examine one’s tastes. It’s excruciatingly difficult to actually articulate why you like something in a way that is interesting to others. It is costly for a critic to align their tastes with something: namely, it cedes authority. Loving a thing– really loving a thing is to allow that the thing has some power or influence over you. How annoyingly sentimental!

This is, I think, how we end up with people who talk about romance like the substack I referenced before. “I like this thing, but let me denigrate it a little first so you know that it isn’t that serious, and so you can’t hold my choices over my head as evidence of my poor taste.” Guess what! People are going to do that anyway! Such meager defenses aren’t thoughtful criticism, they’re cowardice.

I’ve been reading Becca Rothfeld’s All Things are Too Small, and her opening two essays9 explore a similar medley of ideas, though primarily through a critique of minimalism, which she suggests favors a nimble, detached approach to life and possessions over grounded attachment to objects. The movement passes off this lack of attachment to worldly goods as a kind of spirituality and virtue, prizing utility above all else. Art, however, defies the logic of minimalism. It cannot be evaluated in the way that a toaster oven is– functional or not functional, efficient or not efficient, essential or not essential. In Rothfeld’s words: “Art cannot but defy the declutterer’s utilitarian edict: it is superbly needless, for which reason it is anathema to the tactics of capitalists and declutterers alike.” Rothfeld advocates, instead, for excess and maximalism, attachments, mess. She argues that the realm of the superfluous is what makes us human, grants us taste, imbues us with a soul.

So, okay. The romance novel– any romance novel– is “needless,” and as a result, we’ve gotta move beyond questions of whether or not it is a good idea to acquire one. To quote Rothfeld again, “what is required in the aesthetic mode is not the sort of control we exercise in a decluttered room but a capitulation, a willingness to crash into something that is not in its proper place and that is therefore equipped to trip and torque10 us.” That romance novels are a part of my life is not a matter of necessity, it is a matter of the fact that I love them, and I have submitted myself to the project of loving them wholly and without reservation. I have given them power over me, ceded a kind of authority and detachment so that I may look at them closely, fondly, and with discernment.

Someone stands up in the bleachers. They hold up their megaphone. “Let me be a hater,” they declare. I stand, hands cupped around my mouth, and holler back: “Yes, absolutely!” Rothfeld writes that love is “nothing more or less than favoritism par excellence,” which charmed me. To love something is also to allow that you do not love other things. Expressing your taste is a declaration in the affirmative that implies the negative and vice versa, so being a hater and a lover are somewhat co-constitutive states. The trouble with this is that being an interesting hater, too, requires skill11, because criticism (elastically defined), or diffraction, or whatever method of analysis you choose is evidence of having looked closely at something.

My favorite haters12 are rigorous, careful, even hopeful. They’re also interested in questions beyond the commercial and moral. They’re interested in good stories and complicated truths and ambivalences and all the nitty gritty and inconvenient details. Something to aspire to, I think.

Loving Lately

Anyways, here’s some stuff I’ve been devouring as of late:

• Buffy The Vampire Slayer: I finished season 2 and it absolutely rocked my shit. Watching Buffy for the first time has been kind of odd because it’s a show I feel like I’ve watched already: 1) because, obviously, so much paranormal stuff that came after Buffy was trying to do what Buffy does, 2) because some deep, unexcavated part of me zoned in on Buffy like a sleeper cell activated by the appearance of mid-90s attire. Particular favorite episodes are: S1E7 (“Angel”), S1E8 (“I, Robot… You, Jane”), S1E12 (“Prophecy Girl”), S2E13 (“Surprise”), S2E14 (“Innocence”), S2E17 (“Passion”), S2E19 (“I Only Have Eyes For You”). I am, unsurprisingly, most interested in the episodes related to Buffy and Angel because I think those episodes are so chock-full of the boundary transgressions and complications I am deeply fond of in monster media: alive and dead, young and old, good and evil, sacred and profane. I find Sarah Michelle Gellar particularly talented for her ability to play a girl who is expansive and unruly and extraordinary but also A Sixteen Year Old Girl.

• August Lane by Regina Black: If you’ve ever watched those marble sculpting videos online you’ll know how I feel about Regina Black. Where I, a normie, see a block of marble, she sees a sculpture. She’s a chisel and a hammer away from the most photorealistic profile you’ve ever seen cast in stone. For me, August Lane is a book that is as insightful up-close and on a line level as it is far apart and on a structural one, in part because she’s zeroing in on something small with such a level of precision that it loops all the way back around and manages to be broadly identifiable. In this case, the specific topic is country music, which she uses as a prism to refract her core ideas on love, rupture and repair, art and the making of it, grief, race, class, beauty, America. Luke is a man who mows peoples’ lawns and fixes things around the house without being asked and August is a woman who carries around a notebook full of poetry and has a mean tenderness to her that I wish I could bottle for safekeeping. And then Regina hits you in the chest with something about how, in a world that is robbed of justice and inherent meaning, all you can do– must do– is make your art and make it well, with people who really care about that art too. It’s gorgeous work.

• Daddy Issues by Kate Goldbeck: When I think about Kate’s writing I think about some of the advice I got when I first started training as a therapist– we spend so much of our everyday lives trying to make people comfortable. Many of us spend hours of our day attending to the verbal and nonverbal cues of others, listening, processing, and adjusting ourselves accordingly so that people aren’t made uncomfortable. And that’s adaptive! We want people to feel comfortable with us, to like us. In therapy, however, a clinician is responsible for walking a client to that border between comfort and discomfort and placing them on that knife’s edge specifically because we hope to elicit a novel or unusual response in them that is revealing of what lies underneath pleasantries and smalltalk and niceties. Kate is so skilled at unearthing that in a reader or, at least, me. I think it’s why her work can sometimes be divisive amongst a subset of romance readers, but I also think it’s why I refute ideas of romance as pure escapism. If romance is pure escapism, we rob ourselves of the possibility of reading work that is this clever and funny about youth and success and art and labor and all the funky constellations of relations that people end up in.

• Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood: I cried reading this, which was truly perplexing given the marketing around this book as a lighter and more upbeat sibling to Not in Love, until I chat with Cat about it and she pointed out that the things I was saying about Hark and Maya made them sound like Simon and Eileen from Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney. Then I knew I was cooked, because unfortunately those two, and their spiritual predecessors in Mr. Salary, are very important to me.

I’d love to know what you’re loving (and hating) as of late.

11

A big part of what inspired this substack was a collection of things I’d been reading on criticism, one of which is below:

The Point’s Substack

Can Criticism Survive Outside the University?

Below you will find an edited and abridged transcript of the second panel of our recent conference at the University of Chicago, “The End of the University and The Future of Criticism.” The panelists are all writers, editors and critics who have found their way in the literary world outside the academy…

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a year ago · 31 likes · 1 comment · The Point

Up top, would really appreciate if y’all could take a second to donate or share the donation links for legal aid for Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts PhD student who was abducted by ICE.

This is true of every newsletter i’ve published this year but especially this one— the fingerprints of my friends’ thoughts are all over this. Thank you Emma and Chels in particular for being incredibly smart and cool and for writing about much of this before me and better <3 go read their work, which I also link throughout the essay.

Nosferatu (2024)

A couple of months ago I talked about themes of monstrousness and border violation in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) over on TikTok. The film is a remake of a long line of Nosferatu and Dracula interpretations, with a decidedly romantic feel to it. The film begins with Lily Rose-Depp as the protagonist Ellen Hutter, kneeling in a soft white shift dress. She clasps her hands together, turns her elfin eyes to the sky, and prays, “Come to me. Come to me: A guardian angel, a spirit of comfort – spirit of any celestial sphere – anything – hear my call.” The prayer summons Count Orlok, who observes Ellen from behind a gauzy curtain and says, reverently, “You are not for the living. You are not for human kind,” then, “And shall you be one with me evereternally. Do you swear it?” Ellen agrees to this, and their embrace, the script says, produces a “powerful, unknown bliss,” in her.

The exchange, which took place when she was just a teenager, changes Ellen forever. For years afterwards, she experiences seizures that both wrack her with pleasure and pain. Count Orlok terrorizes her psyche until she meets and weds Thomas Hutter, played by Nicholas Hoult, her sweet and devoted husband. The film then follows Count Orlok’s journey to reclaim Ellen in Wisburg, where he launches a battle against the town, its people, and Ellen’s dearest friends until she agrees of her own volition to join him once more.

I commented on how Ellen’s actions as a teenager reveal something of the “generative power of sexuality,” a reference to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty1. It was her changeling power alone, the depth of her despair, yearning, and loneliness, that could animate this centuries-old monster into being. It is her agreement that binds them together. In this interpretation, Ellen is both his creator and his victim, a complex duality to say the least. Of course, I say this with acknowledgement of the fact that she was a child and he was a monster. She agrees to something and then doesn’t quite realize what she’s gotten herself into until she seizes in the gardens outside her home.

The first wave of discourse on Nosferatu (2024) centered on the characterization of Ellen and Count Orlok as a romantic relationship versus a predatory one. People made videos about the irresponsibility of characterizing Ellen and Count Orlok’s relationship as romantic or erotic given his rape of her as an adolescent and her own statements as an adult (“I abhor you!”) about his pursuit of her as a child. On the flip side, people pointed out the explicitly erotic themes of the movie and Ellen’s own inability to resist Count Orlok when confronted with him in the (rotting) flesh. The script makes no mistake of cluing us in on her fraught desire: “His breath is lustful. So is hers. She disgusts herself by how drawn she is to him. ORLOK grips her more tightly.”

As with most internet discourse, I found myself sort of bored by the polarization at play. Abhorrence and earnest desire are easily enmeshed for me. That Orlok is a violent predator and the thing she craves most in the world, didn’t feel narratively incompatible at all. In fact, those things felt entirely complimentary. His abjection revealed the abjection she perceived, and felt profound shame about, in herself. It was too intimate, too close to the core of her being. She could never escape this relentless, feral appetite. Certainly not when it was an appetite of her own making.

Romance Reasons

I’ve been thinking about Nosferatu in the context of romance2 because of growing preoccupation in the romance community with the language of consent in a post-#MeToo world3. My time spent in the online romance community suggests that the consensus opinion is: romance novels should strive for representation of ethical, consensual sex wherever possible, and should be clearly marketed and sold as Dark Romance if probing concepts like consensual nonconsent, dubious consent, or nonconsent4. Experimentation with nonconsent is okay, but only in a very specific sliver of the genre, fenced in on all sides to avoid polluting its neighbors. There’s a little bit of therapy-speak in here too: dark romance is a safe place for survivors of violence to explore hard things, get catharsis, safely work through capital-T Trauma5.

With the influx of conversation about romance as a “feminist” genre, consent discourse seems to be particularly interested in disaffiliating romance from its earlier seminal works; works like Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Flame and the Flower prominently feature rape between the MMC and FMC, as do a slew of other works collectively identified by the label bodice ripper.6 These disaffiliations are interesting to me because nonconsent and rape are, of course, still a part of romance. Even prior to the popularization of self-pub dark romance, noncon existed in romance in various forms well into the 2010s.

There seem to be particular anxieties about how depictions of rape within a romance novel amount to an implicit or explicit endorsement of rape as an act. If a man can rape a woman and still end the book “happily ever after,” isn’t that equivalent to manufacturing consent for patriarchal violence? Such depictions might be a tragic part of romance’s past, but we’ve moved beyond that, now. What kind of people are we, if we read books like this and enjoy them? In a post-#MeToo world, shouldn’t we “do better”?

It Happened One Autumn by Lisa Kleypas is maybe the easiest example of the shift in attitudes I’ve seen. It’s a historical romance, and while Kleypas got her start in bodice rippers, it isn’t really a bodice ripper itself. The story follows new-money American heiress Lillian Bowman and the very old-money Earl Marcus, Lord Westcliff. The two are enemies from the start. She’s a playful, ill-behaved hoyden and he’s stern, bound by honor, and badly in need of someone who will remind him that he’s a flesh-and-blood person. They bicker and fight their way into falling in love, held apart by the fact that he should be seeking a more “proper,” candidate for Lady Westcliff than the heiress to a soap fortune. Eventually, Westcliff stumbles across Lillian getting absolutely piss-drunk off pear brandy in his personal library. Besotted and undefended against her, Westcliff capitulates to his own desires and takes Lillian to bed.

Westcliff is fully aware of the ethical problems with his actions. In the library, he thinks to himself:

His beleaguered sense of honor protested that he was not the kind of man who would take an inebriated woman to bed. She was helpless. She was a virgin. He would never forgive himself if he took advantage of her in this condition–

It doesn’t stop him, however. They have sex, then she wakes up the next day, fully compromised and hungover, with Westcliff apologizing for how dishonorably he acted by promising to make it up to her with a betrothal.

In 2021, a version of this novel was released without the pivotal chapter where Lillian and Westcliff consummate their relationship. The book moves from the library scene, where Westcliff fights with his sense of honor and his intense desire, to the scene where wakes up with her safely ensconced in his bed. She’s still ruined, for being in a bachelor’s bedroom in a state of undress, but she hasn’t had sex. Their first sex scene, which also existed in the original text, takes place later that day in Marcus’ study, after Marcus has formally asked her father to court her and when Lillian is fully sober and in control. While the publisher nor author offer commentary on why these changes were made7 it’s hard not to feel like It Happened One Autumn was modified in response to evolving expectations around consent from romance readers.

doing better

One of the more perplexing parts of the push for more explicit and enthusiastic consent in romance novels is the implicit assumption that consent is settled law. Where #MeToo produced, for a small handful of people, a level of clarity about the ubiquity of sexual violence and harassment in the film industry, for most people who think about and do this work, it was far more demonstrative of the failings of an affirmative consent model and its liberal feminist underpinnings, not to mention indicative of the way that white feminist celebrities were able to neatly extract a restorative-justice initiative spearheaded by a Black community organizer, for young Black girls experiencing sexual violence, and repurpose it for carceral feminist aims.8

Truthfully, consent is still a hotly contested conceptual territory. Among the articles and academic works I read for this essay, consent was defined differently in every single one. One paper borrowed RAINN’s guidelines: “a) Did the person express overt actions or words indicating agreement for sexual acts? b) Was the consent offered of the person’s own free will, without being induced by fraud, coercion, violence, or threat of violence? c) Did the individual have the capacity, or legal ability, to consent?” In a piece in BookRiot, the author suggests that consent in romance ”specifically is two (or more) people agreeing to be physically intimate with each other at every step. Body language and enthusiasm can be consent. Explicit consent is agreeing with words. Ideally, both are involved.” An article from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, cited sex educator Emily Nagoski’s definition: “Everyone is glad to be there and free to leave with no unwanted consequences.”9

All of these definitions, while beautifully simple and satisfyingly devoid of moral ambiguity, barely hold up to an additional layer of scrutiny. I’m thinking about Katherine Angel’s book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2022), which devotes the entire first half to challenging affirmative consent models. By Angel’s estimation, affirmative consent models fail women because they:

• Operate on the basis of a consenter’s self-knowledge (“That we must say what we want, and indeed know what we want, has become a truism it is hard to disagree with if one takes seriously women’s autonomy and pleasure in sex.”)

• Fail to account adequately for asymmetrical power dynamics (“Pleasure, and the right to it, are not equally distributed”)

• Don’t realize that saying “Yes!” is also difficult, and does not guarantee pleasure. (“Are consent, saying yes, and expressing desire a guarantor of pleasure? Do they preclude men’s instrumentalization of women? Of course not.”)

• Don’t account for how saying “Yes!” is also difficult because women are punished for expressing desire (“A woman’s sexual appetite is often the very means through which male violence is exonerated.”)

• frame “women’s role in sex primarily as one of refusal.”

Other criticisms cite the juridicism of affirmative consent, or the way that consent becomes, predominantly, a legal issue in the ethical life of our society. Obtaining affirmative, enthusiastic consent becomes a matter of mitigating legal risk within a sexual encounter, rather than investing in the pleasure of a partner. Desire, pleasure, consent, and risk are frequently conflictual forces.10

The psychoanalyst and writer Avgi Saketopoulou expands on such criticisms in her book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Race, Risk, and Traumatophilia (2024)11. She writes that affirmative consent is “insufficiently nuanced,” and that it “problematically imagines desire to be autonomous, unconstrained, and possible to separate from social inequalities that, in fact, condition who gets to withhold consent and who does not.” Saketopoulou’s notes that affirmative consent inadequately addresses the vulnerability and risk inherent to a sexual encounter, and asks our desires to be legible to both us and our partners. All of this is to say: new consent paradigms are desperately needed, in real life and in our examination of it within fiction.

It’s in this context that she offers a discussion of opacity, a concept developed by the writer Édouard Glissant to capture that which cannot be translated, excavated, or understood. In his own words, the opaque is “that which cannot be reduced.”12 Saketopoulou uses opacity to express that not all desires are readily communicable, many desires are discovered during or after a sexual encounter, and seeking an ultimate cause or source of desire can be extractive and unhelpful. She presents, instead, “limit consent,” or an exchange wherein partners offer a tentative surrender to the unknowability of what comes next in a sexual encounter. “What they are implicitly agreeing to in this negotiation,” she writes, “is to be subjected to something unforeseeable, to being vulnerable, and to being surprised.”

Limit consent should sound quite familiar to romance readers. When I first read about it, I thought about the first sex scene in Lisa Kleypas’ Devil in Winter, when the accomplished rake Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent, takes his wallflower bride-of-convenience Evangeline Jenner to bed. The scene begins when she wakes up in an inn after the anvil wedding, only to find him already halfway through foreplay. The sex scene that follows is choreographed by Sebastian, but doesn’t go quite how he intends for it to. In the last lines of the chapter, as both characters reach a climax, Kleypas writes:

Gasping, St. Vincent lifted his head to stare at her as if she were a variety of creature he had never seen before. “Good Lord,” he whispered, his expression not one of gratification, but of something close to alarm.

When Sebastian leaves their bed, after, he’s dazed, uncertain, on unsteady legs, fumbling. He describes it as madness, observing that “all the physical riches of Evangeline Jenner could not account for her extraordinary effect on him.” Sebastian sets out to have exactly the kind of sex that he enjoys and is skilled at, but becomes subject to something unforeseeable, something exposing, something that makes contact with an opaque, impenetrable part of him that never goes “explained” or reduced by the text. The experience frightens him enough that he spends much of the rest of the book pretending to avoid his wife altogether.

As a reader, limit consent offers me a means of understanding the work of a sex scene differently and more richly. When characters are not “glad to be there,” or “in agreement,” or “enthusiastic,” limit consent expresses something of the enigmatic possibility of sex beyond the development of a contract. Sex, read this way, is not about enthusiasm and joy so much as it is about transformation.

One of the books that comes up often when I talk about consent is A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole, the first in her iconic paranormal romance series Immortals After Dark. The story follows Lachlain, king of werewolves, and Emmaline, a half-vampire, half-valkyrie with more physical weaknesses than strengths. Lachlain begins the novel chained to an eternally glowing fire by the vampire faction of the paranormal world. He’s been tortured13 and held captive for 150 years beneath the city of Paris until he scents his mate, Emmaline, for the first time and quite literally gnaws his leg off (iconic) to escape his chains and find her. He hunts Emmaline, seeming more beast than man, until he captures her in the streets and tears their clothes off so he can press her to his bare skin. He kisses her face with a tenderness that makes her think she’s lost her mind.

More than a few friends have talked about how newcomers to paranormal romance are better suited to start with later books in the series, which feature fewer scenes with ambiguously consensual sexual circumstances. Lachlain is feral in a very literal sense. He’s angry to be mated to a member of the species that held him captive and simultaneously desperate for her:

“I need you. No matter what you are. And I’ll wait no longer.”

At his baffling words, her body inexplicably softened, relaxing. Her claws curled as if to clutch him to her, and her fangs receded to ready for his kiss. Frantic, she rapped her nails against the wall behind her and tapped her tongue against her left fang. Her defenses remained dormant. She was terrified of him. Why wasn’t her body?

The exchange that follows moves between fear and pleasure. She kisses him on his demand, out of fear of pain, but she also finds herself begrudgingly enjoying the experience. He slices the silk of her clothes away with a sharp claw and feels her up in the shower together. Emmaline, horrified, thinks to herself, “She was embarrassed that this stranger saw her like this, but she was also intrigued by his body. She strove not to peek at his huge erection as he bent and moved, but it was… eye-catching.”

For a seventy-year-old 14 vampkyrie-princess who hasn’t so much as held a man’s hand, Lachlain is a loose cannon who shatters her fragile self-containment and loneliness and ushers in the existence of Emmaline’s sexual self by force. The experience is confusing, disorienting: “She should be terrified. Was she so desperate for touch—any touch—that she would submit to this?” Later, when Lachlain attempts to wake her up with an orgasm from oral sex, she kicks him across the room. She reflects on the experience in a way that captures the same confusion:

She’d struck out at him with such violence because she’d been confused and frightened. Yet she’d also been nearer to orgasm than she had in her entire life. She was a weak woman, because for a second, the temptation to lie there docile and let her knees fall open to accept his fierce kiss had been nearly overwhelming. Even now she found herself wet. For him. Her response bewildered her.

The straightforward, literal reading of these scenes likely amounts to assault. It’s not a reading I begrudge anyone at all. But I also think that limit consent acknowledges the possibility that more is at work. In these early chapters, Emmaline is encountering something beyond translation or even reason within herself, a thing that provokes bewilderment, intrigue, desperation, bafflement. Lachlain is not merely a beast who threatens her autonomy and agency, he is also someone who produces feelings in her that are so foreign, so frightening, so exposing that she doesn’t know what to do with them. Such vulnerability likely feels dangerous, and even unsafe, but profound vulnerability was never supposed to be comfortable to begin with. It was, and is, the impetus for transformation.

reading differently

In part, the shift in attitudes towards nonconsent in romance feels like it is predicated on the idea that a romance novel can’t make a reader feel bad. We can’t have rape scenes in romance novels because a romance novel is contractually obligated to make a reader feel happy, and rape doesn’t feel good. But what if feeling bad is the point?

In Sexuality Beyond Consent, Saketopoulou, writing to psychologists, suggests that a clinician must be traumatophilic. That is, we must love the trauma of our clients, because it isn’t a thing to be resolved, erased, or fixed. There is no point at which we return to our pre-trauma state. There is only after, and that after is fundamentally formed by the trauma. In her words, “a traumatophilic lens is interested in the way trauma is not purged, but lived through, though on different terms from those that originally inflicted the injury. Through this reanimating, the visitation of trauma may become an ever-renewable source of inspiration, acting on us in potentially transforming ways.” It’s a radical idea in contemporary psychotherapy, which is often preoccupied with self-optimization and self-regulation in deeply capitalistic ways, but it resonates. She notes that the ego, the self, is deeply invested in its own stability and resistant to novelty. A tremendous force is required to override an ego’s own defenses and fortifications.

Whether or not you buy psychoanalysis in a therapeutic setting (and, believe me, you should be deeply skeptical for many reasons), this framing is really striking for me as a reader. We must love our characters, who often have viciously self-protective egos, and we must love the tremendous force that succeeds in ultimately altering them. Characters must experience difficult things, must be challenged, must be pushed. It is that push, challenge, difficulty, and yes, trauma, that makes them. A character cannot emerge from a narrative unscathed, untouched, untested if an author hopes to make the case that a character has fundamentally changed.

But why does that character-forming trauma have to be rape? Well, it isn’t always rape. Actually, it is rarely rape, even in romance. But it sometimes is rape and other kinds of sexual violence because romance is a genre about sex, intimacy, gender, and power. Few actions exist at the nexus of those things the way that nonconsensual sexual acts do. Put another way, and with consideration for the role of sexual violence in narrative, “this interimplication of pleasure/pain can leave the subject ‘momentarily undone’ (1986, p. 100). This unraveling of the self ‘disrupt[s] the ego's coherence and dissolve[s] its boundaries’ (Bersani, 1986, p. 101), an experience that Bersani famously described as the self's shattering,” (emphasis my own).

Most scholarship about rape within romance attends to the reader experience of encountering it within text, much of which I find to be unsatisfying and some of which I’ve sort of explored above, but there’s also some deeply interesting work on the narrative function of such scenes. Toscano (2012), posits three ways that heroes perceive and appropriate heroine identity, resulting in the rape scene: “Rape of Mistaken Identity, the Rape of possession, and the Rape of Coercion or ‘Forced Seduction,’” each elaborated upon below:

• Mistaken Identity: usually at the beginning of the narrative, “a device intended to create an immediate intimacy and bond between the two protagonists while simultaneously placing an obstacle in the path of any future relationship between them. The heroine cannot but distrust and even hate the hero for his actions, while the hero cannot but distrust his own reliance on appearances.”

• Possession: produces circumstances wherein the hero realizes “the recognition that the body alone can never fulfill the hero’s desire for the heroine; that mere possession of the heroine whether it is through marriage, contract, or rape fails to create reciprocity.”

• Coercion or Forced Seduction: this device “is not simply the moment at which the story seems to be veering towards tragedy or the separation of the lovers, but rather the rape, both physical and verbal, becomes the ritual through which the identities of both heroine and hero die in order to be reborn.”

Toscano is smart (smarter than me, certainly) to forgo sociological and psychological explanations in favor of a textual one. The reality is that such scenes do work for a narrative and for characters. It does work in A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole, in Shadowheart by Laura Kinsale, and in Kiss an Angel or Nobody’s Baby but Mine by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, all books that are extremely beloved by romance readers. Violence can be extremely textually generative.

During the rape scene in Christina Dodd’s A Well Pleasured Lady,15 the prim, cold housekeeper-turned-heiress Guinevere Mary, who regards her own attraction to Sebastian, Lord Whitfield,16 as a liability and an aberration, has the realization that, even more than the physical violation, it was the emotional intensity that was intrusive to her.

She didn’t want him to see her crying, but there was no place to run, no place to hide… Damn him, damn him, how did he know that she hated the loss of privacy almost as much as she hated the turbulent emotions?

The language of the scene is incredibly evocative: “Mary burned. This entanglement was calamity.” And Sebastian doesn’t escape without burns, either: “he might have started this out of fury, but he was involved now. He’d laid claim on her, but she’d returned the favor, and now they were so tangled she didn’t know how to escape.” And maybe most striking of all: “pressure grew as irresistible force met immovable object. Then the immovable object snapped.” It’s a scene that unhinges its jaw and swallows both characters whole. It is not happy, it is not enthusiastic, it is not comfortable, but it is doing work.

Maybe so?

To be clear, I don’t have any interest in telling people how they should navigate consent in their life and relationships. Those negotiations are deeply intimate and beyond the scope of this Substack. I do, however, think we do ourselves a disservice by insisting romance novels model good, wholesome, ethical, affirmative consent, whatever that might look like. By insisting on “yes!” consent in romance, we continue to relegate romance to the realm of the real (as in literal), didactic, and optimistic. There’s an anesthetizing quality to that optimism, something that robs romance of its complexity and intensity.

It strikes me, too, as a rejection of the concept of fiction itself, to insist upon the presentation of good, ethical models of sex and sexuality in romance fiction for fear that we may communicate a tacit acceptance of sexual violence otherwise. I just don’t believe that it is a romance novel’s chief objective to make real-world sexual harms legible to us.17 And still, as I was talking about this essay with my sister, she suggested that I make my stance clear: rape is unequivocally bad. It’s a suggestion that struck me as ridiculous, first because that is so obviously true. Second, because it makes my point all the more clear: in discussing the narrative function of fictional harms, there is perennially a fear that we implicate ourselves as complacent or ignorant in the face of real harms.

Such rejection of fiction obfuscates the extent to which authors make tactical decisions about their story to provoke certain reactions from their readers– disgust, fear, confusion, catharsis, despair. Rape does not simply happen to a character within a narrative the way it can happen to people in the real world. An author has made a choice about how rape or nonconsent, broadly, illustrates something about the characters involved and the world of the novel, both for perpetrator and victim. Whether you find that case persuasive or meaningful is up to the discernment of the reader.18

I know I'm always talking about conservatism and fascism on here, and that will probably never stop. Increasingly I am understanding fascism to be, at least psychologically, about the collapsing of possibility— in narrative, in art, in life. That fewer and fewer ambivalences, discomforts, and ambiguities are permissible or even written within romance genre fiction speaks volumes to me about where the American collective consciousness lives.

#MeToo exposed a profound structural and cultural rot, a kind of casual cruelty and violence that festered for decades without recognition or restitution. Such rot can also be vertiginous, disorienting, frightening, and I wonder often if the call for moral clarity within romance is a response to that meaning vertigo.19 Sexual relations are more fraught than ever in the real world, can romance novels give me the simplicity and clarity and satisfaction I don’t see in the world around me? And if romance must explore themes of nonconsent, can we receive a neon, glowing sign in the form of “dark romance,” to make it clear that we all know sexual violence is bad?

Such asks masquerade as progressive, and yet they reinforce broader concerns for me about how we’re taught to engage with media. There are endless circular debates about how what we read has an impact on how we live our lives, an endless tally of bad media that we are bad people for enjoying. What about how we read? The growing inability to exercise discernment, evaluate choices made in a text, cultivate taste, experience discomfort, encounter friction in media and move through it?

Ultimately, for me, consent in romance novels isn’t a moral issue, it’s a craft issue. In the case of It Happened One Autumn, the removal of the nonconsensual scene between Marcus and Lillian comes with costs to character work in the novel. In a novel about a starchy hero who places his responsibilities to the Earldom above all else in his life, his choice to seduce Lillian in far more wholesome circumstances doesn’t do sufficient work to illustrate how his personal mythology is unmade so absolutely and thoroughly by Lillian. The reader doesn’t encounter the discomfort of knowing that Marcus is capable of being selfish, irresponsible, dishonorable, and hedonistic. He’s just a man who took a drunk woman to his room and let her sleep it off, a perfectly kind and respectable thing had it not been Regency-era England.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, most historical romance readers I know agree that the re-release is not as successful as the original text. In prioritizing moral comfort, the story loses much-needed teeth. Funnily enough, the thing in Kleypas’ work that absolutely did need revising or acknowledgement– her fetishistic, tone deaf, and orientalist portrayal of Romani people in the Hathaways series– remains unmodified.

The thing that often feels most real (real as in truthful, not real as in literal) to me in depictions of rape in romance is a thing that Nosferatu, captures in its last scene. Count Orlok has just asked Ellen, “You accept this, of your own will?” and Ellen, dressed in bridal attire, replies, “I do.” He announces, “As our spirits are one, so too shall be our flesh. You are mine,” and she takes him into her bed, where he drinks from her breast. As he drinks, the sun begins to rise, and for just a moment Ellen acknowledges her victory over him with a look. He may be able to drink her to death, but the act will destroy him.

The thing that feels real is this: sometimes pleasure doesn’t feel good, it feels like an annihilation.

It probably isn’t lost on you that the cases I talk through in this Substack are exclusively white and cishet. In part, this probably reflects biases in my reading, which certainly exist. I haven’t read books like Gaywyck, for example, which might have been apt for inclusion in this essay. In part, I wonder if the expectations of good, uncomplicated sexual behavior affect non-white characters differently. For many readers, white people wear both villainy and victimhood with a light touch, able to cast the skin of it off more readily than non-white, especially Black, characters. The ways novels about queer and BIPOC characters are sold to me often favor a kind of didactic tone (I’m thinking of the pressures of “good representation,” here.) Perhaps, also, the way I’ve presented rape relies on a particularly heterosexual, patriarchal formulation of interpersonal violence, though many of the sources I cite include cases across gender, race, and sexuality. I’m still noodling on this part, and welcome thoughts if folks have them!

The most recent of these projects has been a mailer, which I collaborated with my dear friend Alicia to develop. I was looking for a place for my monster romance thoughts to go while I work up the motivation to actually get it polished for publication, and it sort of started as a joke, but then Alicia, design-witch that she is, actually breathed life into the idea. Now we call it To Lovers, In Jest. I’ve included some of the key pieces of our valentine’s day mailer (which actually has still not reached about half of its intended recipients for unknown reasons… USPS and I are fully beefing, apologies if you were supposed to receive one and still haven’t gotten it) below for your perusal, but the most important piece of context is in the letter, below:

It was nice to pay so much attention to something. The envelopes were pink, the stamps were the love forever stamps from USPS. We were able to source most materials from small/local businesses. Shoutout to my guy Sergio at The Printing Garage off Bedford in Williamsburg, who printed all of these in record time and even resized them exactly as I needed them. We commissioned art from [at]_beidak_ on Instagram, and even commissioned a rubber stamp, Alicia’s own design, to seal the envelope from Casey Rubber Stamps in LES (unfortunately, it was not ready on time due to a series of errors mostly having to do with the fact that Casey Rubber Stamps is held together by duct tape and cat hair)3. I got to hand-address and seal and mail all of the envelopes. It was just nice. It was nice to get to make something that I felt proud of, that I got to do with a friend, and that didn’t feel commercially motivated.4 Getting to see Alicia work her magic is such a gift and our shared pinterest board is a never-ending source of delight for me.

If you feel like you have something to say about monsters, medievalism, and gameplay and would maybe want to write for the zine, let me know! You’d get added to the mailing list for your contribution :)

Other things I’ve been working on lately:

• clinical externship interviews for school, which are finally overrrr. keep me in your thoughts and prayers because I have match day on Monday and

• a syllabus for a class I’m hoping to teach— funny enough, this is not for school, so keep your eyes peeled for more news on that

• a newsletter on olfactory ethics in romance. this is slow-going, probably a spring break release lol

• a couple of beta reads this month, both of which were excellent. I’ve been really lucky to be commissioned for some really special work. can’t wait to rave about all of it when it’s announced.

Anyways. In the past I’ve had more complicated or messy feelings about valentine’s day, but this year I found myself more upbeat about it. I was taking the train home from one of my jobs that day, and every other person on the subway was holding a bundle of flowers. hard not to love that.

hope your feb was lovely, and tell me what your creative practices are, if you’re so inclined.

The Exercise

An occupational hazard of being a baby-academic who moonlights as a mediocre-book-content-creator is that I bring my brain wherever I go. Sometimes, that place is the comment section of a horny book recommendation or a thirst edit of Declan O’Hara. A comment section that is frequently riddled with the phrase, “I can feel the feminism leaving my body,” in the context of being attracted to a man. I wish I could be normal about how much I hate when people say this. I wish! But I’ve never met a soapbox I didn’t love.

“I can feel the feminism leaving my body,” is really just a novel spin on a much broader family of statements endemic to online discourse about women’s sexualities. You might recognize its older sisters: “If sexuality was a choice, I would not be attracted to men,” or “heterosexuality is a prison,” or “I wish I could be a lesbian, they have it so much easier.” You might also recognize its cousin: “as a bisexual, I’m attracted to all women and like 3 men.”

This rhetorical family is corralled by a term Asa Seresin calls heteropessimism, defined as “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience.”1 It’s not an attitude exclusive to women– actually, incels are the prime example of heteropessimistic men– but I’m only talking about women here. In the case of women, heteropessimism accepts that it is extremely maladaptive for women to be attracted to men because men are fundamentally bad faith actors within heterosexuality, and yet women persist anyways.

Seresin’s critique of heteropessimism maintains that these performative disaffiliations, while sincere, are largely toothless. Rarely are the women2 who voice these statements actually attempting to extricate themselves from heterosexuality’s clutches (the political lesbianism movement is not gaining ground; the 4B movement discourse in the United States collapsed almost instantly after blowing up; convent enrollment is not on the rise, as far as I know)– it’s all just disaffected complaint. He also contends that heteropessimist sentiments:

• Are anesthetizing. In anticipation of the violence of heterosexuality, heteropessimism presupposes a kind of psychological detachment that inhibits necessary curiosity and deep feeling about heterosexuality.

• Privatize heterosexuality. Individual performative detachments from heterosexuality foreclose on the possibility of improving upon heterosexuality on a structural level at all, ultimately reiterating and reifying heterosexuality’s construction as stagnant, immutable, inevitable (in Seresin’s words, “To be permanently, preemptively disappointed in heterosexuality is to refuse the possibility of changing straight culture for the better”)

• Can rely on a kind of misandry that allows white, cis women to disengage from their own complicity in harm. While Seresin uses this critique as an opportunity to talk about the careless interactions that can be commonplace between straight women and lesbians (i.e. “men are so trash, lesbians have it way easier”), it also brings to mind the specific ways white women have weaponized sexual power against men of color.3

Personally, I’m most interested in Seresin’s suggestion that heteropessimism works against women’s ability to articulate desire. If it’s embarrassing, shameful, regretful, tragic, stupid to be attracted to men, how do we make room for desire? The reality that most women, statistically speaking, are attracted to men and will continue to be?

In the academic and internet circles I occupy, heteropessimism is rampant. It is widely accepted and joked about that women being attracted to men must, fundamentally, come at the expense of their self-preservation, wellbeing, and general common sense. I struggle with this logic in part because there are times when I feel that it must be true. In the depths of a stack of Hinge (derogatory) likes, after the thirtieth consecutive “my controversial take is that pineapple doesn’t belong on pizza,” I feel sort of stupid and silly about the fact that I persist in one of the most Sisyphean tasks in the modern world: attempting to date men.

And yet I also know that attempts to discipline desire are often misguided, in part because desire is unruly and persistent, like a fungus under the skin. Desire has a funky way of crawling to the surface and placing deep roots no matter how hard you try to suppress it and rein it in and deny its existence. In part, I balk at how heteropessimism places the onus on women to self-regulate their desires for their own safety by positioning the poor conduct of men as unchanging, inevitable, irredeemable, simultaneously accepting, implicitly, that women are the more malleable and reformable quantity in this equation.4

In the end, desire is what Seresin comes back to, too:

Particularly for women, radically transforming heterosexuality might begin with honest accounts of which elements of heterosexuality are actually appealing. the house is clearly on fire, but is there anything worth saving? Such accounts are totally foreclosed by heteropessimism, and must therefore be drawn from conversations and narratives that—even if only momentarily—transcend a heteropessimist register.

I find the end of the essay to be kind of tender and, above all, pragmatic. Women who are attracted to men aren’t going anywhere, and being casually dismissive about their attractions to men hasn't been particularly useful. Why not try a different tack?

Yearn Maxxing

Of all the research I did for this essay, my favorite reading is a 2023 article on heteropessimism from Adora Svitak elegantly titled, “How do we write about love of cock?”5 Svitak writes about the necessity of seriously theorizing desire, cultivating what could be referred to as a “pornographic imagination,” within academia. She suggests the value of making room for portrayals of other kinds of hetero sexual relations, ones wherein a woman is not just attracted to men, but hungry, wanting, desperate, monstrous in her desire. There’s no doubt that stories about sexual violence between men and women are honest, important, and powerful. Such accounts are at the core of feminist advances in the last four decades, but are stories of desire any less honest? Important? Powerful? Are stories of desire incompatible with women’s accounts of sexual violence and harm?

Romance novels are a place where these ideas find particularly fertile speculative ground. They’re rife with both harrowing representations of gendered violence and rich, textured, meaningful accounts of desire. The really good ones are particularly adept at walking the sharpened blade between the two.

I’m thinking about my recent read of Shadowheart, by Laura Kinsale. It’s a medieval romance featuring Elayne, a long-lost Italian princess who, after a broken off almost-engagement to an Englishman named Raymond, is abducted by a rakish, older, exiled assassin named Allegretto while traveling back to her homeland. Allegretto and Elayne quickly end up married because Allegretto drugs and rapes her and coerces her into acquiescing to the union.

When Elayne first encounters Allegretto, who goes by the very-dramatic-very-theater-kid title Il Corvo (The Raven), she’s struck by his presence: “He was like a statue of pure metal, something– some thing, inhuman– elegant and fantastic. Elayne was not even certain for a moment if he were real or a marble figure come to sudden life, but dark as sin, as gorgeous and corrupt as Lucifer himself.” When expected to bow in respect, eyes averted, she can’t make herself look away, peering at him through her lashes in a gesture both irreverent and reverent at once.

As you might guess by the plot summary, Elayne’s attraction is not uncomplicated. Allegretto asserts his will over her in ways that are horrifying to Elayne. He is manipulative, cruel, frightening. She resents the depth of her desire for him (“She was angered by her own desire, by how his beauty alone lured her close to him. It was not the love she felt for Raymond, nor the conjugal duty she would have owed a truly wedded husband, nor anything but simple, sinful lust”) but resigns herself to it quickly (“If she could never have the man she loved— wella, then she would take a beautiful murderous bandit instead, and read his books and learn his wiles and live with him in wickedness.”). The shape of her desire is not a traditional one. Elayne quickly takes charge in the sex between the two, displaying an affinity for light sadism and dominance that fits right in with Allegretto’s repressed bratty sensibilities.

“You know what I wish. Do you know it?” It was half a question, half a cry.

His lips parted. She saw his chest rise and fall. “Tell me.”

“To give you hurt again!” she exclaimed, with a tinge of panic. “God save me.”

He made a sound like a muted growl. “Hurt me, then.”

She was panting. She turned away, in recoil from her own self. “Nay,” she breathed.

“I want it,” he whispered. “I have lived in dream of it for days.”

Elayne loves to hurt him. Loves to sink her teeth into his shoulder and leave marks on him that he tracks with his fingers for days after. He loves to be hurt. Elayne loves that the most skillful, scary, manipulative, beautiful man she knows will shed his armor and his blades and his authority for her pleasure, and that her power over him by the end of the novel is absolute. Allegretto loves that Elayne is the one person in the world that he can not, would not, need not defend against, the singular figure who he can cede everything to. The desire between them is a feral thing, an articulation of the possibilities between two people who are, for once in their lives, able to be totally honest about what they want.

In preparation for this Substack, I solicited responses from people on Instagram asking for the most “skillfully erotic,” M/F romances that they’d read6. A handful of folks, unsurprisingly, mentioned one of my favorite contemporaries: Regina Black’s The Art of Scandal. The novel opens with Rachel, a 37-year-old Black woman, finding out that her white, wealthy, politician husband, Matt, has been cheating on her for the better part of the last year. Matt, on the cusp of a re-election that could be the beginning of a very long and storied progressive political career, asks Rachel to stay married to him gesturally until the votes are counted, holding a considerable divorce settlement over her head in the process. Rachel agrees, even as she’s starting to cultivate a secret, intimate relationship with younger, attractive, mysterious Nate.

Nate’s appeal is multifold. He’s tall, with broad shoulders, large biceps, and a dimple. He thinks she’s beautiful, looks at her carefully and attentively, lets her be emotionally volatile, difficult, insatiable without judgment as she does a retrospective on her last 13 years and maintains a charade with her husband. By her own admission, “He always seemed to show up just in time to undermine her misery until it vanished.” He’s funny and irreverent. In their first conversation, he asks “So, what do you want now?” and it prompts Rachel to actually consider the question. For the first time in a long time, there’s a possibility of her wanting and being something that isn’t a prop for her husband’s career (“unpaid labor,” as she describes it). He reconnects her to her love of art and curation, encourages her ambition, and rekindles a sense of desire in her. Nate becomes, for Rachel, one of the few things in her life that is really, truly, hers and not Matt’s.

The taboos of their relationship heighten the stakes. He’s younger, she’s still married, the insular world of Oasis Springs is always watching for transgression. But Rachel’s relationship with Nate is part of what enables her to form a new sense of self in the wake of a shattered marriage. After 13 years of being embedded in the image-conscious machine of her husband’s political career, Nate is the lone figure she doesn’t have to be so militantly self-conscious about her affect and presentation with.

Regina Black is doing something really lovely here: (1) repudiating and meaningfully critiquing a version of heterosexuality that relies upon Rachel’s never-ending, tokenized, unrecognized labor within a white context that derides her and dismisses her and (2) constructing an alternative life where Rachel’s intimate, honest, sexy relationship with Nate is the bedrock of her ability to repair the alienation (in the labor sense, in the social sense, in the intrapersonal sense) that version of heterosexuality left her with.

A similar thing plays out in Deep End by Ali Hazelwood (do I need to summarize this, haven’t you all read it?). Scarlett “Vandy” Vandermeer has known for a long time that her sexual appetites leaned kinky– specifically, submissive– but doesn’t find a partner who can meet her beat-for-beat until she finds Lukas Blomqvist. In the lead up to their relationship, Scarlett’s internal monologue occasionally reflects a familiar kind of heteropessimism: “It’s not morally wrong. It doesn’t hurt anyone. There are no victims here, but maybe it’s messed up? At the very least it’s so fucking—I don’t even know, heteronormative of me. Gender conforming. Regressive. Stereotypical. Banal. I hate it. I love it.”

But for Scarlett, her relationship with Lukas is deeply personally transformative. He’s big and tall and attractive to her in some concrete, bodily, masculine way. He smells good and he’s accomplished. He’s also infinitely self-assured and self-disciplined and perceptive, qualities that render him “safe,” to her as a person who previously dealt with emotional abuse at the hands of an angry, volatile, hostile father. Maybe most interestingly, Lukas is skilled at doing a thing that Scarlett seems to really need as she’s dealing with a massive mental block from a diving accident that takes place before the book: intervening in the fracture between her mind and her body and briefly taking the reins out of her hands so she can just be.

I feel like an object, created for him. By him. Did I exist before the first time he fucked me? I have no memory of it. Do I exist when we’re not together? I’m just a toy. His favorite. Irreplaceable.

The obvious critique is that reappraisals of a kind of sexual dynamic that replicates the broader structures of power and subjugation in the world can hardly be called radical. Sure. I’m not necessarily invested in calling this “radical,” sex, whatever that may look like. I think the case could be made that Lukas and Scarlett’s sex replicates a familiar power structure. I also think that if you look closely, it could be something else. It could be really good sex. Sex where she is safe and fulfilled and trusts her partner and gets to experiment with her body’s abilities and feels a full, embodied, expansive kind of desire. Sex where she gets pleasure, but also respect and tenderness and loving attention that doesn’t think of her as fragile or brittle.

Part of my reading of their relationship is filtered through Talia Bettcher’s theory of erotic structuralism7 and some of Lacan’s writings on desire8 and maybe a little bit of Iris Murdoch’s idea of a “just and loving gaze.”9 My kind of shitty synthesis of this body of work is that intimacy is the closing of distance between Self and Other, and that in erotically experiencing the Other, we erotically experience the Self.10 Scarlett experiences herself through the filter of Lukas and his self-assured, self-disciplined masculinity. For a character who is frequently anxious, full of self-doubt, uncertain, it’s the erotic encounter that grants her permission to consider herself differently and more lovingly.

Lukas is on his knees, my thighs trapped in the spread of his. He must be looking at my ass, and if this was anyone else, I’d be fretting over it. Am I pretty enough? Have I disappointed him with my body? Except, he’s the one who gets to decide what happens. And if he didn’t like me, he simply wouldn’t continue. My worries quiet down, and I smile into the comforter.

Scarlett gets to borrow from Lukas, to relish in his self confidence when he slips between her and her body as a beneficent tyrant. There’s no room for self-consciousness when the Other is so wholly, completely, intimately upon the Self.

Both of these examples have been kind of cerebral but I don’t really think that’s required to meaningfully participate in this exercise. Part of the answer to “How do you write about love of cock?”11 is just to like, write it. Nobody does this quite like the inimitable Talia Hibbert. I’m thinking about the most memorable sex scene in the iconic Act Your Age, Eve Brown, which kicks off when Jacob, Eve’s boss, accidentally unearths her glittery purple dildo from under her bedsheets.

In the scene, Eve’s chest tightens and her stomach squeezes and she describes herself as feeling “hot and glittering inside.” Eve’s eyes are drawn to his “long, strong fingers,” and the intensity of his stare and the steel of his voice. She fantasizes about his punishing grip on himself while he jerks off to thoughts of her. Her desire is both animated by him and by his desire for her. She wants to be the person he thinks of when he orgasms, wants to be wanted, and wants to be touched. Eve talks about how he gropes her, how he traps her in place, how he’s like a “marauding bandit.” It’s language that could feel more fraught, maybe, if Hibbert wasn’t so clear about how Eve wants sex exactly like that. Eve wants him to touch her hard (he complies), she wants to be penetrated (he does), and she wants to be looked at (boy does he do plenty of that). She loves his body and the way that he speaks (directly, honestly, commandingly). Eve is, at the end of the day, spectacularly, beautifully horny:

The noise Eve made at that moment was less words and more a garbled tangle of OhmyGodJacobnoyesfuckyou. It was like he’d heard everything she’d told him and then more, the secret parts, the unspoken parts, the parts where she wanted that abrupt stretch, the feeling of fullness forced on her. Because he shoved the toy’s merciless girth inside her without hesitating, and when she squirmed away from the pleasure he put his right arm across her belly to pin her down.

Part of what I find to be magical about this scene is Hibbert’s ability to write about bodies as real, touchable, living things. Eve wants to be held down and fucked, and she knows it. One of the earliest introductions to Eve is her fascination with Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes erotic fanfiction. She delights in men’s bodies and in her own pleasure at their hands and her own. Attraction, conceptually, is a complicated thing, but Eve’s attraction to Jacob is a deliciously straight arrow between wanting and receiving that doesn’t feel unrealistic for its simplicity. It just feels honest to her character.

If heteropessimism is, by Seresin’s account, anesthetizing, disaffected, dissociative,12 then romance novels are the opposite: brimming with feeling, with a kind of sentimentality that can be earnest and cloying.13 If heteropessimism is a foreclosure of possibility within straight existence, romance novels are all possibility. The possibilities within love, within intimacy, within connection. Even in these four accounts of heterosexuality, there’s considerable variety in power dynamic, tone, and purpose: asymmetrical or egalitarian, cerebral or embodied, tense or playful.

That isn’t to say that romance novels are a panacea for the fraught state of heterosexual relations— they’re not, nor should they have to be. I actually find that to be a tiresome way to read and write romance. Nothing about these stories is “inherently empowering” or radical. Romance novels are just an interesting cultural object, one that can be read and experienced and filtered through many discourses, one that I’d like to use to think differently and more richly about desire and intimacy.14

Critiques

Truthfully, the first time I read On Heteropessimism, it pissed me off. It read like a dismissal of the power of complaint as a core mechanism of activating towards change.15 It felt like a dismissal of the relentless, unsparing, oppressive blanket of misogynistic violence that drives women towards heteropessimism in the first place.

On reread, though, Seresin is considerate of this, too. He does acknowledge the role of heteropessimism in changing heterosexuality (“Today, heteropessimism might actually obscure the extent to which heterosexuality is changing—even as it is also causing it.”). He doesn’t dismiss gender-based violence, rather he declares it as the reason for his critique: that gender-based violence is so omnipresent a concern that we must believe we can change how things are done. His suggestion to think about the appeals of heterosexuality is not a denial of the legitimate rot at the root of heterosexuality, it’s an invitation to be radically honest with ourselves. It’s an invitation to imbue heterosexuality with a sense of possibility, to position it as shifting territory that can be reconstituted by wider, thicker, more complex discourses.16

My hope is that this doesn’t read as a defense of heterosexuality as it currently operates. I agree wholeheartedly that the house is on fire. I don’t think that straight sex and intimacy is subversive or transgressive or radical. I just also think we have to believe that other worlds are possible, and only through closely, non-judgmentally, curiously excavating one’s desires do we get to a place where we can actually do something about them. In this way, challenging heteropessimism isn’t about becoming a heteroidealist or whatever, it’s about being utilitarian. It’s about finding a functional way forward in a fucked situation.

If nothing else, I’m a little over it with the implication that feminists who are attracted to men must be sexless in order to be principled, or with the idea that men are fundamentally, irredeemably poisonous and without merits (which is, of course TERFy as hell). Both logics strike me as incurious and limiting. Don’t we know better by now?

This week’s a doozy. Lots of additional reading and citations in the footnotes because I tried to keep the bulk of the reading uncluttered. Audio version of this essay coming later this week <3

Part 1: Threads Discourse

This week’s Threads discourse kicked off when the author of a young adult novel published a graphic advertising her forthcoming YA romance fantasy novel. In most ways, it’s a typical advertising graphic, but readers and creators zeroed in on the point on the right side of the image: “yes, there is smut.” The reaction was swift and sizable. For the better part of a day, my feed was full of posts about 1) how inappropriate it is to characterize sex featuring teenagers as smut, 2) discussions of what smut constitutes, and 3) impassioned statements about how characterizing a YA novel as smut was offering ammunition to book banning efforts.

I… had a reaction to this. See the threads linked here, here, here, here, and here.

The responses to those threads largely disagreed with me. Folks doubled down on how messed up it was for adult women to be writing sex scenes between minors, how completely distinct smut is from healthy, developmentally appropriate sex, and how irresponsible it is to be “titillating teens with sex,” a phrase that feels plucked from a Mormon family guidebook on raising children who will later be found googling what soaking is.

This isn’t the first time I’ve felt this disconnected from bookish community because of some strangely regressive views on sex and sexuality. Last year, after St. Martin’s Press sent out PR boxes containing vibrators and lube to influencers, some of whom were not aware they were on PR lists for the publisher and hadn’t agreed to receive PR, there was a flurry of discussion around the implications of foisting sex toys onto non-consenting adults. The book being promoted was a queer adult romance novel by the very popular queer adult romance novelist Casey McQuiston, and all influencers involved were adults (as far as I know), but social media was still speckled with concern to the effect of: “What if I opened this PR box in front of a child! That’s so inappropriate!”1

I was, until recently, unaware of the actual shape and design of the vibrator in question, but without much information or context besides the meta-conversation about how inappropriate it was, the visual in my head grew bigger and wilder by the day. I was expecting a Hitachi wand with “jorkin my penits” engraved on the side. What I discovered was a dark green Beauty Blender in a tasteful brown cardboard case labeled “personal massager,” from Maude, the lifestyle brand. The lube was in a small, dark bottle labeled “organic personal lubricant.” I’d walked past the vibrator no fewer than 200 times when I walked into the C-Town at the end of my street when I lived in Brooklyn, shelved prominently just above the flowers. It is prominently, unavoidably visible to all customers, located in the entryway. The first time I squinted at it while retrieving a grocery cart, I thought it was a tulip bulb.

Far be it from me to defend a publisher from criticism. SMP merits much critique (see the footnotes), and it is absolutely annoying or frustrating to receive mail you haven’t agreed to receive. It isn’t my ministry to tell people not to be angry about something. I do, however, find it hard to lend credence to the idea that the existence of this PR box constitutes material harm, and think that it behooves us not to construct hypothetical harm to defend our beliefs. When people started inventing scenarios of influencers opening PR packages in front of abusive intimate partners and being harmed, then attributing the fault of that imaginary, nonspecific harm to a marketing professional and not, say, the intimate partner, all I could think was that somewhere, we’d lost the plot badly. Also, the tenuous or wholly invented linkage of queer adult sex and sexuality (fictional or real) to harm against children is a tale as old as homophobia itself, and one that I watched supposed “allies” skate right past in their crusade.

Both cases represent a concerning trend I’ve best seen observed by Eleanor Stern on TikTok, wherein adults online seem increasingly unable to experience the world without bringing a hypothetical child’s gaze and experience into the conversation. I wrote about this a little a few Substacks ago when I explained the components of a moral crusade, but I feel the need to come down harder on this because it is dangerous. It is dangerous. Not to mention, most offensively of all, it’s erotophobic loser behavior.

Adults on the internet persist in pointing to isolated instances where teenagers are potentially being exposed to corrupting and dangerous sexual material because they feel they are protecting children. Never mind the fact that:

• no one who is talking about this book is the target audience for the book

• teenagers of all ages seek out sexual material (whether or not they are actually having sex) because it is developmentally appropriate for a teenager to be curious about sex and pleasure

• it is probably great that the sex in the book is probably pleasurable, consensual, and exciting

• healthy, developmentally appropriate sex portrayed in fiction can also be arousing or titillating to read

• concurrently, teenagers are being assigned books featuring sexually explicit themes and content in school, and none of those sexual themes are likely to be consensual, pleasurable, or exciting

• many of the people talking about this probably read books like Vampire Academy and House of Night in middle school and were, consequently, exposed to arousing sex scenes and scenarios themselves

• it is actually not possible to neatly discern the “intent,” of an author as far as producing “titillating” content, and the quest to do so inevitably turns into nonsensical thought policing and straight up censorship

• it is morally neutral to experience arousal, even as a child or adolescent

• teenagers have access to considerably more problematic sexual material than any sex scene they are coming across in a 300 page novel

Part 2: Social Constructions of Childhood

None of these material realities of a teenager’s life or adult Poster’s lives need to be considered in order to scold others about the way that calling a YA novel smutty is dangerous and corrupting because people don’t care about material realities. People are more interested in deploying childhood as a rhetorical device than they are in actual children, no matter their purported political allegiances. This is a theory I found pretty robustly supported in the literature on childhood studies. Take this quote:

Childhood, the invention of adults, reflects adult needs and adult fears quite as much as it signifies the absence of adulthood. In the course of history children have been glorified, patronised, ignored, or held in contempt, depending upon the cultural assumptions of adults. (Walther, 1979, p. 64)2

Understanding that quote fully requires a brief detour into Foucault, which I will attempt to simplify. Contemporary teaching on sex and sexuality in the public school system, when it exists, tends to reference sexuality as a fixed set of natural properties, rooted in biology.3 We are human, so we experience desire and attraction. It supports our evolutionary need to reproduce, continue our species, and exist. It is an immutable and inevitable reality.

Foucault, from the discipline of history, positions sexuality as constructed, an idea emerging from the accumulation of multiple discourses formulated on the individual, interpersonal, cultural, and societal levels. Biological and evolutionary discourses are also manmade and so they are constructed, not inevitable, uncontestable, or immutable. While scholars like Freud write about how childhood is inherently and biologically sexual, Foucault writes, instead, about how the contested ground of sexuality and childhood is the ground upon which institutional “devices and discursive strategies have been deployed,” (Foucault, 1976, pp. 29-30).4 It’s from that place that we can understand the work of scholars like Gayle Rubin, a feminist anthropologist who presented her conceptualization of the charmed circle5 of acceptable sexual behavior at the famous 1982 Barnard Conference of Sexuality, which is largely recognized as the beginning of the Feminist Sex Wars. Without distracting us too much from the purpose of this Substack, the divisions between sex-positive and anti-pornography camps made clear by the Feminist Sex Wars have profoundly shaped contemporary feminist discourse, so it’s worth looking into further.

Okay, so the idea of acceptable and unacceptable sexuality is socially constructed, an accumulation of several discourses. What does that have to do with a YA romantasy? Well, the thing we’re talking about is sexual discourse. It’s a discourse about what constitutes acceptable sexual material for teenagers and adolescents. To that end, there actually isn’t a scientific or academic consensus on what kind of sexual material children and adolescents can and can’t cope with across age group. In lieu of that, moral crusaders have a tendency to suggest that all minors should be denied knowledge of sex and sexuality altogether (or on extremely restrictive terms). The double bind of this is that sexualization and predation of children and, in particular, girls, is contingent upon their innocence and naiveté. That naiveté is both the site of desire for predatory adults and an impediment to children’s abilities to make sense of violations to bodily autonomy and report those violations appropriately.6

Okay, the obvious rebuttal: I don’t have issues with teens reading or knowing about sex. I want teens to read safe, appropriate, healthy representations of sex. Give them comprehensive sex education.

But children and teens are not exclusively engaged in and surrounded by uncomplicated, healthy sexual dynamics. Don’t they deserve to see that represented in their literature? Must literature for adolescents be exclusively didactic and exemplary? Aren’t adolescents capable of discerning fact from fiction? Aren’t adolescents entitled to an erotic imagination? Doesn’t the emphasis on ‘safe, appropriate, healthy,’ also reinforce hierarchies of domination wherein the experiences of adolescents are sanitized and flattened?7

The academic literature on teenagers and sexuality confirms a few things: that teenage girls are taught to see sex and sexuality as dangerous and punishing, and that desire– the active want for something– is male and monstrous. From astonishingly young ages, teenage girls are taught to prioritize the preferences, desires, and habits of boys over cultivating their own sense of desire, their own erotic imaginations, their own sense of exploration and playfulness and embodied joy. The reality is that a smutty book, whether it includes a threesome or pegging or light bondage, is likely not the source of that early disembodiment. It’s a broader world that sees girls experiencing pleasure and feels fear. It’s a broader world that would rather see girls ignorant and vulnerable to exploitation than knowledgeable, imaginative, and resistant to predation.8 As the scholarship says-

Children are mostly constructed as lacking agency, and these constructions have functioned to keep children marginalized and dominated. On the other hand, no matter how childhood is constructed, we cannot deny that the adult carries the memories and experiences of his/her childhood; further, it cannot be denied that the experiences s/he has as a child have a profound effect on what kind of subject s/he emerges to be, thus the child is also the self. Childhood is that from which the subject emerges (Zhao, 2010, p. 242)9

And this is the thing about it. Discussions of childhood are always about the ways that adults construct childhood for other adults, and so we are trapped in cycles of discourse about what is right “for the kids,” when really we are speaking about a more abstract and contested vision of childhood. It’s the ultimate rhetorical stopping point, the thing that you can’t argue against. Don’t we all want what’s good for the kids?

Part 3: Book Banning

So now we come to the last part of the case I saw made online: distinguishing between sex scenes written for the purpose of a teenage audience, in YA novels, and “smut,” a thing that evidently means something to the effect of sex scenes written for the purpose of an adult audience,10 is a key method of resisting book banners, who will point to the word “smut,” and use it as confirmatory evidence that certain literature is corrupting the youth and therefore should be removed from schools, libraries, archives, etc.

I don’t even totally know where to begin with this. I am not of the belief that any language will be specific or innocuous enough that book banners will be persuaded not to ban books containing what they deem to be objectionable or pedophilic or pornographic content. You can call it smut, you can call it healthy sex, you can call it developmentally appropriate, you can speak to its instructional value. Chances are, a book banner will still say that unless it’s sex between man and woman, under the covenant of marriage, devoid of pleasure (for the woman), and for the purpose of reproduction, (or, better yet, not sexual at all) it is likely deviant, corrupting, and evil.

If a book is banned because it was advertised as smutty and book banners think that books with sexually explicit material is inherently pedophilic, objectionable, and pornographic, doesn’t the fault for that banning lie in the hands of book banners, who hold sexually regressive views and deranged political agendas, not the author, who is writing perfectly acceptable material for the upper YA audience that this book is advertised towards? Or, is the problem that the author wrote sexual content that is titillating for an audience of older teenagers? Because if you believe the latter, I’m not even sure how you got this far into this Substack.

Funnily enough, widely held practices for disrupting book banning encourages parents and community members to 1) read the book being considered for banning, 2) make detailed points about the book’s merits and value, 3) come to school board and town hall meetings prepared to make a specific, personal, attentive case for why it’s nonsensical that the book is being painted as obscene and pornographic.11 It renders this particular argument about “smut” as ammunition for book banning particularly silly, because none of us have read the book!

For what it’s worth, I read all 42 published reviews for Bitten by Jordan Gray on Goodreads. Repeatedly, reviewers praise the writing quality, the palpable feeling of female rage that Gray is able to convey, the angst, the tension, the love triangle. Several reviews mentioned that this would be appropriate for an upper-YA audience and named comparable authors who write in YA like Kerri Maniscalco or Richelle Meade. Not one earnest early reviewer mentioned anything about how explicit the book is or how sexual its overtones are. One person wrote “I have been haunted by a particular corset tying scene ever since. 👀” and that was just about as close to a sexual allusion as anything got. The reviews make the book sound like a fantasy-paranormal spin on Divergent or Shatter Me– series that nearly every girl my age read or knew of. There are three 1-star reviews, all published on Jan 25th, the day the discourse around this book blew up. They all say some version of the same thing: the comp books are to zionist authors (SJM and Rebecca Yarros– perhaps a valid critique?), the book is advertised as SMUT, and that they would never read this book.

The day after this discourse, a TikTok blew up referencing the way that women who read exclusively erotic fiction are porn addicted. Mutuals of mine reposted the TikTok. A couple of weeks ago, a friend of a friend in my real life casually mentioned how she thinks it’s weird when people overwhelmingly read erotica and romance. I won’t even lend energy to this because other people have done a better job of deconstructing how this talking point is straight out of the evangelical anti-sex agenda, but I do feel a persistent sense of dread when thinking about all of this. Everywhere I look, conservative backlash to feminist progress and activism is rearing its ugly head, and no one– especially people who firmly believe they could never have a conservative thought–is immune to its effects.

Every time an adult has a conversation about what is “appropriate for childhood,” without citing a source, consulting an expert, or speaking with a specific child in their charge; every time someone posts about how it’s dangerous for “minors to have access to problematic material,” and the problematic material in question is a book; every time someone invents an elaborate hypothetical sexual harm and positions it as a widely held reality; every time someone medicalizes sex and sexuality, I know that conservatism is infiltrating our brains. It’s especially insidious because sometimes that conservatism wears a fashionable hat and a cashmere scarf and comes disguised as “good intentions” and “responsible marketing.” That conservatism knows how to say words like leftist and advocacy and abolitionist and progressive. But saying a word is just saying a word. It doesn’t mean you understand it. It definitely doesn’t mean you believe it.

I’m watching Gossip Girl for the first time at the moment. It’s a show I’ve mostly absorbed through the culture before (the thanksgiving scene… the big GG reveal… Blair’s turn as Princess of Monaco… fully transmitted into my brain through twitter.com in its heyday) and mostly thought that I didn’t need to know the details of, but it’s been a comfort background watch as I worked on clinical externship applications this month (blah blah grad school stuff).

The thing I’ve realized about Gossip Girl is that it is a show largely animated by the logic that every single character is the silliest, stupidest person you’ve ever met in your life. Without that, none of the conflict ever really makes sense. What do you mean Dan had a baby with Georgina Sparks that may or may not be his and somehow managed to conceal this child from his father for a period of nearly 3 months? What do you mean Chuck was mugged, shot, and pushed into the river Danube and healed (spiritually and physically) by Fleur Delacour, the prostitute-angel? What do you mean Nate Archibald is heterosexual? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter! These beautiful1 people toddle through the world making soapy declarations in very public settings without substantiating them in the slightest, conspiring against one another in increasingly outrageous psychosexual games, and embarking on pseudo-incestual relationships with one another until they’ve come together, come apart, and come together again and again and again. I am thoroughly enjoying myself. I did, indeed, cry when Blair2 confronted Chuck about being sold for a hotel. I am embracing the mess.

The logic that pushes the plot in Gossip Girl is a familiar one. Many a romance novel is written this way, with the tacit assumption that the main character (usually an FMC, in my experience) is so absolutely oblivious to her environment and the interior lives of other characters that the story simply happens to her, and the reader is along for the ride as she is acted upon, Serena Van Der Woodsen style. I’m not knocking this, and there are plenty of stories that operate this way that manage to be, for me, satisfying in their own way.

I’m thinking a little of Twisted Lies by Ana Huang, a book I thoroughly enjoyed and still count as my favorite of Huang’s work. Goodreads agrees: its rating is the highest of the extremely popular Twisted series. Stella, the FMC, is an ambiguously multiracial content creator with aspirations towards bigger and better brand collaborations, wants nothing more than to be able to provide for her beloved former nanny, who resides at an assisted living facility because of her dementia. She struggles with being perceived as unaccomplished in her tensely competitive family and with the fact that she is being actively stalked by a violent man. Christian, the MMC, is a shadowy millionaire/billionaire/somethingoutrageouslywealthyitdoesn’treallymatter CEO of a securities company who just can’t figure this mysterious dreamgirl out. He becomes obsessed with her, inadvertently becoming her second stalker. Circumstances escalate, she moves into his apartment and they fake date until they real date. They have lots of hot sex in various tropical locations. Christian defends Stella against her family, then her violent stalker, and melts his icy heart in the process. They live happily ever after.

It’s a good story. It’s a fun story! I’m not unaware of the fact that it is really fucking hard to write a book that is genuinely entertaining from beginning to end. I’ve been following Huang’s work since the Wattpad days, so there’ll always be a soft spot in my heart for her books.

The trouble is, I’ve also simultaneously been reading a streak of some of the best romance novels I’ve ever read in my life and they are making me hungry for a kind of complexity and care that is becoming increasingly rare and precious in romance. It started with Fair, Bright, and Terrible by Elizabeth Kingston, then One Burning Heart by Elizabeth Kingston,3 then Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale, then For My Lady’s Heart by Laura Kinsale. I know, I know. A historical romance reader only now coming to Kinsale? A fraud! Lock me up, officer. I’m here now and willing to pay my dues.

The thing about Kinsale and Kingston is that they write the hell out of an FMC. Book after book of women who are exceedingly clever, wily, funny, annoying, unscrupulous, holier-than-thou, principled, selfish, courageous, slippery, preachy, rigid, witty, mean-spirited, inflexible, difficult, hedonistic, and on and on and on. I love every single one of them dearly, and each one defies tidy description. Not once did it occur to me to ask if they were “likeable.”4 I just liked them because they were genuinely interesting, a truly rare quality in a romance-environment that seems increasingly vested in FMCs as softly misshapen projective objects or mouthpieces for an author’s personal manifesto on femininity, rather than layered and fully-formed characters in their own right. Melanthe and Maddy and Margaret and Eluned are FMCs you can sink your fucking teeth into. Characters containing whole worlds within them, entire lives that extend beyond the first and last pages of their books. To encounter them is to brush up against something living and breathing with the back of your hand, to feel their gasp against your fingers.

The word that kept coming to mind as I read these books was relentless. Kinsale and Kingston don’t give a flying fuck about making sure you keep up and know exactly what’s going on and feel safe and comfortable and tucked into your little bed as you read. They’re never going to tell you how you’re supposed to feel when you read their work. They write as they please and you run after them at breakneck speed, hoping your brain will be able to make sense of the needle they’re threading. Inevitably, because they are exceptionally skilled writers, you do. By the time I reached the end of One Burning Heart, I was, quite literally, breathless. Eluned of Fair, Bright, and Terrible entered a hall of fame reserved for very few FMCs in my entire romance reading history. I’m never going to forget what it felt like to read Melanthe’s plea to Ruck at the end of For My Lady’s Heart or Maddy’s cheeky, “‘Thou hast not guessed it yet?... I fear I’m only good enough to be thy duchess,” at the end of Flowers from the Storm. Magic, witchcraft, sorcery. It’s the very stuff that made me a romance reader, packed into four gorgeous books.

I don’t bring up Kinsale and Kingston as direct comparison points for Huang– they couldn’t be. I think their work meets entirely different needs and sometimes serves different audiences and requires different skills to develop. I am fiercely protective of the right for both Twisted Lies and One Burning Heart to exist in and be celebrated in romance, but it’s hard not to feel concerned about the fact that One Burning Heart is so lonely among 2024 releases. If one is to believe the gossip mill, publishers certainly aren’t interested in acquiring stuff like it, even as they fight to the death (to varying levels of success) to acquire poor imitations of Ana Huang’s work.

I’m going to keep grumbling about this issue as is my god-given right as a romance reader. For now, I still have a TBR to work through.

Romance is having a tough couple of weeks. First, it was that lady on tiktok talking about the importance of distinguishing between real literature and genre fiction1, then it was Kallmekris posting a ragebait youtube video about how a bunch of Booktok books (nearly all romance) are gross trash (for more on this, watch Grapie’s lovely youtube video about it), and then there was this sly dig in a profile of Rebecca Yarros in Elle Magazine2.

None of this is new. I’ve been a part of (lurking or engaging) online romance reading community for 4.5 years now, altogether, and some version of this take has emerged, zombie-fied, nearly monthly. It’s exhausting, but so are the rebuttals:

• Romance isn’t trash because it’s feminist: is it, always? And don’t no-true-scotsman me on this. Is romance inherently always feminist? I sure don’t think so.

• Romance isn’t trash because it healed my sexual trauma3: Well, okay. I’m glad, but I don’t think romance has to be medicinal to be worth keeping around nor do I think all romance is doing that for all readers.

• Romance isn’t trash because it isn’t porn: this one’s an interesting one– why are we so desperate to define ourselves in opposition to sex workers? Romance, to me, isn’t porn because romance readers and writers risk a lot less reputationally and interpersonally and bodily than sex workers do to make and be paid for porn. I also think that porn is poorly conceptually defined, slippery, and volatile– and I ultimately wouldn’t be upset if the cultural consensus was that yes, romance is porn because I don’t care to alienate myself from sex workers. The reality is that there are more areas for coalition building than separation between romance community and sex workers. Our fights are the same, our causes are the same, our enemies are the same.

• Romance isn’t trash because it’s written by women: oh brother. I don’t even want to touch this one. We know better by now, don’t we?

So how do we defend romance to people who don’t get it? We don’t. Or at least, I’m not particularly called to explain myself to people who aren’t a part of this space.

I find myself bored of the romance community’s attempts to justify its existence because I don’t think that appeals to unsympathetic parties are effective or useful. The idea that we can argue our way into being respected is naive and silly. More than that, I find myself frustrated by the idea that this specific kind of art needs to justify its existence more than any other. The emotions evoked by other forms of genre fiction aren’t under such close scrutiny because other genres are a little (just a little) less likely to make people horny, and being horny is dangerous. Being horny means you want.

The trouble with constantly engaging in a quest for romance’s recognition by an outside party is that it distracts us from having useful critical conversations in-community. Romance has so many issues right now: a slew of books wherein plot is substituted for “good vibes,” girlbossified protagonists, toothless intimate dynamics, an absence of decent spaces for criticism, craft issues, AI issues, ever-present race issues. When we’re constantly outsourcing frustration to third parties that don’t care to understand genre fiction, we rob ourselves of the chance to talk about interesting things. I don’t want to be talking about how a snobby critic called romance trashy, I want to be shouting from rooftops about how One Burning Heart by Elizabeth Kingston made me feel.

_____

A couple of years ago I was assigned a paper about sex work and moral crusades for school (Weitzer, 2020). The author names five core characteristics of a moral crusade4:

• Disproportionality: inflation of the magnitude and severity of a problem with claims that go well beyond the available evidence;

• Categorical conviction: crusaders insist that the problem exists precisely as they portray it, reject all counterclaims, and deny the existence of gray areas;

• Horror stories, in which the worst cases are privileged, described in detail, and presented as representative;

• Hostility toward at least some of the actors involved in the targeted activity, branding them as “folk devils”; and

• Framing of the problem as symptomatic of larger threats to the mores or to cherished institutions (Cohen 1972; Garland 2008; Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994).

Every time another person picks up ICEBREAKER by Hannah Grace, a book cursed with a fun cover and drowsy third act (sorry, it’s true, you could cut 150 pages and the book would be perfectly fine), and accuses it of being singlehandedly responsible for a generation of porn-addicted, brain-dead tween girls, I think of this paper again.

No one ever seems to be able to point to a real, living, breathing adolescent harmed by the supposed epidemic of mis-shelving Icebreaker. No one ever seems to consider that, rather than having these books pressed into their hands by sin-peddlers in their seedy neighborhood indie bookstore, teenagers might seek out explicitly sexual material of their own free will on God’s green internet because they are, again, horny. No one ever considers that a book in which the main characters engage in consensual, extremely pleasurable sex (truly, Stasi orgasms enough to power the state of Rhode Island) while wearing condoms may be fun and perfectly developmentally appropriate. We are all obsessed with the plight of hypothetical children encountering hypothetically harmful material in a hypothetical place where bare-minimum parenting, competent booksellers, informed teachers, and literate librarians do not exist. Won’t somebody please stop thinking of the children for like two seconds?

Putting aside the fact that well-meaning moral crusaders are handing book banners the language they need to suppress the creation of art and putting aside the fact that , conservatism is on the rise in a big, splashy, scary way, the harder pill to swallow is that sexual violence exists in the real world, in our real lives, and in the lives of teenagers. It exists on the Supreme Court and in the Oval Office and in boardrooms and in classrooms and a hundred other places that aren’t the pages of a book, which could never jump out and actually touch you, even if it upsets you. The rot of patriarchal violence is structural and inescapable. That is the panic, that is the thing we can’t solve for by banning books.

The difficulty with these kinds of things is that the second we give bad faith critics airtime (yes, even in this substack), we also enshrine them in some small way as legitimate. We draw eyes to these perspectives, we pick them apart, we treat them as if they are anything but a desperate gasp for views in this tense attention economy. I find myself needing to talk about this and complain about this to long-suffering friends and write about this and I also find myself desperately tired of it. Romance community co-constructs narratives about itself with (and in opposition to) media about romance community, and so we’re strapped in to the steaming hot take machine forever and ever and ever.

On the eve of booktok going away I am vaguely haunted by the spectre of every uninspired think piece published in a major publication about the community and, more specifically, the romance reading segment of it (though the other corners got weird flack too). The work of loving something deeply, for me, is to attempt to see it clearly and fully, something that a guest lecturer in an Elle Magazine profile is not qualified or able to do because they do not love romance. I’m not oblivious to the issues of romance community (on or off booktok). I love to complain about this place and its offerings, and will continue to do so at length, but I am weary of this windmill of bad takes, the feeling of swiping the algorithm and waiting for something to make me mad again. I’m nervous about careless people who hand book banners talking points. I’m annoyed by people’s feverish attempts to protect romance by sanctifying it. There are better ways to talk to each other on here. There have to be!

Anyways, next post is about all the stuff I have been loving in romance as antidote to this post.

At the nexus of those two thoughts was the idea to, possibly, serve a niche that wasn’t being served– to try to present an interview that I would want to read: sprawling, fun, exploratory, but also specific and attentive to the work romance novelists are putting into their art. I can’t thank Heather enough for agreeing to do this, for offering her incredible mind and time and energy to the task. She is, as you will see, the absolute coolest.

If you’re new to Heather’s work, I’d recommend giving Preferential Treatment (billionaire romance) or Cold Hearted (paranormal romance) a go first. You can follow most of this interview without having read everything, but we do make specific references, and spoilers abound for the Tooth and Claw series and Preferential Treatment in particular.

**A note about form: this interview happened over email, between September and December of this year. You’ll see a bit of back and forth between us, then a series of reactions from me. This is because I start with a few questions at a time and build accordingly in subsequent emails to offer a more conversational shape. Content has been edited ever so slightly for clarity, but this is pretty unvarnished altogether**

Merry Christmas, Reni and Mal. This one’s for you, my fellow fan club members. I hope this was a fun surprise for you <3

Content warnings for brief mentions of sexual violence and rape

S: Okay, to start off, I'd love to get a sense of your journey as a romance reader and writer: When and how did you start reading romance? What books were influential in developing your taste as a reader? As a writer?

H: I started reading romance at a fairly young age. Books like Gail Caron Levine's Ella Enchanted, Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness quartet, and all of Donna Jo Napoli's fairytale and mythology retellings introduced me to romance and romantic storylines, but I think I was twelve or thirteen when I read my first adult romance. I'd been curious about the bodice rippers my mom and aunties all had since I was a little kid, but I was forbidden from reading them. When our local library got a self-checkout machine, I sneakily borrowed Johanna Lindsey's Prisoner of My Desire, which is possibly the most bodice-ripping of all bodice rippers to cut your teeth on, but I was absolutely enthralled. From there, I read basically the library's entire collection of historical romances. For years, my only exposure to the romance genre was through historicals, and I read a lot of them. I eventually branched into contemporaries via Nora Roberts, whose book Northern Lights had a big impact on me as both reader and writer. And then, through Roberts's witchy romances, I discovered other paranormal romances, where Nalini Singh's Psy-Changeling series and Meljean Brook's Guardian series were hugely influential for me.

The books I loved reading are the same books that have had a big influence on me as a writer. If I had to name a specific book, I really can't discount the influence of that first adult romance I read, Prisoner of My Desire. The content is shocking--both the heroine and the hero, at different points in the story, abduct the other, hold the other captive, and rape the other. Repeatedly. But that shocking premise doesn't come out of a vacuum. In a genre where the heroine's "surrender" to the hero's sexual conquest had been a staple, straight-up captivity and rape are not an absurd leap. Instead of being shocked, I think most readers who were familiar with (and fans of) the genre were probably kind of titillated that an author actually took it all the way there. On top of that, you get this total inversion of the genre's previously established norms, in that the heroine is the one who first abducts and rapes the hero. His doing likewise to her is retaliatory, rather than the character's natural male virility or whatever.

In the present, I wouldn't say that Prisoner of My Desire is one of my favorite books. I haven't read it in years. Possibly in decades. But the fact that Lindsey took the implications of the bodice rippers' premise and made them so unapologetically explicit, while simultaneously upending genre conventions, has stuck with me for a long time. On that first read, I had no context for how it compared to the rest of the genre, but I've since read hundreds of romances, and not many have impacted my understanding of the genre that strongly.

S: Thinking about taste, again - were there other pieces of romance media (music, TV, non romance-novels with romance plots, scenes in film) that stand out to you as particularly influential in how you think about romance?

H: When I was young, my mom, my grandma, and my summer babysitter were soap opera fans, and so I was constantly watching them too. My mom and grandma watched Days of our Lives, and my babysitter watched pretty much all of them. I don't know that I'd advise exposing young kids to the unhinged drama of daytime soaps, but it can definitely serve as an accelerated course in narrative structure, character archetypes, tropes, and relationship dynamics as a driver of conflict and plot. I think a big part of why soaps have succeeded for continuous decades, is because of how fundamentally they are grounded in character. They can take the most off-the-rails plot lines, and viewers will follow along, no matter how absurd, because they are deeply invested in the characters. To be fair, the absurdity is a part of the appeal, but it only works when the characters work. If viewers don't care about a character, then they'll hate when that character's storyline eats up airtime, no matter how crazy the story.

As I got older, I tended towards fantasy and speculative media with romance elements. I absolutely loved (and still love) films like Labyrinth and The Princess Bride. I loved paranormal shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed. In all of these, there's an adversarial element to the romantic relationships that heightens the stakes of them. It ranges in intensity, but in each case it's there, and it has significant impact on the plot. In the case of Labyrinth, the adversarial element is the primary driver of the plot. In the Princess Bride, it's the initial catalyst for the plot as well as the midpoint "turn." Meanwhile, in Buffy and Charmed, you frequently have "good" protagonists in relationships with "bad" antagonist characters. That tension creates so much momentum in the relationships, and entwines both the romance and the plot so that they propel each other.

Anime and animated series had a big impact on shaping my preferences, too. I loved Inuyasha, Escaflowne, and the Disney show Gargoyles. The influence there, for me, was the fascination with an otherworldly hero paired with a pragmatic heroine who gradually discovers her power over the course of the story. Similarly, I was obsessed with the video game Final Fantasy X (yet another portal fantasy) and its romantic subplot between Tidus, who takes the role of transported, out-of-their-element ingenue, and Yuna a powerful and respected summoner in the world Tidus is transported to. In all of these, there's also an element of loners or outsiders finding community and belonging when forced into a new world, which isn't technically romance, but echoes a lot of the emotional beats that romance fans find gratifying.

S: When did you start thinking that you could be a romance writer? When did you actually start putting pen to paper?

H: I've been writing basically since I could write. Since preschool, probably? Kindergarten? I remember writing tiny little stories, maybe three or four sentences, for my classmates on pieces of construction paper. I knew I wanted to be a writer from a pretty young age, but for a long time it was sort of an aspirational wish rather than something I believed was a realistic career goal. I grew up in a working class family in a very working class town where just about every adult I knew worked at a paper mill or a metal fabrication plant. Culturally, the idea of becoming a professional author was about as whimsical as wanting to be a circus performer. Obviously people do those things, but the support and modeling for how to pursue them just wasn't there—until the internet became ubiquitous.

I wrote with the secret hope of publishing throughout my childhood, teens, and early adulthood, but my courage kept failing me when it came time to actually let other people read what I had written. I'd always written some degree of romance into my stories, and I think that was a large part of the embarrassment for me. Somewhere in my late-twenties, I finally decided to self-publish something I'd written (Star Crossed) since self-publishing would allow me to be relatively anonymous. The reception was better than I'd expected, which gave me the courage to publish another. And then another. Each book I released was like exposure therapy, and now, instead of wanting to cringe out of my own skin, I'm actually excited to show people my writing and talk about it.

S: A lot of folks in romance seem to get their start in fandom and fanfiction writing-- was that your experience, at all?

H: Absolutely. I wrote fanfic in my teenage years, before AO3's existence, on livejournal.com and fanfiction.net. At different points in time, I was a very small fish in the Labyrinth, Gargoyles, and Inuyasha fandoms. Fanfiction wasn't a direct line to publication for me—none of my fics ever got me "discovered" and I haven't repurposed any of them into original works—but the anonymity of it allowed me to be brave enough to actually put my writing in front of an audience. And the experience of writing for an audience, plus writing for regular deadlines, and playing around with pre-existing characters and worlds was all helpful in the long run.

S: There’s so much here that I’ve been thinking about— I love how far-ranging your romance influences are (TV, film, anime, video games, and romance classics). A friend of mine, a librarian and part-time romance scholar (her incredibly good substack linked here), has a theory about how some of the most interesting perspectives in romance academia come from people who come to romance from other disciplines and bring those disciplinary influences to the niche of romance scholarship. For me, that’s especially evident in your work, which I find to be so referential in this really vast but specific way. For this next set of questions, I’d love to draw on some of the ways I think your influences show up in your writing.

First, Johanna Lindsay. I haven’t read Prisoner of My Desire myself (my bodice ripper reading is, unfortunately, sorely lacking but I’m on a quest to fix that), but I think the way you summarize the power exchange in the novel is really fascinating because power-play also feels so essential to your own writing. I don’t mean that rape is essential to your writing at all, I mean that in Preferential Treatment, there’s the financial power vs. sexual power dynamic between the MCs; in your Tooth & Claw trilogy, the element of the “hunt, capture, release,” is so central to the way the intimacy unfolds between the MCs; in Demon Lover, there’s the dynamic of a succubus extracting from a human— except he’s the subjugated party, really? I could go on and on. My point is, really, that I think power-play is a thing you are so incredibly skilled at. There’s such an awareness of how power is located in these macro structures but then converges in such an intimate way so as to shape these micro-interactions between two parties. My question is this— how do you think about exploring power between your MCs without having scales shift too far in one direction or another? Is that a calculation that you consciously make when you write? When so much of sex can feel contingent upon there being a power differential in order for desire to spark (is that an idea you even agree with— I don’t mean to speak for both of us!) [H: I do think this idea is very, very entrenched in the genre--especially in heterosexual pairings. It's not universal, but it is very prevalent.], how do you still make it feel safe and equitable and earnestly loving at the end of the day?

H: I think it's primarily subconscious, driven by my own personal preferences. As a reader, I really dislike romances in which male dominance and female submission are treated as the default, as if it's just an inherent truth of the nature of opposite-sex attraction. It's not something I'm actively on alert for, it's just a vibe that gives me the ick. Likewise, as a writer, I'm not super-consciously assessing my characters or my plots for the power balance--the character dynamics that I'm drawn to writing just naturally find a balance that suits my personal preferences.

Real-life power disparities (like wealth, social status, institutional authority, even physical stature) are a personal deterrent for me and so, quite often when I include them in my stories, they exist as barriers to the romance. In Preferential Treatment, Kate is put off by Mikhail's extreme wealth and the fact that he's her boss. In Hot Blooded, Tessa is likewise leery of the financial disparity between her and Amos and in one scene, she assumes an act of generosity on Amos's part is intended as manipulation. (It's not, Amos would never!) In both cases, it's the less "powerful" aspects of the male characters that end up endearing them to their romantic match. Mikhail's submissiveness as well as his very unglamorous childhood make him accessible and relatable and likable to Kate. Amos's introverted nerdiness makes Tessa trust him enough to open up with him, get to know him. Similarly, in Once Bitten, Jules is initially intimidated by Max's physical presence, to the extent that Max makes a conscious effort to be as physically constrained around her as he can--and it's only once she realizes that he's kind of nervous around her that she feels safe enough to engage more intentionally with him.

But none of those things were intentionally planned around the question of power balance. I think those elements just naturally emerge from my own inclinations. If there's an overt power disparity along the lines of wealth, status, etc., then in order to feel comfortable, I need it to be offset by the interpersonal dynamic. Whether that's actual, explicit submission from the more powerful character, or just shy nervousness, I need something that shows that the powerful character doesn't hold all the cards.

When it comes to sexual submission and dominance, and even non-sexual power imbalances, a crucial part of making everything feel equitable and loving comes down to establishing the personal agency of the submissive/weaker characters and acknowledging the vulnerabilities of the dominant/powerful characters. Just because a character likes to cede control during sex doesn't mean their characterization in every other aspect has to be shaped by that. Likewise, just because a character likes to take control during sexual encounters doesn't mean they're invulnerable, unselfconscious pillars of stoic perfection. Likewise, a character with more structural/institutional power isn't necessarily more emotionally/intellectually powerful than a character with less.

I also intentionally write characters who are aware of the implications of their power dynamic expanded to a macro level (with the exception of Mikhail, who has the emotional intelligence of a potted plant). I don't insert that awareness explicitly into the text in the form of dialogue or an internal monologue, but it does shape their choices and desires. My characters (generally) have a clear understanding of enthusiastic consent, are attentive to their partner's enjoyment, and the sexually dominant characters enjoy that dominance without desiring emotional control or psychological control over their partners in regular life.

A lot of that boils down to, like you said, play (S: see next q for context). Both partners are playing a game together. Even sexual dynamics without an explicit power exchange can be combative in a playful, fun way. And that playfulness needs to carry into the rest of the relationship--not necessarily with the associated power dynamics, but to show that these people enjoy being together both sexually and non-sexually. Playfulness can be more intimate than sex, in the sense that it's possible to have sex that only requires physical vulnerability, but playfulness requires intellectual and emotional openness. Characters who play together are establishing an emotional and intellectual bond that goes beyond just sexual desire, and so no matter how extreme the power exchange is in sexual moments, it's built on a foundation of characters who enjoy and respect each other as human beings (or at least, eventually come to do so).

S: To your point about Buffy, Princess Bride, Charmed, and Labyrinth. The adversarial element of your work is one of the things I’m so drawn to for the reasons that you describe. For me, the inflection point (the “turn,” you mention) is often the moment when I realize that a romance is doing something really magical. In your work, there’s often an element of play that seems to facilitate that turn and, specifically, to change the way characters interpret the intentions of their adversaries. In Cold Hearted, I’m thinking of the yarn battles. In Preferential Treatment there is, of course, the chess. In your first Lake Lenora book there’s the sort of playful sex games embedded into the renovation plot, so on and so forth. How do you think about integrating play into your work? Why is it such a prominent part of your work?

H: It's not really something I intentionally plan, but rather something that develops intuitively. It feels very natural to write playful interactions between characters that build to an emotional/sexual crescendo. I think it's partly cultural--I grew up in a social environment that wasn't super big on talking about feelings or overt demonstrations of affection, but games and other types of play were an incredibly important part of socializing and maintaining connections. As a kid, my parents played cards pretty much every weekend with a varying group of family and friends, sometimes at our house, often at someone else's. While the adults played cards, the assorted ramble of kids played together as well--roughhousing, or playing pretend, or sports, or games like Hide and Seek. I also played several sports throughout school and my CCD classes (Catholic catechism) from first to twelfth grade spent half of the class time playing group games like Sharks and Minnows--so I have a pretty ingrained appreciation for physical play, too. My high school friend group continued to play our own mash-up of Sardines and Ghost in the Graveyard every time we all got together, well into our twenties. Even as a 30-something adult, games and playing are important for how I connect with my family and friends. To this day, a visit to my parents means at least a few rounds of Hearts or Polish poker.

From a narrative perspective, I think that the physicality of things like the hunt/chase games in the Tooth & Claw series, and the mental interaction that comes games like chess in Preferential Treatment, are excellent parallels for the kind of physical/mental intimacy that readers want from a good romance. But as for why it's a prominent part of my work, I think it's mostly because it's a significant part of how I connect with people in my own life, and so it naturally finds expression in stories about personal connection.

S: I’m thinking about your anime/manga/animated series influences and your point about outsiders finding community. Pardon my cynicism, but in the real world, it can often feel like romantic relationships (or like, the heterosexual matrix of coupling up and having kids and becoming a nuclear family unit, more specifically) are more accomplished at severing the ties between people and alienating them further from their fellow person than bringing them closer to a community. Romance, too, can sometimes draw on these ideas (“this person is the only person who understands you, this person is the only person who can make you feel seen, this person is the only person you should spend all of your time with,”). Your work, to me, is pointedly the opposite, and the way you write about lonely people becoming a part of something bigger is something I have so much fondness for. How do you navigate writing a romantic relationship that retains primacy in the romance novel without forgoing connection to a broader community?

H: Let me join you in your cynicism, because I absolutely 100% agree that the "nuclear family" as the fundamental social unit only serves to break down communities into socially alienated, emotionally dysfunctional islands. That perspective is probably why a lot of my couples' happily-ever-afters involve connection to a wider community. It's hard for me to imagine a romantic happily-ever-after being sustained in isolation.

As for my approach to navigating both, I tend to think of the protagonists' romantic arc as the plot, while the community that the protagonists belong to (or are trying to integrate into) as being a crucial component of the overall world-building. It's a huge part of the setting. It forms a lot of the rules and motivations that govern the world that the main characters have to navigate. So, while the plot is driven by the protagonists' romance, the community they're connected to is necessarily involved. It also just feels very true-to-life for me. I have never been in a romantic relationship that wasn't somehow integrated into our surrounding network of family and friends and neighbors. I can't really imagine how a relationship devoid of those other connections would even function. On a personal level it strikes me as very claustrophobic and from a writing perspective it feels like hollow world-building.

S: I love that you mentioned Gargoyles. Selfishly, I have to ask— are you possibly interested in writing a monster romance of that variety in the future (gargoyles, dragons, krakens, etc.)? Or possibly making any forays into the omegaverse?

H: Yes to both! My roots are definitely in monster romance (if we can count aliens in the monster category) and I have many more ideas in that realm. No to krakens (I grew up on the Great Lakes, and as a freshwater kid, I find ocean creatures absolutely terrifying. Why must they look like that?? Why do they all come with built-in weaponry???) But I've been sitting on ideas for some other monster romances—including gargoyles. I've also been batting omegaverse ideas around for a couple years now. Nothing has grabbed me enough to flesh it out into a full story, but I dwell on it often enough that I think it's probably inevitable that I'll venture into the omegaverse in the future.

S: I loooove this so much. A couple of points I’m noodling on from this:

• Your point about how powerful or dominant or assertive characters make meaningful concessions and exercise restraint in such a way that it makes them more appealing - like maybe this is the appeal of the “cinnamon roll,” (Amos <3) or the “himbo,” (maybe? Mikhail? Or Max?) or any other permutation of “soft but dominant when it counts,” archetype that romance people seem to really love (myself included). It does often feel like people talk about power in ways that make it seem fundamentally and unavoidably unruly, poisonous, and frightening, but there’s something here about how there are a multiplicity of ways to be powerful and maybe something about how power is a tool that people can wield meaningfully-- especially when embedded in strong communities of people that keep you on your toes--, rather than being a thing that consumes indiscriminately.

• This bit, about play requiring a certain vulnerability, is a thing I think about allll the time, and I love how you talked about your upbringing being shaped by play. I feel a bit like play is one of those things that’s so essential to being human but gets lost so quickly in a late stage capitalist hellscape that doesn’t really prize non-profit-producing occupations. Being an adult who gets to play (somehow, some way, with someone) feels so rare and precious, and to see that restored (especially in a character like Grace from Cold Hearted, who is maybe relearning how to be a person again) in love is like, sublimely satisfying to read about.

• The distinction between romance as driving plot and community as driving worldbuilding is so good to me!!

• Very much agreed on the kraken front. I’ve read a couple, and they’ve been fine, but the idea of living underwater in a pretty bubble does fill me with dread and also, tentacles/suckers just don’t do a lot for me. I will say that the design for Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean was singularly persuasive, though. Very very excited for your future forays into other monsters and the omegaverse.

H: Oooh, yes, there is definitely a huge appeal in a character who has strength and/or power and therefore the capacity to abuse it, but chooses to be gentle and kind. I also think that some degree of power structure/delegation of authority is inherent to human society, and so communities that demand integrity from their people and hold them accountable for lapses in integrity are really crucial for fostering and preserving "good" power. (Good as in benevolent, not in regards to moral value.)

And oh gosh, yeah, Davy Jones stands as a *maybe* exception to my sea monster aversion, haha.

So your point about how power might shape a character’s choices and desires but isn’t necessarily a heavy feature of dialogue or an internal monologue is something that I think is particularly striking about your work-- I love that you’re often offering a vision of a better world (not devoid of harm, but one where life after harm-- a good life, even! exists) but it isn’t didactic or lecture-y. Like, a person doesn’t need to be reading work about abolition to understand that Jules’ third act frustration with Max in Once Bitten is a thing that isn’t motivated by punishment, but by a desire for the recognition of her feelings of pain and betrayal and and a desire for repair after rupture, but I think those moments can be really persuasive examples of restoration and abolitionist repair in action. (I lean on the T&C series heavily because I’ve got them basically memorized at this point, I’m also thinking about the small town romances, and Ashlyn’s character journey in particular). Could you speak a little about your own ideas of justice, harm, and repair and how they might shape your romance?

H: Broadly speaking, I believe very strongly in restorative justice over punitive or carceral systems (with the caveat that some individuals are beyond redemption, but that's a different conversation), and I apply that outlook to interpersonal relationships as well. Humans are imperfect and we all have acted out of carelessness, selfishness, or frustration, and have hurt others. That's an inevitable part of life. It's important that we are willing to make good faith efforts to right the wrongs we've done to others, but I also think that's dependent upon existing within a system that is able to balance holding offenders accountable with giving them the grace to repair the harm they've caused. When it comes to romance, I tend to include moments or even entire plots in which the couples have to navigate around hurt caused by one or both of them. For me, it shows that the characters are truly on each others' side. That when push comes to shove, they will choose to work together, to solve their problems together, to put aside ego in favor of understanding and empathy. The BIG one for this is Once Bitten, but I think it shows up throughout the Tooth & Claw series as well as in Preferential Treatment, and in smaller ways in my other books.

As you said, with regards to Once Bitten, Jules's anger with Max isn't driven by a desire for punishment. She doesn't want him to suffer. But she needs him to understand how she has suffered. He can't undo what's been done, but his sincere remorse and his determination to do better (and the actions he takes to do so) are what actually ameliorate the harm he's caused. His empathy and effort at amends is healing for her in ways that punishing him would never accomplish. And not only does he repair some of the harm he's done, he's also proving that she can trust him and be safe with him again.

I do think there are some wrongs that are unforgivable and unrecoverable, but that's up to the person or people who've been harmed, and everyone is going to have different thresholds for what they can forgive. Obviously, in a romance, when one character has grievously harmed another, the end goal is going to be forgiveness. But for that forgiveness to feel deserved, the offender has to be truly remorseful--not just because the other character is angry with them and they regret the rift that it's caused between them, but because they empathize with and understand the pain they've caused that character and truly wish they could undo the other character's suffering.

S: Kind of expanding on these worldbuilding questions - I sometimes feel like your writing is engaging with the dialectical method [for the uninitiated reader, I’m referring to the process by which opposing or contrasting viewpoints are considered and explored in pursuit of truth; in psychology, we use it to refer to talk about the contradiction and truth that one can want to accept themselves and pursue change]. You present a truth, that collectivism (in the form of a werewolf pack or a small town or an alien society) can be a powerful antidote to the loneliness inherent to being a human being. But you also explore the contradictions in that: that families and communities are messy and fraught and sometimes abusive. Your characters are frequently grappling with what it means to draw boundaries with loved ones, even as they crave closeness and the company of others (Tessa and her family in Hot Blooded, for example, or Kate and her sister in Preferential Treatment). It’s a really powerful thing because I feel like you don’t let us grow complacent as readers-- you often upend our expectations of what must essentially be true. Even in Once Bitten, I’m thinking about how you tee up the Cereus pack as this idyllic utopia but keep us on our toes-- is utopia at the cost of leaving your family-of-origin behind worth it? I’m waxing poetic about this because what I really want to ask you is this: How does your writing interact with your own views about pursuing intimacy in a weird, alienated world?

H: The increasing social disconnection of our world is something I think about a lot, and romance is a really, really great vehicle for exploring alternative worlds in which social connection is the primary consideration in our lives--in both good ways and bad. I'm not sure who to credit this to, but it's been suggested that the romance genre should be categorized under the speculative fiction umbrella alongside fantasy and sci-fi, and I don't totally disagree with that. I think a major part of the appeal of romance is that it offers a vision of what could be. We do live in a weird, alienated world, but we don't have to.

For me, the appeal of writing romance has always been about taking characters from a place of alienation and discontent to one of belonging, understanding, and connection. At different points in my life, I've felt trapped in a socially disconnected limbo, uncertain how to find or make meaningful connections, and reading romance always offered an escape from that. Now as a writer, I want to provide that same hope and respite in my stories. I think it's fair to say that most (or all?) of my characters begin their stories in a state of emotional isolation due to past trauma, or family dynamics, or neurodivergence, etc., but then go on to heal from the trauma, or find like-minded people, or escape whatever circumstances are keeping them in that state. That is pretty overtly what shapes my plots and character arcs when I'm planning out a story, in that moving characters from alienation/isolation to connection is the basic structural outline that I use. I think greater human connection is an important pursuit, I think it's necessary for our health and happiness as a society (and I say that as a deeply introverted person), and so that outlook inevitably has a big impact on the way I build characters and form stories.

S: I love the point you make about how ‘human connection is an important pursuit,’ in part because of the phrasing. ‘Pursuit,’ offers this element of incompleteness, like connection isn’t always possible, or it arrives under not-ideal circumstances, but it’s worth striving for anyway?

H: Absolutely! Life is motion, and I don't think there's a point with something like human connection where we can be like "We did it! All done! High five!" It's an ongoing action that is defined by its continued pursuit. Like, a river that doesn't flow isn't a river, it's a lake. (If that makes any sense?)

S: I also love the way you talk about remorse and reconnection because these ideas feel so crucial to the project of pursuing connection. Part of Max’s charm is that he just tries so hard. He’s persistent and steadfast with Jules in this very earnest way. The relationship that he and Jules have pre-transformation will never exist again, but there’s something new and special on the other end of their reconciliation that feels just as rich and satisfying.

I’m a fellow endorser of the romance-as-spec-fic thesis (in the hands of the right authors, such as yourself) in part because of your point about connection but also, I think (half-baked thought, still cooking) because sci-fi and other spec-fic can be quite dark and twisty and interested in the wayward paths that humans can take and build futures with– and romance is also very dextrous in this way. I wonder if this resonates for you, as someone who cut your teeth onbooks like Prisoner of My Desire. The speculative futures at work in romance are often optimistic because of the HEA but that optimism isn’t uncomplicated or simplistic or naive, and sometimes they aren’t optimistic at all. I think about this a bit with Preferential Treatment, where the relationship between Kate and Mikhail at the end is decidedly an HEA (and a very persuasive one), but there’s this little sliver of something else in their joy in the fact that Mikhail is still a billionaire, is still a member of the ruling class, is still someone who, structurally, wields so much power (which is a thing that bothers Kate!). The frictions inherent in that dynamic are really compelling for me as a recovering-cynic.

H: I like this a lot. I'm not sure how to articulate exactly the way it's making my synapses spark, but there's something really interesting there. I'm going to be ruminating on this for the foreseeable future.

S: What romance novels have you loved reading recently?

H: I've mostly been reading non-fiction lately--partly to research an idea that is still just a zygote, and partly because I read almost NOTHING BUT romance for the first three-quarters of the year, and I burnt myself out on it. But the romances I most recently read and loved included the Saint of Steel series by T. Kingfisher. I love T. Kingfisher's experienced, nuanced, emotionally rounded characters, and I'm always a sucker for well-developed fantasy worldbuilding. I also really enjoyed Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner, which was published in the 80s. It has been on my TBR for at least a decade, but I only just got around to reading it. It leans more on the "fantasy of manners" than the romance, but it is still a very fun, witty queer romance set in a world where bisexuality is basically the norm. I also did a comfort re-read of pretty much the entire Psy-Changeling series by Nalini Singh, which is just an all around excellent paranormal romance series.

S: What’s a romance novel you’ve been meaning to read but haven’t gotten to?

H: Oh man, there are so many. I've been mostly only buying physical copies of books for the last couple years, and so my TBR pile is literally a pile. It's a leaning tower (S: oh this is deeply relatable). Anyways, I think when the romance reading mood finally snatches me again (it's not far off--I feel it lurking), I'm going to read The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. I've been meaning to read it since it released, and I might finally get around to it before the year's out.

S: What’s the last non-romance novel you really liked/would recommend?

H: If I was trying to lure romance-only readers to another genre, I cannot recommend The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells highly enough. The main character is a genderless, asexual android, and is deeply traumatized (but in denial about it) and by necessity is very much a loner with social anxiety. But it develops really meaningful relationships with the other characters over the course of the series, and I think those emotional beats hit in exactly the same way that good romances do (S: consider me lured!!!). As for the non-romance novel that was my actual most recent love, The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez pulled me out of a big reading slump. I don't have a terribly coherent take on why I loved it. It's beautifully written, though it can be challenging to get into--it uses second-person POV and plays with structure in unconventional ways. But it's a really, really compelling story. I'm still picking at it mentally, months after reading it.

S: You’re releasing audiobooks!! What has that experience been like (both to produce an audiobook and to listen to someone else perform your work!)?

H: It's been really exciting! I have to admit, I am so, so fussy when it comes to narrator voices for audiobooks. I don't listen to audiobooks very often, mainly because of this fussiness. For my part, I mostly handed the reins over to Tantor, who produced the audiobooks. My primary involvement was in approving the casting of narrators, which allowed me to suggest narrators, but generally just required me to listen to audio samples and say yea or nay. Coming from self-pub, where you have to handle all the logistics of producing a book on your own, it was nice to hand most of that off for the audiobooks. At the end of all of that, hearing my books in audio was a bit surreal. My books exist so much in my head, and while I have paperback copies of all of them, I primarily interact with them as imaginings in my mind. So, having my own thoughts spoken back to me in another person's voice is kind of strange, but in a very, very cool way.

S: A few process questions:

1. Are you a plotter or a pantser?

H: Definitely both. I tend to start out with a single grain of an idea and just write from there, seeing where it goes until I run out of momentum. Very occasionally, that carries me through an entire book. But usually, I'll get the first act written before I have to take a step back, analyze what I've got, and develop a more structured outline so I can figure out where I'm actually going with this story, what needs filling in, what other things need to happen, how it's actually going to end, and how to get to that ending. And then that outline guides me for the rest of the process.

2. Are you usually working on one thing at a time or juggling a few projects at once?

H: I will often jump between projects until one really grabs me. Once it does, I lock into that story until it's finished. After it's finished, if I don't have a solid plan in mind for my next book, I'll go back to bouncing between projects. But at that stage I'm mostly just trying to figure out what I actually want to be writing.

S: If you could adapt any of your backlist into TV or film, which would it be? And do you have dream castings?

H: Of all my books, I think the Tooth & Claw series would probably be best-suited to a film or TV adaptation. Preferential Treatment would be really great, but I don't think I'd trust a corporate interest to faithfully adapt it. As for casting, I never know who actors are except for the most insanely famous ones, so I'd be terrible at coming up with my own choices there. But if I had any creative control it'd be: 1. Don't age down my characters. 2. Don't white-wash my non-white characters. 3. Cast actors with real, human-looking faces.

S: Which book has been your favorite to write?

H: I don't think I have one particular book that was a favorite to write. Preferential Treatment was probably the easiest for me to write--it was one of the very few books where it just flowed from initial idea to The End and I only had to do minimal outlining because it was pretty much entirely formed in my head from the get go. At the same time, I feared I was setting myself up to be chased out of the subgenre with pitchforks, so I actually sat on it for a while after it was finished, debating as to whether I should make certain changes. In the end, I didn't make the changes, and I'm glad that I didn't. [S: cannot express how much I am also glad you didn’t make changes– I love that book exactly as it is!!]

S: Which characters do you feel closest to? Which ones have been most challenging?

H: Most of my main characters have some element of me in them. It's impossible not to. But, at the time in my life when I wrote Cold Hearted, Grace is probably the closest I've come to writing myself into a story. Tessa from Hot Blooded was a really personal character as well. The character I find most distinct from myself is probably Theyma from Heart Song. Her background is totally different from mine--she came up in extreme poverty, became insanely famous because of her talent, and had the beauty and charisma to attract the attention of an incredibly powerful man. And then, in absolutely horrible circumstances (her marriage/enslavement), she had the cunning and courage to maneuver her way out. In the same circumstances, I truly don't think I'd be smart enough or brave enough to do what she did. I don't think most people would. The challenge of writing Theyma was to create a character who had that epic backstory, and who would believably plan and execute such a dangerous escape, but who would still feel like a real, vulnerable, emotionally nuanced person.

S: Twice Shy! I have to ask! How are you feeling about it?

H: Optimistic! I was grappling with the idea that maybe I just had to throw in the towel and release the version I was unhappy with when I hit on a change that renewed my enthusiasm for the rewrites. In theory, it's not a massive change, but it impacts pretty much every scene, so it requires a full rewrite. It's like I've baked a cake with too many eggs. Once the cake is baked, I can't just fish the extra egg out. I've got to redo the batter from scratch to have less egg. The good news is, I've already made the cake once, so the second time around should go a lot faster.

S: I loved your serial-fantasy novel1 in part for the content, but also because the format* was so delightful (waking up to a chapter of a romance novel is, in my book, a meditative practice). Any plans to do something like that again?

H: Yes, absolutely! I'm actually toying with the idea of serializing every book in that series. I loved sending out chapters and getting to sort of read along with my readers. I'm not 100% committed to another serial yet, but I know if I do it, it'll probably be on a different platform, rather than through my newsletter. I have to finish rewrites on Twice Shy, but once I'm done there, I'll be turning my attention to the next book in the Wild Magic series, and I'll figure out if and how I'm going to serialize it.

Thanks for reading, y’all! And feel free to leave other qs for HG in the comments if you’d like— no guarantees on responses, but I’d love to pass them on to her if folks have them.

• decolonizepalestine.com which my mutual leen (@vivafalastinleen) - TikTok shared and has been indispensable to me

• my mutual Cat’s substack with a digest of good reading material

  cat on the internet

  & how do we bear witness? & how do we go on?

  “The moment we face now is apocalyptic, the engines of destruction roaring at our gates and in our skies. Each moment is an atrocity. Genocide has begun. But Israel is mistaken if it believes this will be the final word. Palestine will live.“ — Sarah Aziza…

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  3 years ago · 7 likes · cat

• my mutual Mallorie has been posting useful daily political actions to take (CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVE!)

• Ismatu’s reflections on drugs, fasting, and liberation (among other things) have been really incredible reads for me at the moment

I’ve been reflecting a lot on grief recently. My roommate’s cat Mr. Fitzerman (Fitz, for short, Mister Baby, to me) passed away— he was somewhere between 12-15 years old and diabetic and had glaucoma. He had cloudy green eyes and a pink nose and orange fur. He moved very slowly and didn’t jump very high and didn’t play with many toys, besides a little stuffed pickle toy. Our wifi is named “pickle boy” because of it. We called him Benjamin Button because he had a funny way of being very old and very kitten-like all at once. He loved to press his forehead against my arm while I read on the couch. It’s been a couple of weeks, and I still look for him outside the bathroom door or tucked against my door or under my desk when I’m working. He had a bad habit of dragging his water bowl across the entryway hall, so we were constantly mopping up his drinking water before it would rot our wood floors. Our rug was always collecting enough cat hair to make a sturdy coat, and now it isn’t. It was impossible to sweep and mop effectively enough to rid ourselves of the litter he tracked everywhere. The kitchen always smelled a little, no matter how freshly scooped the litterbox was. I miss all of these inconveniences desperately. Our doormat is a long, skinny mat with a long, skinny orange cat printed on it, and I want to cry a little every time I cross the threshold into our home. I only knew him for a few months, but I loved him very much.

These feelings have pushed all of the other grief in me right to the surface. I wrote about this last summer, but my grandmother passed in June of 2022 and the experience of watching her pass and dealing with her death cleaved me open. Some natural fault line opened in my chest, and every long-concealed part of me spilled out of the seams, exposed for easy viewing, vulnerable to the open air. Since then, I’ve been in a lot of therapy and a lot of grief group sessions and been loved by a lot of wonderful people and the thing I’ve discerned from it all, a year and a half later, is that the grief doesn’t ever really go away. It doesn’t go away and it shouldn’t go away and it shows up right beside me and takes my hand when I am laughing or crossing the street or I hear a Mitski song or am reading or writing or breathing or doing any number of normal human things. In the early days, I would experience joy and then feel the sharp tack of guilt and shame— how callous of me to be happy when someone I love has died, how silly!

I bring this up in the context of Palestine because I’ve seen a lot online from allies about the “burnout” of doing something like bearing witness to a genocide, and the calls after to take care of our bodies by looking away or logging off or taking a break. There’s a flippant, angry part of me that feels called to say that those who risk the least have the most to say about self-care in these moments, and I stand by that. There’s something desperately cowardly about how loudly these people pontificate about shielding themselves from any discomfort from the safety of their homes at the hearts of the imperial core. There’s something unbelievably tiresome about the way that people who risk nothing seek moral absolution from others. But I’m not speaking to them. I am, very intentionally, not speaking to zionists or those complicit in their violence through measured silence. I read Fanon. Seeking recognition from the oppressor, from those who would do our killing, is not a good use of my energy or time.

What I do want to do is explore this feeling for people who are more earnestly and truly engaging with Palestinian liberation. What I’m getting at is that I think bearing witness to suffering and feeling the full mess of grief that comes with it is a deeply powerful, liberatory thing. I think it hurts, and that feeling pain and discomfort is okay, and I think we should keep our eyes open anyway.

I’m reminded of a line by Jasmine Syedullah from an edited volume on the politics of care that a former professor compiled— this is about teaching and abolition:

“At the level of the body, especially in positions of professional academic achievement, I feel how dissociated we are from feeling connected, from feeling ourselves and feeling each other. Privileging fear and competition over fellowship or unity is an act of self-betrayal, one in which we default to practices of abstraction and isolation over the truth that we are all embodied, and therefore, ‘managing’ feelings of harm, internalizing and rationalizing experiences of violence, bypassing opportunities to hold each other accountable, too closed off to lean into generative confrontation or conflict as a collective. To move closer towards a feeling-sense of abolition’s transformative effects, we have to meet this moment from the feet up, grounded by the willful and receptive vulnerability of Lorde’s ‘not knowing what was coming next,’ to show up in professional, intimate, and congregational spaces with an eye towards the possibility of cultivating refuge and repair (Lorde, 1981, p. 726).”

There’s a lot about that quote I find compelling— the reference to “feeling-sense,” and “receptive vulnerability.” In my read, Syedullah is inviting us to challenge our cultural scripts of lofty intellectualism and personal emotional silos. She attends to the uncertainty of liberatory, abolitionist work as the root of transformation. She guides us towards solidarity. The openings that grief, uncertainty, and vulnerability make in our skin are a means of reaching towards others, of slipping towards each other, rather than apart. In her own words, “[abolition] muddies the solid ground of self-preservation and demands we protect ourselves by reaching out for each other, for roots, for rafts, for all of us or none.”

Earlier in the same piece, Sydeullah references Ashon Crawley’s writing on tenderness in response to Ross Gay’s poem about Eric Garner. I think of this piece from that reading often: “In this time of crisis. I want to grow things, to see things flower and unfurl daily, to see buds break from soil and begin to breathe. I want to be open to emerging from this with delight and softness.”

I don’t know where I’m going with this, precisely. I’m thinking about Fitz and I’m thinking about Animal Friends Shelter cat sanctuary in Gaza and what a tremendous act of love it is to care for stray cats even when your own safety is so precarious. I’m thinking of how hard people are working to excavate people they don’t even know from under mountains of rubble. I’m thinking of doctors performing surgeries with phone lights, in crumbling hallways. I’m thinking of the nurse who hugged me in the ICU hallway when my grandmother was taken off her ventilator. I’m thinking of Motaz Azaiza’s Instagram bio.

I’m thinking of how hard this hurts to watch, how profoundly angry it makes me, and how much it is reminding me how good people are to each other when it really counts, how deeply we are capable of loving strangers. I’m thinking of how our attention and care is the very least and, somehow, the very most we can offer people who are experiencing the worst imaginable suffering. I’m thinking about Ashon Crawley’s writing again—

“To tend to and be tender with annuals and perennials and biennials and shrubs and bushes and seedlings and weeds and trees and trees and trees is not only about building the capacity to breathe; it is also about sensual range that the flesh feels and imagines, and being tender thus becomes the occasion for a community to come to gather, to gather around sight and touch and taste and smell and the sound of the rustling of the beautifully planted, gently placed lives.”

I mentioned, earlier, feeling guilt when grief appeared and reminded me of my loss. I don’t entirely feel this way anymore, mostly because I don’t fear the grief anymore, really. It feels more like an old friend that visits me when I’m expecting it least— a little like the beginning of that Dickinson poem:

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –

Losing my grandmother didn’t necessarily make me religious or even particularly spiritual, but it certainly altered the way I think and feel on a level I still can’t quite articulate. I think it was the feeling of my second body crashing into my first, the convergence of my porous self into the bordered one, the forcible reminder that we are all knotted together at our roots, and that the pain we feel when one root is attacked or clipped is keenly felt. In this way, grief is also connective tissue. An aching joint that binds me to my body, but to other bodies too.

I think I’m just feeling called to explore this wound that many of us are nervously prodding, to invite us to see grief as an opening towards the world, rather than a demand to close up and shield ourselves. I think I’m feeling like tenderness is the only way through. There’s something necessary about the cleaving of grief, something about how cracking wide open lets the light in.

thx to my friend nineesha who talked me through this newsletter a few days ago, lucky to be loved by people like you