Years ago--long before I became Kensington romance author Dana Becker--someone gave me a useful piece of advice. I was working as a librarian in a prison at the time and an older inmate marched up to the circulation desk and slammed a book onto the checkout counter. Even without looking, I knew the book's genre and could also guess its author. This was a person who had read so many Nora Roberts romance novels, and with such ardor, that her prison nickname was "Nora Roberts." Sometimes this pleased her, sometimes she was touchy about it. "I know what you're thinking," she'd said to me that day. "But if someone's locked up, you don't get to judge what they read." Looking back on it now, I believe she understated her case. For a person who reads in captivity, the stakes can scarcely be higher. For this sort of reader, there is no such thing as mere escapism. An outsider ought to do more than reserve judgment: better to listen closely and to learn from a captive's book decisions. Consider that prisoner of fate, Anna Karenina. Toward the end of her life, Anna sits on a train, reading by candlelight. She is transported by the images in her jaunty English novel--the kind of novel that Tolstoy himself had mail-ordered by the dozens as he wrote Anna Karenina . When we meet Anna on the train, with her ladies' novel in hand, we see her trying, and failing, to match the story's images with her real life. "When she read how Lady Mary had ridden after the hounds, teased the bride, and astonished everyone by her boldness--she wanted to do it herself. But there was no chance of doing anything; and twisting the smooth paper knife in her little hands, she forced herself to read. The hero of the novel was already almost reaching his English happiness, a baronetcy and an estate, and Anna was feeling a desire to go with him to the estate . . ." But then something strange happens. As Anna falls deeper into her English novel, a wave of shame washes over her so unexpectedly and so suddenly that she is startled. Why? Anna wonders. Why shame? A reader of contemporary romance can relate. Romance readers are constantly shamed. The uncomfortable reading of a book on a train, or plane, is a familiar scenario for today's romance reader. Not long ago, romance publishers offered their readers the option of a false book cover, to help hide the contents. I once heard a romance editor at Random House say that she sends her grandmother boxes of the latest romance novels, "but we never discuss it, we never say a word about it." Excluding romance is a good way for a bookshop to be seen as "serious." Many romance readers have stories of being shamed for their love of books characterized by the happily-ever-after ending, or, as romance people call it, the HEA. The HEA is mandatory in romance. It is the definition of it, per the laws set forth by the Romance Writers of America (RWA). The HEA is, to romance readers, a nonnegotiable principle, an inalienable right. Anna Karenina's own story, of course, is no HEA. Unlike the heroine of her English ladies' novel, Anna herself does not ride after the hounds. There is neither baron to go with nor any "English happiness" to be had for Anna. She casts herself under an oncoming train--the train that once gave her space to dream is, in the end, what kills her. This is meant as a brutal dramatization of the gap between the stories we read in novels and those we must actually live in reality. When I was in my twenties Anna Karenina struck me as not only heartbreaking but, in its portrait-perfect depictions of her character, also rather true to life. To my younger self, this tale also had something of a feminist bent, for its understanding of Anna as a human being and for the mirror it held up to her society. But now, as an adult, it mostly just pisses me off. Why did Anna have to die? Is that the more realistic conclusion? Or is it a convenient ending for an author bent on proving a theory about Happiness, as formulated in Tolstoy's catchy first sentence: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"? This proposition implies that it was the singular unhappiness of Anna's fate that made her story unique, and thus worth telling to begin with. If happiness is the principle of romance--of the kinds of novels Anna reads--unhappiness, Tolstoy posits, is the principle of the realist social novel (aka The Novel), the kind of book in which Anna is forced to live and to die. And let's be clear about that death: it was entirely the decision of the author. Anna Karenina didn't throw herself under anything. Tolstoy threw her under that train. Her death was no suicide. Nor was the death of Flaubert's Emma Bovary. She was also killed for her sin of reading romances too literally, or, to be more specific, for her belief that the happiness she encountered in her books was something she might partake of in real life. Though the official cause of her death was self-administered arsenic, Flaubert leaves little doubt what really led to Emma's demise: after the suicide, we see a substance, exactly like black ink, vomiting forth continuously from Emma's mouth. The poison was the books, not the arsenic. But, in my reading, the real culprit here, as with Anna Karenina , was the author himself: the deadly black substance wasn't the ink of her romances but rather the ink of Flaubert's own pen. When I think of those stories today, they seem to me less about why Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary ended her life than about why her (male) author decided to kill her. What was it about her choice of reading that so threatened these writers? Why does Don Quixote's fixation on courtly romances lead him to heroic misadventure and a happy ending, but women who try something like that perish in disgrace? Had Jane Austen written Anna Karenina's and Emma Bovary's story, they would surely have met different endings. Would those endings have been less realistic, less of a mirror to society, a lesser artistic statement? I think about these murdered reader-heroines often because the outlines of their stories crop up so often in daily life. When I hear that stereotypical take, that romance lit is for "desperate housewives" who live in the middle of the country, I think of Emma Bovary, who lived out in the provinces. I think about Anna Karenina every time a woman sitting next to me on a plane apologizes to me for her decision to read a romance novel. "It's not smutty," one woman assured me, on a flight to San Francisco, as if she were proposing to light a cigar and blow smoke in my face for the duration of the flight, and not what she actually did: quietly read a book in which an exasperated and put-upon woman gets to win for once in her life. * Which is why, when I first set out on my own romance quest, I was so excited to attend the RT convention, or, as it is known, simply RT. At RT there are no apologies made. It is a gathering of celebration and pride. At RT, every year, romance announces its intentions at elaborate balls and swarming author events, and in giant banners as tall as a New Orleans Marriott. As someone who dwelled within the angsty world of "literary" publishing, I have, on more than one occasion, found myself leaning my head around the corner to see what was happening down the hall at the romance end of the industry, a situation akin to being at a funeral and hearing the strains of a party happening next door. Whatever was going on over there, it seemed to be more alive, and possibly more life-affirming. They were undoubtedly having more fun. My first RT brought me to the New Orleans Marriott, and a panel called "BDSM: The Truth Behind the Fiction," which shared a busy time slot with sessions like "Secrets to Maximizing Your Sales" and something called "Pitchslap"--and which billed itself as "a lively discussion on BDSM in erotic romance with a group of bestselling authors who actually live the lifestyle!" As promised, the discussion was lively. It was also informative. "The market for kinky stories is more competitive than ever," one of the authors said from the dais. "We've almost overtaken Paranormal!" (This prompted some grumbling in the audience, presumably among the orthodox Paranormalists.) "Authenticity in your kink writing is going to be one of the things that sets you apart," she added. For the next half-hour the three authors detailed what this has meant to their writing. It's not just the feel of the whip against your skin, it's the emotions it evokes. The first lash means one thing, the fifth means something else. The feel of the whip when it's being run gently over the nape of your neck . . . that chilly coldness . . . that means something else entirely. This gesture also means something different, emotionally, before a whipping as opposed to after. Seeing the whip from across the room generates its own singular emotions. The whip itself, the leather, can get hot from a lashing. And what does that evoke? The questions were piling up. ("Get the details and report back!" one of the panelists said.) Here was one solution to the Life-Literature problem, how our lives and our stories never quite match up, and how we always somehow get stuck in the spaces between. For these particular authors, there was no Life-Literature Problem: they were living the lifestyle . Toward the end of the session, one of the panelists sighed deeply and remarked, "It's honestly getting so hard to find good submissives out there," to which a small voice from the back of the conference room was heard to shout back, "I'll be your submissive!" The conference room erupted in cheers. There was a lot happening at RT. There was much to consider in that New Orleans Marriott. I would see two women named Cherry exchange business cards. I would see some impressively honest marketing ("I'm already drooling over this one," read one blurb). I would hear someone publicly declare, "If your character has amnesia, that's a book I'm definitely reading." I would see a large group of women band together and hijack a men's public bathroom. I would learn that "domestic discipline" was in, as a genre. I would be nodded to knowingly by another male convention-goer, a bald guy with a ponytail down to his lower back, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and a kilt. I would see well-known cover model CJ Hollenbach and be too lame to say hello. I would on several occasions be told, upon meeting someone, that I was the first Jew they had ever met. I'd be repeatedly cautioned that Fifty Shades of Grey should not be regarded as the best example of the Erotica genre, even as these same authors scrambled to learn the marketing lessons of its success. I would meet more people with aliases than I had since I'd worked in prison. And I'd be in the presence of more optimistic writers in a few days than I'd met thus far in my life. That part, in particular, seemed significant to me. Excerpted from The Happily Ever After: A Memoir of an Unlikely Romance Novelist by Avi Steinberg All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
