Isn't It Romantic?

Something a little lighter this week, friends

I’ve been reading a lot more romance novels lately. This is in part because I joined a truly excellent smutty romance book club, in part because I’m trying to write a romance novel, and in part because…*waves hands around* all of this. You know what I mean. 

I spent election night 2016 at a friend’s apartment. As the night got worse, one by one we drifted out of the living room where the TV was playing the increasingly terrible news, and into one of the bedrooms where the West Wing was playing. When I got home from work the next day, sick to my stomach and not sure what to do, I put the West Wing on again. I was sure that if I didn’t, the poison of Trump’s election would take the West Wing from me forever. It was one of the TV shows I’d grown up with, a show I watched with my dad while it aired, a show which fostered a nascent interest in politics and the belief in people who want to make a difference. 

But clutching the West Wing tightly in my shaking, metaphorical hands aside, my media tastes changed substantially with the 2016 election. I sloughed off starting any new shows and started listening to podcasts, but it was really my reading habits that changed. I’d always been primarily a fiction reader when I was growing up. I read some of the classics, and a lot of books I didn’t totally get because I was a bit too young to understand them. I read a lot of fantasy, and a lot of historical fiction. I liked love stories, but I wanted them to be a part of some bigger plot. I liked the idea of people falling in love while saving the world. But after Trump was elected I turned towards nonfiction. I had missed something, something big, and I wanted to figure out what it was. I wanted to know the world a little better. 

It wasn’t all nonfiction, all the time, but the fiction that pierced through, that stuck with me in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election was few and far between. One of the novels was Casey McQuiston’s Red, White, and Royal Blue. If you’ve spent more than five minutes in my company since this book was published, you’ve probably heard me talk about it. I currently own four copies, three of them signed, and I refused to get rid of any of them while moving even though I was significantly downsizing both my apartment and the available shelf space. 

Red, White, and Royal Blue follows Alex Clairmont-Diaz, son of the first woman president, in a fictional world where his mom, Ellen Clairmont, ran for President and won in the aftermath of President Obama’s second term. In it, Alex has a bisexual crisis, falls in love with Prince Henry of England, comes out to the entire country and helps Democrats flip Texas and turn it blue for the first time since 1976. The book is about Henry and Alex falling in love, but it's also about fighting to be seen, fighting for your voice, and the drive to make the world better, brighter, and safer for everyone. I devoured it, and then I devoured it again, and again, and again. I just read it again while moving, because there is nothing like returning to a beloved favorite in a time of deep, unyielding stress. 

In the years since we elected Biden, I’ve done a better job of tracking my reading. I don’t go for the apps or the websites, but I do write down every book I finish, reread or not, in a google doc that I’ve had going since 2020. In 2022 the romance really picks up. I made it a project to read all of Jane Austen’s novels, I careened through Heartstopper and books by Alexis Hall and Kevin Kwan. I started reading more sci-fi and fantasy too, but the novels I zipped through, the ones I picked up in the morning and finished before I went to bed that same night were all romances. I have two nonfiction books sitting on my bedside table that I’ve been meaning to read for weeks, but I kind of already know that the next thing I’m going to read is You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian (follow up to We Could Be So Good by the same author which I finished just last week and I’m obsessed with). 

In a recent romance I read, Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert, one of the main characters, Zafir Ansari, is an avid reader of romances, and when he’s explaining this to the woman he’s fallen in love with, he says: “I felt like my world had already ended unhappily, but every book I read about someone who’d been through the worst and found happiness anyway seemed to say the opposite. Like my story didn’t need to be over if I didn’t want it to. Like, if I could just be strong enough to reclaim my emotions, and to work through them, maybe I’d be okay again.” 

I’m glad I found my way back to romances, not just because of the community I’ve found in them, or because of the writing project I’m working on, but because, like Zafir, I take heart from stories where characters have to confront the thing that’s standing between them and their own happiness, even if that thing is themselves; where characters have to open themselves up to the vulnerability of being known and the trust you need to have in other people to make that happen. There is something deeply necessary about the reminder that not only is there good in the world, but that it is something we can find, and share, and make a home for in ourselves. 

Like all stories, romance contains multitudes - it can be dark and sexy and fantastical. It can span ages and genres. It can be scary and strange, riveting and ravishing and revolutionary. It can be staid, conservative, or boring. It doesn’t have to make you feel better about the world or teach you something to be valuable. Reading should serve whatever you want it to - entertainment, escapism, enjoyment chief among them. But the stories I find myself drawn to again and again are the ones where, through love, people find ways to know themselves better, to find the safety and security to be bolder, to fight for themselves and the people they care about. 

Perhaps it’s not so different from my politics after all.

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With the 2024 election barreling towards us, I’m going to start including an action you can take to fight for progress and elect Democrats this year. Here’s this week’s:

How to Save Democracy This Week:

Sign up for a phone bank! I know calling strangers sounds scary - believe me, my anxiety ratchets up before every shift. But I promise it isn’t as scary as it sounds. Every shift you sign up for gives you training, you don’t have to use your own phone number to call, and most people are really nice. Phone banking has never once killed me, and I promise it won’t kill you either. If you’re not sure where to start, start with Sister District.

• The training is really great - they give you specific information about why and how your participation helps, and the organizers are really kind, generous, and knowledgeable.

• The tech is really easy to use.

• They are calling for state legislature candidates, which means that you’re helping get Democrats elected who will fight for people at the state level as well as the federal level. If you’re not sure how that works, see reverse coattails.

• Sign up for a shift here! If you want to do it with me, I’m signed up to make calls on Tuesday, July 2.

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Use Your Voice to Fight for People in Gaza

Please keep calling your Representative and Senators in Congress, contacting the White House, and talking to your friends about pushing for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. You can also donate to help in Gaza here. Our government is enabling a humanitarian catastrophe and we need to use our power and our voice to stop it.