Birth of a Romance Reader

We can set the blame for my romance addiction squarely on the head of my grandmother. (Though let's face it, I'm sure I would have gotten there on my own at some point.)

The summer I was thirteen, just about to turn fourteen, by grandmother came to visit us from where she lived in Florida (where all the Jewish grandparents went if they could). With her she brought a bag full to the brim of Harlequin romances. My mother, grandmother and I all read them, passing them along after we'd finished them.

I remember several of them fairly well, oddly enough. One was about an 18 year old girl whose father dies and leaves her under the guardianship of a smoldering thirty-something man with thick stubby lashes. It was pretty sexy, actually, but these days you'd never see that plot in a contemporary romance.

Then there was one by Violet Winspeare. Just to impress upon you how old-school these books were, the "heroine" was this beyond passive wimp of a woman who married a cold-hearted man for some reason of convenience I cannot now recall. She loved him even though there was no reason on earth she should, since he bullied her and slept with her in circumstances that are murky now but might reasonably have been called rape, though there was nothing graphic.

And yet I kept reading. Yes, I found some of it distasteful, and I knew that was not how men and women should be together, but my understanding of sex and romance was still vague enough that I ate up anything that had anything to do with them. I even went through all the (non-romance) books on the living room bookshelves looking for the sexy parts, and I found some good ones. It was quite an education.


But the weirdest romance I read was about a young woman, maybe mid or late 20's, whose older husband had just died when the book opened. The main thing was that in her marriage the man called the shots. She did what he wanted and he made the decisions. It was like this with the new, younger man who came into her life as well. That was just the way it was in this book's world. It wasn't an issue, just the belief system the main characters shared. Or the woman shared and the new guy had no interest in dismantling. All I can think is that the author felt the same way, so she wrote a book with characters that felt this way.

Nowadays that would be something two characters would role-play, something kinky to try in the bedroom. But that wasn't what this was. And I read it, bemused, confused, but still insatiably curious. The goofiest thing of all though was a scene in which the heroine takes a shower, then wraps the towel around her waist. She hears someone come in the house and walks into the hallway to see the hero standing there. They talk for a minute before she suddenly remembers that she's standing there bare-breasted.

It could happen to anyone, right? There you are, chatting with some guy, completely unaware that you're flashing your boobs.

God, those books. They were so wrong, and yet they were edited and published and sold to millions of women (and girls) around the world who gobbled them up.

Harlequins were my gateway drug.

Mind you, none of my grandmother's books were ever discussed between us that summer. What did my mother and grandmother, two of the strongest women I've ever known, think of them? I have no idea. We read them as if it were a secret, as if we weren't supposed to acknowledge we were doing it. Or maybe it was the fact that I was so young, and they had no idea how to talk about it. There were no graphic sex scenes, so it wasn't that, but ours was not a family that talked openly about those sorts of things. Of course, few are.

But then one day, when I was maybe seventeen, I walked into the kitchen with one of my romances and my mother, prompted by who knows what, said to me:

"You know it's not all stars and fireworks in real life."
"I know that," I said,  mortified.
I was a virgin, as she well knew, and I think she wanted to keep me from having unrealistic expectations. I felt foolish, like she'd seen into my secret yearning hopes, and so I acted like of course I knew that wasn't what sex was like.

Maybe I was impressionable and getting the wrong idea about simultaneous climaxes and whatnot, but what was that going to hurt? I'm all for setting a high bar.

In any case, it didn't slow me down. It was my escape from my nerdy, no dates ever high-school existence.

I soon discovered Annie's Book Swap, a used bookstore chain with an enormous romance section that I and many other women treated as a lending library. Buy five, read them, bring them back a week later and buy more. Of course, you never got as much in trade-in as you paid for them, but by the time I could drive, I was going there every week for my fix. Soon I was also reading historicals. These, too, were unlike the ones you'd find now. Historical romances of the 1980s and 90s were all over the place. The guys were usually serious dicks, stern and cold and alpha male to the hilt, and the women suffered rapes and abuse (sometimes by the heroes but not always) before falling into their arms.

I have occasionally since the old days come upon one of those historicals, and I can tell immediately I'm reading an oldie. Whereas now the stories are tighter and the arc clear, these were more about adventure, which is a fine ambition. But nowadays we want our heroines to be happy and find their power, no matter how out of place that might be in a nineteenth century story. We want the men to be gorgeous and built, alpha and sensitive as well as fabulous in bed. And why not? They're our fantasies, after all.