Happily Ever After: Catherine Roach's thoughts on the endings of romance novels

The third, and last, in my series of posts on Catherine M. Roach's Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture focuses, fittingly, on the endings of romance novels (see posts #1 and #2 here and here). "In romance, the ending is crucial," Roach notes in the introduction of her book's final chapter (165). That that ending be a happy one has become not just a given, but one of the key parts of the definition of the genre as a whole. Romance authors whom Roach interviewed "view the ending as a contract they have with their readers: No matter how wounded the characters are by plot conflicts in a book's middle, all will be well by the end" (166). What is the larger cultural meaning of the romance novel's HEA, or "happily ever after"?

Roach's answer is two-fold:

(1) People have faith in love. The romance story functions similarly to a religious belief system that offers guidance on the end goal of how to live a good and worthy life

(2) The romance story is a reparation fantasy of the end of patriarchy. In this fantasy, the romance hero stands in for patriarchy itself in a vision wherein gender unfairness is repaired and all works out. (167)

I'm completely on board with claim #1. Romance, at least for many women, has become "the Highest Good," a replacement for (or, perhaps a supplement to?) Christianity, a religion that has been in steady decline in the West and the North since the 18th century (see chart at right). Traditional romance novels certainly demonstrate a "faith in the healing power of love" (169). And even romances that eschew the romantic love heals lovers paradigm do share with their less progressive counterparts an "underlying conviction" in "the power of love to make the world a better place" (169). In almost all romance novels, to love romantically is to want to strive to be a better person, a kinder person, a person who does good, rather than harm, both within the romantic relationship and without, in the greater world. 

Claim #2, though, feels more iffy to me. To make her argument, Roach uses/revises the theoretical model constructed by literary critic Leslie Fielder in his famous essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" As Roach notes, Fielder's essay is

essentially about the literature of white male America as a homosocial reparation fantasy for racism. In this fantasy, the predations of racism are repaired through an interracial buddy story, a narrative of a white male and a colored male who share friendship and brotherly love. The story is offered with remorse and affection on the part of whites and read with pleasure by them, partly because the friendship offered by the characters of color implies forgiveness and absolution for white people's acts and attitudes of racism. (177)

Roach takes Fielder's model and turns it on its head, suggesting that the central fantasy of romance novels is offered not by the oppressors, but by the oppressed; not by the racists, but by the women who have been subject to patriarchy's sexism. Instead of a friendship and brotherly love of the oppressed, romance offers the emotional and sexual love of the oppressor: the "myth of the male beloved." In Roach's interpretation, the mythical male beloved figure, "the alpha male, the patriarch—loves with tenderness, devotion, and sensitivity, even while maintaining his alpha ways" (177). But not really. Because, Roach asserts, "the core appeal of romance fiction is this fantasy of the end of patriarchy in which the alpha male hero is revealed as the submissive"—submissive to the female, and submissive to a more feminine conception of gender relations, a conception based on love and connection (178, emphasis added).

When I was drafting the previous sentence, I initially added "not on dominance and oppression" to its end. But then I began to wonder: doesn't the idea of male "submission" by necessity imply female "dominance"? Can the hero be "submissive" by agreeing to a relationship that refuses a "dominant/submissive" binary? And if there is no refusal of a dominant/submissive binary, is there any real challenge to patriarchy?

This idea of alpha male submission echoes the arguments of many of the romance writers who contributed essays to Jayne Ann Krentz's 1992 essay collection, Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women. These writers argued that romance's appeal lies in the way it inverts traditional gendered power relations:

Why is this ending so satisfying? Not only because love has triumphed, but because he has capitulated and she has won. He's willing, finally and at the very last minute and after much resistance, to do anything to keep her with him. This is the ultimate fantasy, the quintessential escapist fare. (Doreen Owens Malik, "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: The Hero as Challenge," 76)

He is the mightiest of the mighty, the strongest of the strong. But, because he has been tamed by our heroine, because she exerts such a powerful emotional stranglehold over him, his almost superhuman physical strength is now hers to command (Susan Elizabeth Phillips, "The Romance and the Empowerment of Women," 58).

The hero must be part villain or else he won't be much of a challenge for a strong woman. The heroine must put herself at risk with him if the story is to achieve the level of excitement and the particular sense of danger that only a classic romance can provide.

     And the flat truth is that you don't get much of a challenge for a heroine from a sensitive, understanding, right-thinking "modern" man who is part therapist, part best friend, and thoroughly tamed from the start. (Jayne Ann Krentz, "Trying to Tame the Romance," 108-109).

In the minds of many of the contributors to Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, for a heroine to "win," a hero must lose: he must "capitulate," he must be "tamed." And in the books of many romance writers, such a vision of female winners and male losers still remains.

But many 21st century romance novels do not rely on this dominance/submission model. Instead, they push for "equality" between the hero and heroine, a relationship in which power is shared (and in the sexual realm, often played with), rather than wrested from the male by the female. I'm not certain how Roach's idea that romance is "a reparation fantasy of the end of patriarchy" applies to them.

Even if we limit her argument to just those novels in which gender relations are constructed as a win/lose, rather than a struggle toward equality and parity, I wonder just how reparation "ends" patriarchy? Roach takes the concept of "reparative reading" from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a type of reading in opposition to "paranoid reading," critical interpretation focused on uncovering "the violence hidden in texts and culture," concerned about "oppression and false consciousness," and working to "leverage the power of exposing injustice to bring about positive change" (178). In contrast, reparative reading is less about suspicion, and more about love: "The desire of the reparative impulse is to repair an object of relationship—say, the readers' relationship to the hero or heroine—that will then have resources to offer the self" (178).

What resources does romance offer the (female) self? Roach argues that "Women readers 'extract sustenance' from romance novels in the imaginative play of repairing the alpha male and of restoring gender relations" (179).  This "repairing" of the alpha male "is one in which the domineering or uncaring patriarch becomes the good man" (182). A romance must still feature an alpha man, Roach suggests, because "if it is still a man's world out there, then for a woman to have a good man at her side is a good thing. A woman is safer from danger and has more resources to draw on, to the extent that she is in a committed relationship with, and thus protected and aided by, the good man" (182). This seems to contradict Roach's assertion that within the romance, patriarchy has "ended." The "good man" hero may no longer be sexist by book's end, but he is still enmeshed within, and benefits from, patriarchy, because patriarchy is a system, not an individual relationship. Both within and outside the book, patriarchy remains, no matter how "good" one's man becomes.

In discussing J. R. Ward's 2005 Dark Lover, Roach seems to comes to a similar conclusion: "The reader fantasy here is that patriarchy ends, yet patriarchy continues. In this end, you have the alpha-king for your own, since you have conquered him on the battlefield of love and taught him how to love" (187). There seems to be a vital "and" missing here: "and, because patriarchy continues, he still can behave with impunity like an alpha-hole to everyone else, and still reap the benefits of male power and privilege."

So yes, the traditional romance novel, invested in a binary conception of romantic power relations, does invoke a fantasy of female empowerment. But while gender unfairness may be repaired on the level of the individual couple, through the alpha male's "submission" to his beloved female, patriarchy as a whole has hardly been "ended." Because patriarchy isn't just about relations between an individual man and woman; it is "the predominance of men in positions of power and influence in society, with culture values and norms favouring men" (OED online). The fantasy, then, for a woman reader of traditional alpha male romance seems less about imagining the end of the system of patriarchy, and more about dreaming of becoming its unlikely beneficiary.

Or perhaps I am just too much of a "paranoid reader" to appreciate Roach's argument?

I hope you all have a chance to take a look at Roach's intelligent, provocative book, and talking about (and debating) its fascinating theories.

Photo credits:

Christianity chart: Pew Research Center, Religion and Public Life

Catherine M. Roach

Happily Ever After

The Romance Story in Popular Culture

Indiana University Press, 2016

The Merits of Romance: A Debate from Catherine M. Roach's HAPPILY EVER AFTER

In between reading romance novels, I've been gradually making my way through Catherine M. Roach's academic study of the genre, Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture (see my post about the book's opening chapter here). Because Roach is in the unusual (although not entirely unique) position of being both a scholar and a writer of romance, her nonfiction study includes more than just straightforward analyses of individual books, or analysis of the romance genre as a whole. Instead, academically-oriented chapters are sandwiched between chapters that Roach describes as "more narrative in style, with passages of my own romance writing and with stories based on my time spent among romance communities of readers and authors" (15). One of the most curious of these chapters is Chapter 3, "Notes from the Imagination: Reading Romance Writing." The chapter stages an imaginary debate between the author's two romance-related identities: Catherine Roach, gender and cultural studies professor, and Catherine LaRoche, historical romance author.

The idea behind such a "performative ethnography," Roach argues in the introduction to this chapter, is to allow the reader to "have fun" rather than "drowning you in jargon and theory" (48). By making fun not only of herself, but of "certain conventions of sober analysis," Roach hopes to destabilize the "insider/outsider boundaries that can make conversation—serious conversation—difficult across the divide between academics and the general public" (48).

I have to admit, though, that I found myself frowning more often than laughing while reading Chapter 3, and not quite knowing why. Was I just not getting into the spirit of Roach's self-described "tomfoolery"? Or was there something else going on here?

When I went back to re-read the chapter, I found my eye caught this time not by the content of Roach and LaRoche's arguments, but by the stage directions and voice intonations Roche gives each of her two "identities" to perform. Can you tell which Roach/LaRoche's identity goes with which set of stage directions?

Debator A	Debator B
sneering tone	sighing
more sneering	sounds of slurping coffee
sound of coffee cup slamming down	squealing noisily
bewildered	sounds of chair scraping
annoyed	pouting, sitting back down
sanctimoniously	sighing
whining	mockingly
grudgingly	pouting again
sarcastically	sounds of shuffling paper
with more sneer	laughing
bewildered, again	laughing
paper rustling noises that sound suspiciously like a woman fanning herself	sounds of slapping the table
humph	angrily
defensively
goadingly

(answer will appear in comment section below at the end of the day)

What stereotypes of romance writers, and of female academics, does each set of stage directions suggest?

Does deploying such stereotypes in the middle of a mock debate help call our attention to them? Or simply reproduce them? Can using them (and having readers notice you using them) help break down the "insider/outsider boundaries that can make conversation—serious conversation—difficult across the divide between academics and the general public" (48)? Or does it just invite readers to uncritically mock both sides?

The Romance Community on Film: LOVE BETWEEN THE COVERS

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a screening of a full rough cut of Love Between the Covers, a documentary that takes "an honest look at the amazing global community that romance writers and readers have built" (lovebetweenthecovers.com). Award-winning filmmaker Laurie Kahn (A Midwife's Tale; Tupperware!) notes on the newly-launched web site for Love that she has a special interest in exploring "communities of women who haven't been taken seriously (but should be), who deserve to be heard without being mocked." If ever a community of women fit such a bill, romance readers and writers surely do...

Kahn asked me and several local romance writers (the filmmaker works in eastern Massachusetts) to view the current "draft" of the film, and then to discuss it with her and with the film's editor, Bill Anderson. Laurie asked us not to give away any of the details of the film, but I feel safe in saying that Love Between the Covers gives a far less biased look at both the industry and at the (primarily women) who create or/and consume its wares (remember the "documentary" Guilty Pleasures, anyone?). I'm not sure which was more fun—sitting in Laurie and Bill's editing room, watching the rough cut on an oversized computer screen, or gathering around the fireplace in Laurie's living room, talking about the whys and wherefores of the filmmaker and editors' creative decisions, as well as the industry as a whole. Thanks, Laurie and Bill, for the invitation, and for listening to our feedback with such attention and care.

Patricia Grasso, me, Myretta Robens, and film editor Bill Andersen, drinking tea and exchanging ideas about
Laurie's film, Love Between the Covers

Laurie's project has been funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities (as well as a successful Kickstarter campaign), and, perhaps unsurprisingly, has been a target for grandstanding politicians eager to denounce the exploration of romance as a wasteful use of taxpayers' money. One Representative (a man, of course) actually introduced a bill in Congress seeking to defund the Popular Romance Project, the web site affiliated with the film (more details here). Though the bill has not been passed, Laurie reports that NEH funding for the PRP web site has been put on hold. Needless to say, any donations to help defray the expense of completing the film would be more than welcome.

When will you have a chance to see Love Between the Covers? Another sneak preview is being screened in February 2015, at the Library of Congress, as part of the Center for the Book's free conference,  "What is Love? Romance Fiction in the Digital Age". Laurie reports that the documentary will also be screened at film festivals across the country (and the world) in 2015, and that several television outlets have expressed interest. If the film comes to a city near you before it premieres on broadcast TV, I'd recommend you jump at the chance to take a look.

In the meantime, you can find Laurie and her work at the web sites The Popular Romance Project and Love Between the Covers, and at twitter at @LoveBTCfilm.

Challenge a Romance Doubter

In my post about last month's Princeton conference on the Popular Romance Author, I wrote of Professor Kay Mussell's challenge to scholars of the romance genre to question the popular assumption that all romance novels are the same, and that all romance = bad literature. Scholars certainly have a role to play in shifting common knowledge. But the burden doesn't need to rest only upon academia. Everyday readers of romance can play a role in such a project, too.

Do you know someone who likes to read other sorts of genre fiction, but who believes that romance is beneath him/her? That romance is badly written, or cloyingly sentimental, or oppressive to women? I challenge you to challenge that person—a colleague, a neighbor, a friend—to sit down and read a romance you recommend, then talk with you about the experience.

I recently found myself inadvertently in the midst of such a challenge. During the school year, several families in my neighborhood get together for dinner once a week. We began the tradition when our kids were toddlers, when we noticed that unlike the summer, when the kids were all out on the sidewalks and the street enjoying each others' company, they barely saw one another during the colder months. Initially, our weekly dinners served not only to give the neighborhood kids the chance to play together as a group once a week, but also gave harried parents a much-appreciated respite from cooking three out of four Wednesdays each month (host family cooks for all). Most important to us grown-ups, with only one or two parents needed to supervise the the toddling hordes, our weekly dinners gave us new parents a chance to engage in all-too-rare adult conversations, conversations about politics, sex, salacious gossip, and myriad other topics that we'd almost forgotten in the constant chatter about Big Bird, baby wipes, or whether a frozen bagel or an plastic ice teether worked best to soothe sore infant gums.

Over the years, we've come to share news about our work lives, too, and support each other through the ups and downs of our careers. My neighbors encouraged me during the difficult years of writing a dissertation with a small child vying for my attention, and, more recently, have heard about the ups and downs of my attempts to parlay my academic writing skills into the fiction-writing realm. Several months ago, somewhat to my surprise, one of my neighbors, an MIT grad working as a computer programmer, asked to read my current work in progress. After reading the chapters I sent him, he told me his reactions, but admitted that his unfamiliarity with romance fiction made it difficult for him to judge what I'd written. He asked if I could recommend an exemplar of the genre, so he could have a point of reference, and so critique my work more constructively.

I ran upstairs to my office, and plucked two historical romances off my shelf, one a classic, one a more recent favorite: Laura Kinsale's 1992 Flowers from the Storm and Cecilia Grant's 2013 A Woman Entangled. Though he seemed a bit embarrassed by the cover of Grant's novel, he thanked me politely and took both home.

Would my neighbor have read
the book if I'd given him this edition?

I wasn't sure whether he would actually read either one of the books, but one long business trip plane flight found him turning the pages of the Kinsale. And after he returned home, he kept reading. Last week, while still in the midst of the book, he told me how much he was enjoying the experience. He'd been particularly surprised by the depth of research that had gone into writing it. "Are you sure this wasn't really written by a man, pretending to be a woman?" he asked. If another one of my neighbors had said this, I would have known he was joking, just trying to yank my chain, but this man is of a more serious cast. "Did you really just say something that sexist?" I asked, much to our fellow neighbors' amusement, and perhaps a bit to his chagrin. "Well, I just didn't think a romance writer would be interested in finance, and the state of medicine at the time, or any of the other historical details in the book," he said, before the general conversation moved to another topic.

The next week, dinner was at his house, and we had the chance to talk more about reaction to the book before some of our other neighbors arrived, and later, during the dinner. He'd finished it by then, and told me again how much he'd enjoyed it. In fact, he started asking me questions and talking about details of plot that I, not having read the book in several years, did not even remember. His wife told me she'd never seen him so engaged by a work of fiction, or read a book so quickly. Though he felt the story veered more towards Maddy's point of view, he thought both Maddy and Jervaulx well-developed and compelling; the plot held his interest; and the historical details gave him a strong sense of place. He was a bit more cagey when I asked him about the romance aspects of the novel—a bit shy to discuss sex in mixed company? Or just not that interested in that aspect of the book?

At the end of dinner, I asked for my book back, and he handed me both the Kinsale and the Grant. When I asked if he wanted to hold on to A Woman Entangled, he shrugged, saying "Better not take the chance of ruining the experience by trying another." Was he, despite having read Flowers from the Storm, unpersuaded that romance in general might be better than he had assumed? Or was it that he no longer felt the need to read another romance? Or was it, as his wife suggested, the appearance of the half-clothed man on the cover of the Grant that gave him pause? ["I did enjoy the book but I probably won't make time to become a fan of romances or any other genre really. I read only a few books a year, a mix of fiction and nonfiction, and I don't expect that habit will change in the near future," he wrote to me later when I asked].

In return for giving me his reactions, he asked me for mine. In particular, he was curious about whether I considered Kinsale's book feminist. My gut reaction is both yes and no, but I'm going to have to go back and reread Flowers from the Storm more carefully with his question in mind.

I asked my neighbor if he would take a look at this post before I published it, to make sure I was accurately representing his views. After reading it, he sent me these two additional comments:

I thought at some points the book also caters shamelessly to stereotypical female cravings: handsome guy, bad boy needs to be straightened out, can't resist him, tough but tender, boss in bed, etc. "Emotional porn" came to mind. It's still a great book. In fact, part of its greatness is that it does those things so deftly and delicately.

In hindsight, it's clear from my reactions that I was giving the genre less credit than it deserves, or at least than Laura Kinsale deserves.


So, while the experience hasn't made a life-long romance reader out of my neighbor, I do believe it made him think a bit more about the assumptions he'd taken for granted about the genre I like to read, and the book I'm trying to write. The whole experience made me wonder: what would happen if romance readers each challenged one romance doubter to actually sit down and read an exemplar of the genre? Would the common knowledge about the genre of romance change?

Can you imagine extending such an invitation to a romance doubter you know? If you take up the challenge, I'd love to hear what book you choose, and how your romance doubter reacts...

Reporting from the Popular Romance Author Symposium

Apologies to all for not posting on Friday. Hotels that advertise "free Internet access" often leave out the fact that trying to maintain an online connection for more than two minutes at a time is next to impossible...

Due to technical difficulties, I'll be flipping posts this week, switching the book review to Friday, and posting about the doings at Princeton's Popular Romance Author Symposium today.

Much of the early academic writing about popular romance tended to lump all texts together, writing about romance as if it were one unified thing. Long after individual romance authors broke free from publishers' category lines and established themselves as marketable in themselves, scholarship is finally beginning to take note. The Popular Romance Author Symposium, organized by scholar An Goris, was the first broadscale attempt to bring scholars and writers together to attempt to explore the implications of this shift, and to attempt to determine what being a romance author might have in common with being an author of any other popular genre fiction, and what might be unique about romance authorship in particular.

The Symposium opened on Thursday afternoon with two keynote speeches, one by a romance scholar and one by a popular romance author. Kay Mussell, author of several studies on romance and its authors, set the tone for the conference to follow by noting that despite recent scholarly work to the contrary, the non-romance reader still tends to view romance as monolithic: all romance is the same, and all romance is bad. After listing many of the reasons why this misperception still abounds, Mussell called on her fellow scholars to help foster a more nuanced view of romance, and to communicate that view more widely, to push aside common knowledge about romance founded on outdated, flawed scholarship. She shared ten concrete recommendations for scholars and reviewers (I think I missed one or two as I rushed to take notes—other attendees, please do add any I missed below):

• Don't endorse a monolithic view of romance; when you speak or write of the field, make sure to emphasize the wide variety of styles, subgenres, and levels of writing out there

• Use the term "romance fiction" or "romance novels" rather than simply "romance," to emphasize that a work of romance is a crafted literary accomplishment (apparently other popular genre awards deem their works "novels" or "fiction," in contrast to the RITA awards, which only use the term "romance")

• Question the assumptions lurking behind the denigrating questions people tend to ask about romance, rather than answering the denigrating questions themselves

• Make clear you're speaking from a deep knowledge of the genre

• Make comparisons with other genres

• Avoid defending the genre; work from the assumption that the genre is worth studying and discussing

• Refer to the history of the genre; discuss the ways romance has changed over time (to displace the monolithic assumption, see above)

• Show respect for both authors and readers

• Bring gender into the discussion: why is romance fiction, primarily written by and read by women,  looked down upon, while male-oriented popular fiction is deemed worthy?

Mussell's call to arms was followed by a talk by best-selling author Jennifer Crusie, who was asked to "talk about your career in terms of gender." Crusie claimed that she'd not thought of her career in gendered terms before (which I was quite surprised to hear, given the time she spent as a graduate student studying feminist literary theory), and proceeded to identify several ways that gender played both positive and negative roles in her career. She reminded us that in 1992, when she published her first romance novel, her publisher, Harlequin, controlled 82% of the market. If you wanted to be a romance writer twenty years ago, you didn't have much of an alternative to Harlequin. The company offered crummy financial recompense, but it did offer stability for its authors; Harlequin paid out royalties on a regular and timely basis, even if those checks were far smaller than those being sent to writers in other popular genres.

Harlequin also epitomized the "patriarchal publisher," Crusie noted, with a corporate mentality straight from the 1950s. This patriarchal mentality extended not only to the financial end of the company, but to the content of the books it published; that patriarchal attitude shaped the field of romance for decades.

Crusie broke with Harlequin when she refused to sign away her "moral rights" as an author (there's a law stating that no one can take something you've written, change it, and then still use your name and market it as if you had written it; Harlequin decided to insist that authors contractually sign away this right, so that they might change, edit, and repackage authors' works at will). Moving to another publisher, and becoming a "lead title" writer, came with its own share of difficulties, many of them gender-based, including speaking to the sales reps during sales conference, trying to convince them to read her book first as simply a story, and second as a romance, to get them to move beyond their assumption that a romance book could never do well in hardcover.

Though Crusie herself has not done much work in the area of e-texts, she ended her talk by noting the ways in which the e-book revolution has both opened doors and, in the way of most feminist gains, created more work, for women writers. Writers with rights reverted backlists may be making money, as are a select few new authors, but Crusie cautioned against writers assuming that everyone will make big bucks from the e-book market.

The evening concluded with a roundtable which included the keynote speakers, several other romance scholars, and writer/scholar Eloisa James/Mary Bly. For me, the most interesting part of the roundtable was the differences in how Crusie and James use online platforms. James has one persona on Facebook ("the super nice me"), another on Tumblr ("the younger, more sarcastic me"), and stopped blogging because she found it tapped too much of the imagination she needed to pour into her fiction. She sees these different personas as part of developing her brand, broadening her appeal to different subsets of her audience. In contrast, while Crusie was one of the first authors to create her own web site, she rarely uses other social media platforms (Crusie's business manager, familiar with her outspoken nature, forbid her to Tweet!), preferring to present one "self" to her fans via her blog, and to collaborate with them there. "You're too honest," James told Crusie, when Crusie questioned how James could craft such different personas. She also joked, not at all unkindly, that Crusie's investment in her blog might be one reason why none of the four manuscripts she's currently at work on have reached the completion point.

The roundtable ended with each participant being asked "What is the significance of the romance author?" Their answers:

• Kay Mussell: For romance readers, the author is far more memorable than the titles of her books. But to those outside the romance community, the romance author is either invisible or looked down on.

• An Goris: The romance author drives the genre, and she's a she

• April Allison: The authorial personal is itself a fiction, a product, and this is true of romance authors as much as it is of any other type of author

• Eloisa James: Romance authors do have value. Tons of us are making far more money than our husbands, and are supporting the entire publishing industry.

• Jennifer Crusie: The perception of the romance author is inextricably tied to the perception of women in general. As long as women are second-class citizens, romance will continue to be looked down upon by the public at large.

Sociologists Jo and Jen -- I took the picture!

Attendance on Thursday included a surprising mix of folks—best-selling print authors and self-publishing newbies, established literary scholars and critics at the beginning their careers, academics who study Literature, Popular Culture, Women's Studies, and even Sociology. The scholarly talks on Friday were given to a smaller sub-set of this audience, but maintained the intellectual rigor, welcoming good humor, and commitment to furthering the scholarly conversation about popular romance that formed the backbone of Thursday's presentations. I found the presentation by sociologists Jennifer Lois and Joanna Gregson, who discussed how romance authors respond to negative comments about their work and their genre, particularly interesting, as well as the many conversations we had about the relationship between the romance author and her/his fans.

Thanks to An Goris and William Gleason of Princeton, who worked incredibly hard to make this unusual symposium happen. It was a true treat to take part.

And thanks, too, to Jennifer Crusie, who smiled at this tongue-tied fangirl and generously shared her thoughts over Friday's lunch...



Illustration/photo credits:
Popular Romance Author Symposium
Kay Mussell: The University of Iowa Alumni Association
Jennifer Crusie: Writewell Academy
Jo Gregson and Jen Lois: Romance Sociology