{"id":1121,"date":"2010-07-18T10:40:04","date_gmt":"2010-07-18T15:40:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/?p=1121"},"modified":"2010-07-18T11:51:57","modified_gmt":"2010-07-18T16:51:57","slug":"romance-what-makes-us-close-the-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/2010\/07\/18\/romance-what-makes-us-close-the-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Romance – What Makes Us Close The Book?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently read an article by a psychology researcher<\/a> who thought she could explain why women read Harlequin romance novels.\u00a0Such articles often intrigue me and this one, in particular, drew me in because the author and I share\u00a0the same name (Mary Anne) - albeit, she doesn't spell hers the way my namesake Granny told me I had to spell mine.\u00a0 Dr. Fisher concluded that women read romance because they're looking for a cad who becomes the dad.<\/p>\n

Most of the articles trying to \"explain\"\u00a0women's love of the romance genre make me want to throw something at my computer screen.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The other Mary Anne's\u00a0piece didn't make me mad so much as it made me\u00a0pity the author.\u00a0 First of all, as a researcher, she should have known\u00a0she couldn't base an understanding of a\u00a0vast and complex genre like romance on one\u00a0atypical type of book of the genre.\u00a0 It makes all her conclusions laughably wrong. For example, based on her study of Harlequins, Fisher\u00a0decides that romance novels\u00a0are too short and characters\u00a0are therefore too underdeveloped.\u00a0 Certain types of Harlequins are intended to be short fast reads that get the reader in and out fast.\u00a0 But not all Harlequins are short - some of the publisher's imprints are long, slow, luscious reads.\u00a0 So Dr. Fisher bases her conclusions one\u00a0type of one imprint from one publishing house.\u00a0 I hope she does a better job with the psychological research she gets paid for.<\/p>\n

Fisher concludes that romance novels are \"candy for women's brains.\"\u00a0\u00a0 She concludes that they allow the reader to live vicariously through the heroine and fall in love with the hero but without any of the consequences.\u00a0 Of course, she also thinks that the plots\u00a0revolve around the woman trying to decide if the hero is \"Mr. Right.\" So, at least Fisher is consistently wrong.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Romance novels are, in fact, many\u00a0different things and a reader will reach for a novel based on the experience she's looking for.\u00a0 Some may be brain candy but others are hot chocolate for the soul or salt and pepper, salsa\u00a0or onions and peppers to season a slice of life.\u00a0 And lets not forget the ones that are just dessert - a big old slice of strawberry cheesecake.\u00a0\u00a0Romances are intimate experiences where a\u00a0writer\u00a0takes a reader on a journey that the reader will paint\u00a0with the flavor of her life and her outlook.\u00a0<\/p>\n

No, Dr. Fisher,\u00a0not all romance novels provide skimpy descriptions of the heroine and detailed descriptions of the hero because the\u00a0reader will imagine herself in the heroine's place. Some romances, like mine, will provide\u00a0a few general details about the descriptions of the hero and the heroine because we want the reader to draw the character in her mind the way she imagines him or her.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My basic problem with the other Mary Anne's piece is that she imagines herself as being so very much smarter than the writers and the readers that she can profile all of them.\u00a0\u00a0She can't just acknowledge that much of the genre is so far beyond her understanding that she'll never get it.\u00a0 People who think they're smarter than everyone else like to do that.\u00a0 If they encounter something they don't get, then they'll pull out one tiny piece of it, label it, and pronounce that one size fits all.\u00a0 Who\u00a0among us doesn't know that one size NEVER fits all?\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Dr. Fisher's piece got me to thinking about the flip side of her query.\u00a0 I know that the reasons readers read romance are as varied as the way writers write the books.\u00a0 No, based on an experience I'm having with a novel, I wonder - what makes us put the book down and close it without finishing? Perhaps that's as varied as the reader and the writer too.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0while back I got a bad review for my book,<\/em> Brotherly\u00a0Love<\/em>, on Amazon.\u00a0 That reader found that there were few decent characters and felt the book was written so that it made her feel guilty for wanting the main characters to end up together.\u00a0 She thought the book contained some \"unnecessarily graphic\" rape scenes and advised readers not to \"bother\" with the book.\u00a0\u00a0 Bad reviews are always tough for writers, including me, even though we should know better.\u00a0 Mentally, I know that I'm not writing \"pablum\" so for some people my books won't digest well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I wonder if that reader finished the book?\u00a0 When a book doesn't connect for me I know I can't finish it.\u00a0 And sometimes, it doesn't connect for a particular reader even if the author is very talented and wrote a hell of a book.\u00a0 That's happened to me with one I'm reading now and have just decided to close and walk away from. And when I tell you about the book many of you will have read it, will have possibly read some of the author's other work and enjoyed it all very much.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The book I'm about to put away without finishing is by a fellow South Carolinian - Dorothea Benton Frank, who seems to be a fine writer.\u00a0 It's called Bulls Island<\/em><\/a> and is about characters from Charleston, a community right down the road from\u00a0my\u00a0home in Myrtle Beach.\u00a0 My family and I love Charleston, so I thought I'd love the book.\u00a0 But the story is about a\u00a0girl who's been dating the scion of a rich Charleston family for many years.\u00a0 When they finish\u00a0college they decide to marry and bring her family to have dinner with his because historically, there's been bad\u00a0blood between the families.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the dinner the hero's mother acts so vile and nasty that the heroine's parents leave suddenly, in the middle of a pouring rain storm.\u00a0 The mother dies in a car accident caused by the bad weather.\u00a0 The heroine leaves the area and the hero and moves to New York because she can never marry into that woman's family.\u00a0 That woman killed the heroine's mother, or so she thinks.\u00a0 The heroine moves to New York without a word to the hero and has a baby she never tells the him about.\u00a0 The hero lets his mama play puppetmaster and ends up diddling some female bait she waves in front of him and so marries the girl.\u00a0 The hero and the bait have no children and the bait turns out to be a spineless alcoholic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The heroine rears\u00a0her son in New York and doesn't even tell her father or sister about the kid.\u00a0 She tells her son that his father died in a car wreck with both of her parents.\u00a0 I haven't read\u00a0what, if anything, she told the kid about his father's parents.\u00a0 \u00a0Anyway, the heroine gets a big deal job involving real estate projects and financing and one day gets called into her boss's office and told she's going back to Charleston to manage a project developing \"Bulls Island\" with a local real estate family.\u00a0 (Yes, the hero's family).\u00a0<\/p>\n

While that's going on, back in Charleston, the hero's wife is falling further into the bottle.\u00a0 He learns that the heroine is coming back to\u00a0work with him on the Bulls Island project. On the same night that\u00a0 his daddy has\u00a0a heart attack he finds out that his mama has been having an affair with his daddy's business partner for years.\u00a0 He wonders if that means he can have an affair with the heroine. \u00a0<\/p>\n

While the heroine is\u00a0dealing with\u00a0having to go back to Charleston and face all of her lies, she also dealing with\u00a0her son going away to college. She picks this time to\u00a0start dating\u00a0an Italian guy she describes like a mafia prince,\u00a0considers to be a joke, and finds way, way beneath her socially and intellectually.\u00a0 Yet the heroine\u00a0ends up bedding\u00a0Mr. Mafia who sends\u00a0her 4 or 5 dozen roses after each mattress mambo and reaches the point where she intends to kiss him off.\u00a0 After all, she was just playing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Okay.\u00a0 That was the breaking point for me.\u00a0 It was the stupidity that was just too much.\u00a0 Got to put the book down, which is a shame.\u00a0 I wanted to read the writer's descriptions of Charleston but never got back there with the heroine.\u00a0 These people are all too stupid and self centered for me to tolerate.<\/p>\n

I had trouble right from the get go.\u00a0 The dinner and death of the heroine's mama was hard for me to take.\u00a0 Why didn't the hero stand up, tell mama she was being a prize bitch and she could stop right now and apologize or he'd walk away?\u00a0 Even if the hero didn't do that voluntarily, why didn't the heroine put him to the test?\u00a0 They'd been\u00a0together for 8 years.\u00a0 She should have\u00a0stood up at the dinner table and told the hero to handle mama or he wouldn't be handling her anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And the heroine flits off the New York without ever sitting down with the hero and telling him about her feelings, the whole situation and especially the baby.\u00a0 Yeah, his family's been in Charleston for years and he would be walking away from generations of legacy.\u00a0 But if they were so much in love, she should have given him the choice.\u00a0 The heroine never even tells her own family about the kid and she lies to her son about his family.\u00a0 She walks away from her father and sister just when they lose her mama.\u00a0 To top it all off, the heroine treats the Italian like the hero's mama treated her family.\u00a0 Enough is enough.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it's only enough for me.\u00a0 Like that reviewer who didn't like Brotherly, <\/em>my life and my experiences make it impossible for me to like - or even to finish - Bulls Island<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 I find the hero to be a wiener, the heroine to be a self-centered bitch and all of them to be terminally stupid.\u00a0 I could have even tolerated the dinner and death with something akin to mild indigestion and finished the book if the\u00a0heroine had pushed the hero to choose and then he chose wrong.\u00a0 I can tolerate the hero being a\u00a0prick, but I can't tolerate the heroine being a stupid, self-centered liar.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Back to Ms. Fisher's piece -\u00a0maybe she did get some of it right.\u00a0 Women generally expect men to behave like they're motivated by their egos.\u00a0 We get that.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But we expect more from our heroines because we expect more from ourselves.\u00a0I can deal with the improbable -- I adore the improbable - but I can't deal with the pathetic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So yeah, Dr. Fisher, I'm fine with the hero being a cad as long as the heroine is woman enough to teach him\u00a0a lesson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently read an article by a psychology researcher who thought she could explain why women read Harlequin romance novels.\u00a0Such articles often intrigue me and this one, in particular, drew me in because the author and I share\u00a0the same name (Mary Anne) - albeit, she doesn't spell hers the way my namesake Granny told me ...continue reading \"Romance – What Makes Us Close The Book?\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1121"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1121"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1124,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1121\/revisions\/1124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}