R.H. Walker, Author

(Cover image by Edurne Tx on Unsplash)

Introduction

When I first read Jodi McAlister’s Not Here To Make Friends, I knew immediately that I was its core audience.

Murray and Lily, two producers on a fictional Australian version of The Bachelor, love each other. They’ve been best friends for years, and it’s made clear early on that it was circumstance and mutual respect, not a lack of attraction, that kept them from becoming a couple. A year after the death of Lily’s husband pulls her away from the show, she returns, but with a twist: no longer will she be a producer on the show. Instead she will be a contestant. And not just any contestant, she’s going to be the best (worst?) villain in reality TV history, fueled by her previous experience working behind-the-scenes on the show. Murray, who is still the lead producer, finds himself having to juggle Lily’s antics amid his myriad other responsibilities, while also trying to figure out if she’s in the middle of a nervous breakdown and convince her that turning herself into someone the world loves to hate is a, uh, bad idea, actually.

I could go on and on about the little details that make this book work (Murray’s chronic health problems, Lily’s inability to keep her nose out of the producing work even though she’s a contestant, both characters’ dedication to media ethics despite displaying very obvious sociopathic leanings). The entire thing, to me, works absolutely perfectly. I devoured it in a day then reread it two days later because I couldn’t stop thinking about them. My heart swelled with affection for two of the most imperfect characters I’d ever read, and the love they found with each other. I’ve reread it probably two more times since then– that makes for an average of a reread a month since I first read it back in May. It spoke (and continues to speak) to me that deeply.

After reading through McAlister’s backlist I went to follow her on Instagram, and discovered something I had not previously known: not only was Jodi McAlister the author of highly enjoyable romance novels. She was also DOCTOR Jodi McAlister, eminent scholar, writer, and lecturer on romance in popular media.

I remember grinning to myself and thinking “I knew it. I knew she knew what she was doing.”

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An Unveiling of the Eyes

I recently was approved to receive an advanced reader copy of Dr. McAlister’s newest novel, An Academic Affair, which releases in the U.S. on November 11. As a fan of her previous work I was obviously very excited for this opportunity, and I devoured the book in a single sitting.

Those of you who have been following along with my reading adventures this year know that I’ve been reading a lot of romance lately, to the tune of a couple hundred books in the last six months. I spoke about this a little in my post about the works of Ashley Poston, and that number has only continued to balloon. You might also remember that this is kind of unprecedented for me– I, historically, have not been a huge romance reader.

I’d dabbled, of course, but sometime around April or May, something in me snapped. Maybe it was the stress of my upcoming move, maybe it was entering the last year of my 20s, maybe it was just the need for a change of pace, but I went through a period of feverishly re-reading my old favorite love stories. Once I’d reread them all, I turned to my library and the sales on the audiobook apps, and started scrabbling for every contemporary romance book that seemed even remotely appealing.

This was also, at first, a little embarrassing to me. For all that I try, I am not fully immune to the effects of patriarchy and its disdain for things women like. As a result I was still a romance genre skeptic. As a second, more compelling result, I was pleasantly surprised that I connected with a lot of these stories. I kept trying to figure out why; why had these stories started appealing to me all of a sudden, after all these years?

A lot of book influencers on social media will tell you it’s because romance is escapism, that it’s fun and light in a world where so much is dark. A lot of feminism-minded critics will invoke repressed female desire and romance’s utility as a safe place for women to explore those desires on their own terms, especially when discussing the early history of the genre. Both points are true, but neither have ever quite captured the full story for me. This sudden kinship I felt with the romance genre was more than “I just need to have some fun”. For a long time I struggled to articulate what exactly it was.

This is where An Academic Affair comes back in, because it finally cracked the code.

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On Fairy-Stories

(Minor spoilers for An Academic Affair ahead– I will be discussing one of the book’s core themes but will not be sharing any particular plot details).

One of the primary themes of An Academic Affair is the concept of the “eucatastrophe”, as introduced by J.R.R. Tolkien in his 1947 essay On Fairy-Stories. Tolkien defines the eucatastrophe as the final turning point of a fairy tale, the single event that brings the heroes and heroines to their happy ending. Whereas a catastrophe is where everything starts to come apart, Tolkien’s eucatastrophe is where everything starts to come together.

Often, a eucatastrophe shows up right before an actual catastrophe is about to unfold, offering a last saving grace for our heroes before their certain doom. Take, for example, Tolkien’s own work. One of the best examples of the eucatastrophe can be found in The Lord of the Rings: Sauron is about to win the battle against the armies of Middle-Earth. Frodo has fallen, finally, to the influence of the Ring, and is about to take it for himself. Just then, Gollum intervenes, and as he falls into the fires of Mount Doom, the ring falls with him, and is destroyed.

Suddenly, hope is no longer lost. Without Sauron’s magic to guide them, his armies scatter, and the war is won by the humans of Gondor. Our heroes go home and drive the remaining evil from their lands. Love and hope and mercy prevail, even if our protagonists are not quite the same as they were before.

So too with the romance novel. The “HEA” (happily-ever-after) is the most well-known staple of the romance genre’s many tropes, often cited as the only real requirement for a book to be a romance, but the more I read the more I’m discovering that it isn’t just about the happy ending. It’s also everything that comes before.

(Something something foreplay joke, yes it’s very funny, let’s move on).

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Love, Love, Love

When I think about the component parts of some of my favorite romantic comedies, I’m astounded by how much non-romantic love permeates these stories, too.

So many romances are thinly-veiled love letters to their cities– often New York City, as in When Harry Met Sally, or other major American cities, like Baltimore in B.K. Borison’s First Time Caller (or Seattle in Sleepless in Seattle.) This can also extend to small town settings (Abby Jimenez’s Part of Your World, or Sarah Adams’s When in Rome series). Some of my favorite romance books have strong subplots relating to friends or family (Lyssa Kay Adams’s The Bromance Book Club series and most of Emily Henry’s works). Love of career can be found pretty easily as well, (With Love, From Cold World by Alicia Thompson, or B.K. Borison’s Lovelight Farms series), love of pets, (all of Abby Jimenez’s works, or The Match by Sarah Adams). Heck, even love of fandom is included (Olivia Dade’s Spoiler Alert series, and many of Ashley Poston’s works).

Love is not just reserved for the main couple in a romance novel– these are stories about love in every aspect, and they (at least the good ones) are built with love right down to the bones. The protagonists are often learning not just how to love each other, but themselves and their communities, and I think this plays very heavily into the idea of the eucatastrophe. Never is it just romantic love that comes to our protagonists; once the lead experiences the change of mind and heart that finally allows them to open up to love, it cascades in from all sides, not just from their romantic prospect.

One of my favorite examples of this can be found in Emily Henry’s Book Lovers. The novel’s primary conflict is Nora’s strained relationship with her sister Libby, and the increasingly desperate steps she takes to reconnect with her. Nora’s inability to be honest with herself about what she wants, her myopic determination to provide for everyone in her inner circle by succeeding at any cost, and lastly her determination to stick to the previous two traits, are what end up driving Libby away. With Charlie’s help Nora is able to be honest about what she wants and emotionally reconnect with Libby. Libby, for her part, can finally shower Nora with the care she has so desperately craved, but until now refused to admit she needed. (Concurrent to this is another excellent example of “love of city”– Nora’s enduring love for New York is another love that shores her up, and is also ultimately rewarded by the eucatastrophe at the end of the novel).

Something that’s important to note is that Nora does not need to earn the love of either Charlie or her sister. She must overcome the internal obstacles keeping her from fully pursuing and receiving that love, but one huge theme of Book Lovers is that Nora, for all her type-A quirks, was already worthy of love. She only needed someone to see her fully, someone who would love her without trying to change her, to help her find the path.

bell hooks calls this kind of wholly encompassing love “communion”, and like Tolkien, she categorizes the search for this love as a divine quest. “Women who choose to love must be wise, daring, and courageous,” she says, in her book of the same name. “All around us the culture of lovelessness mocks our quest for love . . . Wisdom is needed if we are to demand that our culture acknowledge the journey to love as a grand, magical, life-transforming, thrilling, risky adventure.”

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Confessional

Now comes the part where I get to be vulnerable.

I have been single for the entirety of my adult life. This wasn’t on purpose, at least not at first; my late teens and early twenties were filled with a deep existential dread that I would never find “my person”, that I would never be found to be desirable, that I would end up bitter and alone. This turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. (I don’t think it helps that at the time, I was living in Provo, Utah, a city and state infamous for having a high rate of young marriages and one of the highest rates of plastic surgery per capita in the United States. Not exactly a recipe for dating confidently, especially not if you’re a vocal feminist who’s built more like a refrigerator than a mudflap girl).

I endured this sense of dread for about four years. In that time I went on, generously, three dates. I had a couple of short stints on dating apps, where I was subjected to, in no particular order: a 9/11 truther, a lovebomber, a handful of negs, and more ghosts than a haunted house. I lost several of my platonic male friends during this time too, and I began to worry that my desperation was driving them all away. It felt as though they could sense I wanted a partner, and not wanting to be selected for the dubious honor, they sought to distance themselves from me.

In 2018, I finally received an offer to go on a second date, from a man I wasn’t interested in seeing again. I turned him down, then proceeded to have a panic attack. What are you doing? I asked myself. What if this is your only chance to find love? Why are you throwing it away?

This was a ridiculous notion, and I told myself so after the panic subsided. It was my right to date or not date whoever I pleased, and I would not force myself to feel bad about that. Feeling drunk on this decision, I took it one step further: all this worry about dating had gotten me absolutely nowhere, and the more I worried about it, the more unwell I became. If I was going to keep being single, then I’d make sure it was my choice.

I have not been on a date since, and it has been glorious.

I went to therapy for my anxiety for the first time that summer. Thanks to my therapist’s encouragement I finally started building a life for myself, not some hypothetical future husband. I re-enrolled in college courses. I started writing again in earnest. I started devoting more time to my friends and family, those relationships I already had and whom I knew already loved me. (This included playing with my very first Dungeons & Dragons group, which would lead me to try my hand at writing games, as partly chronicled in my post about Moomins & Dragons).

It hasn’t always been easy. COVID threw us all into isolation, and five years on we still struggle with widespread loneliness as a global community. I moved a thousand miles away to a new state, and miss my friends and family in different states every day. For the first time in my life I am living fully alone, without family or friends or roommates, and while it has been one of the most gratifying experiences, I still feel the effects of that isolation daily.

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Inquiry

With that context we return to the question at hand: why, after seven years of purposefully turning my back on romantic love, have romance novels started appealing to me?

I have wondered if I am trying to live vicariously through them. This is certainly a possibility; like I said, I’ve been single for my entire adult life, and fiction is one of the best ways we have to simulate experiences we might not otherwise have. It is, in its way, practice for the real world, and as someone who has not dated a lot, I have learned much about myself and my own preferences in reading these books.

Yet I don’t think that’s it. I keep coming back to this idea of the eucatastrophe. The sudden sharp turn for the better, the cascading flood of love and support, the knowledge that no matter what happens in the interim, everything will be okay. I think what I’ve been feeling is optimism. The hope that I am lovable, despite not having been loved romantically. The knowledge that, if I find the love of my life tomorrow, or in twenty years, or never, everything will have played out the way it was supposed to. The feeling of love pressing in on me from all sides of the universe, just waiting to be let in.

I have felt trickles of my own eucatastrophe sneaking up on me over the years. I feel it every time I travel, especially overseas. I feel it every time I sit down to write and the words flow like water from my fingers. I feel it every time I go for a walk. I felt it when I graduated, when I moved to Minnesota, when I moved into my own place. I felt it when I sold my first short story this year. There are more good things coming for me, if I only stay open to them.

I think that, more than anything, is why I’ve been so drawn to romance novels this year. Each one is a reminder that goodness, love, and joy are waiting for us. Even when the world feels out of control. Even when it feels like we might never be back to normal. Even when those in charge are purposefully cruel to those less fortunate, and it feels like there’s no way to stop them. There will always be those who help, those who love despite the pain, those who will fight the good fight to the bitter end.

May we be those fighters, and may we find our own eucatastrophes, when love and hope and mercy finally prevail and shower us with, as Tolkien says, and as McAlister quotes, “joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

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But what about . . .

I couldn’t really find a place to include these that didn’t feel like undercutting the essay as I wrote it, so I’m going to place all of my lamp-shading disclaimers down here at the end.

Yes there are bad romance novels out there (whether bad in quality or bad in a moral sense). Yes they can get a lot of attention. Yes there are a lot of harmful aspects of romance that have been turned into tropes by dint of simply being repeated by authors who find them compelling, and yes, young girls who face exposure to these things will have a lot to unlearn as they get older if they do not have an adult with whom they can safely discuss those aspects.

Here’s the thing: believing that all romance is bad because of your limited exposure to and experience with it is misogyny at work. I know this because I lived it. Been there, done that, got the “not like other girls” scout badge. Romance is as widely varied a genre as any other. It has countless subgenres and specialties, and no two authors that write romance are the same. They come to the genre with different motivations, fears, beliefs, mindsets, and yes, kinks. A heavy reliance on tropes means that many readers can find comfort in familiarity, but no two books are the same.

I’m not saying you have to like romance, that would be ridiculous. Maybe it truly isn’t for you. But if you open yourself to new experiences, like I did, you might just find a lot to love.