Welcome to the romance ghetto. It's pink. Very, very pink. It's rife with body parts that should never, ever be inflicted with animal metaphors, much less ferret and salmon metaphors. When you reach the welcome sign at the entrance, with its curlicued font and excessive exclamation points, you know you've reached the deepest circle of literary hell, full of unspeakable horrors and Satan gnawing on throbbing heads, rending any hope of good prose apart — not unlike this sentence. And its sole inhabitants are dim, lonely housewives; no matter how smart or accomplished you are, if you're in the ghetto, you're a dim, lonely housewife, and any protestations to the contrary are vain efforts at denying your inner dim, lonely housewife.
In short, this is the genre ghetto's genre ghetto. Even the most rabid Piers Anthony or John Ringo fan can cling to a semblance of dignity and taste by comparison when they say, "Hey, at least I don't read romance novels."
My introduction to the genre was pretty rough, because the first romance novel I read (at the tender age of ten) turned out to be Desire's Blossom by Cassie Edwards, the bad book by which I judge all other bad books.
To be fair, Desire's Blossom only confirmed my opinion that romance novels were stupid and badly-written; I couldn't understand why my sister, who was one of the smartest people I knew, loved reading those awful things. My disdain was visceral and unexamined. Part of it was probably my childhood disgust for mushy stuff, and romances meant nothing if not mushy stuff. The lurid covers didn't help. You know that embarrassment squick you felt when you saw Sarah Palin attempt to mangle her way through interviews, or when you watched Keanu play Don John in Much Ado About Nothing? Yeah, romance novel covers gave me embarrassment squick, except for a whole genre.
For the next several years, I'd sporadically pick up the occasional novel from my sister's collection, partly to see if I'd find a good one, but mostly for the detailed, if sometimes anatomically improbable, sex scenes. (My parents, bless their squeamish hearts, could barely stand to discuss menstruation with me, much less anything involving squidgy bits and the old in-out-in-out, so I resorted to self-help, as it were.) None of the other books were as bad by Desire's Blossom, but that's not saying much — if Desire's Blossom were the reading equivalent of repeated hits to your crotch with a football, the other romances ranged from paper cuts to getting your finger caught in the door. If you'd asked me, between ages 10 and 16, what I thought about romance novels, you would've gotten an earful about how badly written they were, and stupid, and frustrating as all hell because the hero and heroine did nothing but fight all the time before abruptly realizing the antagonism was actually true lurve, which, in my expert pre-pubescent opinion, was a load of crock.
Then when I was sixteen, after a few years of not reading any romance novels, I picked up Judith McNaught's Something Wonderful on a complete whim.
It was a revelation.
For the first time, I found myself fully engaged by a romance novel. I couldn't put it down. The heroine was adorable, and any urge to shake her stemmed from fond exasperation, not a desire to dislocate her brainstem. The hero was yet another aristocratic asshole, but he was also vulnerable and sweet. And the conflict was fun and compelling, despite the eye-rolling misunderstandings. (I say this with love, but almost all of McNaught's conflicts go something like this: Hero: "You're a whore and out to use me! See this circumstantial evidence here? Proof you're a whore. Also, my parents never loved me. Wah." Heroine: "I'm not a whore, I'm just a painful combination of beautiful, spunky and naïve. Also, I have horrible, manipulative relatives, and I'm willfully blind to this fact because non-clueless heroines won't come into fashion until about ten years after this book is published. Wah.")
I read that book in one glorious sleep-deprived rush, then ran back to the store and grabbed all the other McNaught novels I could find. Once I'd ploughed my way through all of them, I looked for even more romances I liked. I was no longer daunted by the crap I encountered along the way because I had learned something valuable: there was indeed such a thing as a romance novel worth reading.
So that's the story of how Something Wonderful had successfully lured me into the romance ghetto. I am now an inhabitant, not a scornful tourist. I am doomed to a fate of people who had never met me imagining me a tubby, sexually frustrated woman who never met a Franklin Mint doll she didn't like. Sentences like "Yes, there are good romances" and "No, they're not chick porn" have become a staple in my repertoire.
Here's the thing: romance is probably one of the most frustrating genres I read. Because so many of them are published every year, the total amount of pure crap pumped out is higher than it tends to be in other genres, and they tend to be more shoddily edited. My hit rate with romance novels is downright dismal — it's lower than it is with other genres, and the bad ones make me really cranky. So why the hell do I still read them, and why am I so passionate about them?
Part of it's because when they're good — or when I find one that I enjoy; these two sets don't always intersect — they're incredible. They're smart, they're moving, they're subversive, and they speak to the deepest bonding urges we have. Humans are social beasties, and romance novels, more than any other genre, explore the human experience of building intimate connections with each other.
There's also no other genre I can think of in which female protagonists are so consistently victorious, and so consistently happy by the end. I'm not saying that this in and of itself makes romance novels good, but it's certainly part of what makes them attractive, and it definitely sets them apart from any other genre out there.
And romance novels are where a lot of interesting, tangled issues about societal expectations and gender norms and heteronormativity and sex roles are not just elements of the story, they're centerpieces to the conflict. Romances are the subduction zones of literature: you get all these titanic forces pushing against each other, and nothing much seems to be happening, but they're actually creating new landscapes as all these conflicts ram into each other, and they occasionally produce volcanoes that spew all the molten material that's normally hidden underneath the surface. For example: if you pick up a contemporary romance from