Origin Story (alexa, play my theme music)

When I was fifteen or sixteen I was digging around in my parents’ basement and happened upon a paper bag filled to the brim with thin, colorful books. 

Romance novels! I’d never really seen one before. I grabbed a couple and ran upstairs. Whose are these? I asked my mom. Oh, those were your grandmother’s. 

Now, they were even more of a question mark. I went back downstairs to further inspect the contents of that bag. Grandma’s romance novels? Interesting. 

She must have been into them because there were at least fifty. And looking at some of the tear away pages in the back, I realized that they were part of some sort of subscription service. She was being mailed a book a week. 

As someone who sometimes reads a book a day, this type of appetite for literature was something I really identified with. I promptly sat with my back against the washing machine and read the first fifty pages of one of them. I don’t remember the title, but I do remember it had a chippy real estate agent and used the secret baby trope. (Do people really sell houses to someone without telling them that eight years ago they gave birth to their baby? I wondered.)

Now, a lot of the books in that paper bag are ~not awesome~. For instance, the male main characters often “administer” a sharp slap to break the female main characters out of her “hysterics”. 

And then she drinks a brandy. (They always want brandy after getting slapped.)

Oy. Regardless of some of the deeply questionable content of these books, I was almost immediately hooked on the general concept. Immersive reads with happy endings? Sold. 

It hadn’t ever occurred to me to read straight up romance before. But when I thought about it, 

what were the most interesting parts about all the other books I was reading? The relationships between characters. In everything I’d read up until that point, I’d loved, more than anything else, reading about the ways in which characters’ feelings for one another could change over the course of a book. Whether those feelings were romantic, familial, respectful, filled with ire. Whether the characters were friends, family, enemies, acquaintances, it didn’t matter to me. Understanding how people feel about one another was always what kept me turning pages. And there, in that paper bag, were fiftyish stories in which the entire point was how the characters felt about one another. How those feelings come to be, how they change, how they die or grow. 

I didn’t have any idea then, but that paper bag is where my writing career started.