On more than one occasion — usually while hanging out with fellow romance writers over dinner during a conference — the topic turns to the first romance novel(s) you ever read.
I know I am not alone when I admit that I read my first serious romance novels as a teenager. These were not the YA romances of today, but serious adult romance novels. My best friend gave them to me for my 14th birthday in 1979. I even remember the authors’ names, though not the titles. The authors were Charlotte Lamb and Violet Winspear. After those first two books, I was addicted. Every penny of my babysitting money went to buying every new Harlequin Romance and Harlequin Presents novel each month.
For those of you not old enough to know about Harlequin books of the 70’s, let me tell you a few things I learned from the hundreds of books I devoured between my acquisition of those first two books in 1979 and my entry into university in 1983.
I learned a bit about race car drivers, mercenaries who returned from vanishing in some some third world country jungle, and rich middle-aged businessmen and doctors who always seem to favor young innocent waifs who run off for a brief stint as a model in London, New York or Sydney, before the man shows up to propose and bring her home to become a good wife. I also picked up bits about life in medieval French chateaux, English village cottages, English manor houses, London flats, and Australian sheep and cattle stations.
During my childhood, I traveled with my family throughout the United States. Through those harlequin books I read as a teenager, I was able to go even farther — to all parts of England and Australia, with occasional jaunts to Canada, Italy, Greek Islands, or the more “cosmopolitan” American cities (New York, LA, San Francisco, or maybe New Orleans or Chicago). Occasionally I went with the characters as they took jaunts to the Welsh or Cornish coast, if the story was set in England, or to Perth if the story was set in Australia. This was before the heyday of the Texas books, which is too bad really because as a born and bred Oklahoman I probably would have stayed a lot closer to home longer if I hadn’t been dying to see all of Europe and the rest of the world as soon as possible.
Then there were the cars. I blame Harlequin for my long-held but never indulged fascination with Jaguars and Range Rovers. Those are fantasy cars. In real life, they don’t even work that well (or often haven’t), so I stick with Saabs and convertible VW bugs.
I imagine that by now those of you who are still reading are scratching your heads and saying, “wait a minute, what about the romance story?” Yes, I read for that, too. I loved all those big strong, silent men who — in spite of all sorts of differences — loved these beautiful young women so completely. My heart broke for the heroine every time the story hit the big black moment. Far too often during the summer months I stayed up until 2am so that I could finish books (a habit I’ve never been able to break). I read an entire book in a day because I had to get to the happy ending.
I also learned from those early books that those middle-aged men all preferred to wed innocent young virgins. While for some small segment of middle-aged men, that may well be true, I knew men in real life had more respect for women’s intellects than showed up in those gothic stories.
I liked reading about these characters and their worlds even though I knew that the entire idea of men falling for malleable young innocents was a load of crap. Then, I got sucked into all those serious literature and writing classes. I spent all my free time reading classics, feminist fiction, and serious literary fiction. My writing time was split among my journalism classes, some creative writing that stayed firmly in the literary realm, and and writing essays. As you might imagine, during that time I stopped reading romance novels. I didn’t pick up a single romance novel between 1983 and 1998.
Those of you who know me have heard my tales of the fiction I wrote during those dozen years. I stuck with short stories, many of them dark and filled with an erratic collection of literary devices. As a college student, I wrote some bizarre stories involving coffee cans and one somewhat biographical story about the eating disorder I fought won when I was about twenty. A few years later I wrote what I guess could be called my first attempts at women’s fiction, but I realized something was missing from those stories and I soon gave up that effort at my first full-length novel because I couldn’t figure out where it was going. Writing those stories wasn’t exciting or even fulfilling for me.
Then, as I was going through the horrible breakup of a long-term relationship that included finding a new place to live (I guess what grandma said about the cow and the free milk was true after all!), my mother gave me some contemporary romance novels. This is significant in a couple ways. First, while she hadn’t ever condemned my reading of romance novels, I always thought my mother didn’t understand them. She was a “serious literature” person, but she allowed us to read anything we wanted (including the books of the movies we couldn’t see yet because we were too young). Second, the contemporary novels of 1998 were very different from those harlequins I read in 1979. The women were strong, independent career women like me. The men had emotions that they — imagine this — SHARED with the heroine. Not immediately, of course, but eventually.
The genre had evolved so much that these powerful women-oriented books are filled with characters and story lines that encourage women to be strong, free-thinking individuals who protect themselves from the sort of men who might seek to control and hurt them. They still manage to find love while being themselves. Actually, good character development in a modern romance novel requires the heroine to be true to herself in order to find love. There’s a message I can and will proudly share with women of today and tomorrow.
Romance fiction of today has amazing, strong characters and interesting plots. Sometimes, particularly in the sort of paranormal fantasy books I love most, they take you to fabulous worlds, too.
Losing oneself in a good book has never been so much fun!
