antidote to last week

in a world of serena van der woodsens, I'm hunting for blair waldorf

After last week’s complaining about romance discourse, I thought I’d take a turn towards the positive by writing about things that I’m enjoying. Inevitably, this also devolved into complaining. Apologies in advance.

I’m watching Gossip Girl for the first time at the moment. It’s a show I’ve mostly absorbed through the culture before (the thanksgiving scene… the big GG reveal… Blair’s turn as Princess of Monaco… fully transmitted into my brain through twitter.com in its heyday) and mostly thought that I didn’t need to know the details of, but it’s been a comfort background watch as I worked on clinical externship applications this month (blah blah grad school stuff).

The thing I’ve realized about Gossip Girl is that it is a show largely animated by the logic that every single character is the silliest, stupidest person you’ve ever met in your life. Without that, none of the conflict ever really makes sense. What do you mean Dan had a baby with Georgina Sparks that may or may not be his and somehow managed to conceal this child from his father for a period of nearly 3 months? What do you mean Chuck was mugged, shot, and pushed into the river Danube and healed (spiritually and physically) by Fleur Delacour, the prostitute-angel? What do you mean Nate Archibald is heterosexual? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter! These beautiful¹ people toddle through the world making soapy declarations in very public settings without substantiating them in the slightest, conspiring against one another in increasingly outrageous psychosexual games, and embarking on pseudo-incestual relationships with one another until they’ve come together, come apart, and come together again and again and again. I am thoroughly enjoying myself. I did, indeed, cry when Blair² confronted Chuck about being sold for a hotel. I am embracing the mess.

The logic that pushes the plot in Gossip Girl is a familiar one. Many a romance novel is written this way, with the tacit assumption that the main character (usually an FMC, in my experience) is so absolutely oblivious to her environment and the interior lives of other characters that the story simply happens to her, and the reader is along for the ride as she is acted upon, Serena Van Der Woodsen style. I’m not knocking this, and there are plenty of stories that operate this way that manage to be, for me, satisfying in their own way.

I’m thinking a little of Twisted Lies by Ana Huang, a book I thoroughly enjoyed and still count as my favorite of Huang’s work. Goodreads agrees: its rating is the highest of the extremely popular Twisted series. Stella, the FMC, is an ambiguously multiracial content creator with aspirations towards bigger and better brand collaborations, wants nothing more than to be able to provide for her beloved former nanny, who resides at an assisted living facility because of her dementia. She struggles with being perceived as unaccomplished in her tensely competitive family and with the fact that she is being actively stalked by a violent man. Christian, the MMC, is a shadowy millionaire/billionaire/somethingoutrageouslywealthyitdoesn’treallymatter CEO of a securities company who just can’t figure this mysterious dreamgirl out. He becomes obsessed with her, inadvertently becoming her second stalker. Circumstances escalate, she moves into his apartment and they fake date until they real date. They have lots of hot sex in various tropical locations. Christian defends Stella against her family, then her violent stalker, and melts his icy heart in the process. They live happily ever after.

It’s a good story. It’s a fun story! I’m not unaware of the fact that it is really fucking hard to write a book that is genuinely entertaining from beginning to end. I’ve been following Huang’s work since the Wattpad days, so there’ll always be a soft spot in my heart for her books.

The trouble is, I’ve also simultaneously been reading a streak of some of the best romance novels I’ve ever read in my life and they are making me hungry for a kind of complexity and care that is becoming increasingly rare and precious in romance. It started with Fair, Bright, and Terrible by Elizabeth Kingston, then One Burning Heart by Elizabeth Kingston,³ then Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale, then For My Lady’s Heart by Laura Kinsale. I know, I know. A historical romance reader only now coming to Kinsale? A fraud! Lock me up, officer. I’m here now and willing to pay my dues.

me, peddling my wares to unsuspecting youth

The thing about Kinsale and Kingston is that they write the hell out of an FMC. Book after book of women who are exceedingly clever, wily, funny, annoying, unscrupulous, holier-than-thou, principled, selfish, courageous, slippery, preachy, rigid, witty, mean-spirited, inflexible, difficult, hedonistic, and on and on and on. I love every single one of them dearly, and each one defies tidy description. Not once did it occur to me to ask if they were “likeable.”⁴ I just liked them because they were genuinely interesting, a truly rare quality in a romance-environment that seems increasingly vested in FMCs as softly misshapen projective objects or mouthpieces for an author’s personal manifesto on femininity, rather than layered and fully-formed characters in their own right. Melanthe and Maddy and Margaret and Eluned are FMCs you can sink your fucking teeth into. Characters containing whole worlds within them, entire lives that extend beyond the first and last pages of their books. To encounter them is to brush up against something living and breathing with the back of your hand, to feel their gasp against your fingers.

The word that kept coming to mind as I read these books was relentless. Kinsale and Kingston don’t give a flying fuck about making sure you keep up and know exactly what’s going on and feel safe and comfortable and tucked into your little bed as you read. They’re never going to tell you how you’re supposed to feel when you read their work. They write as they please and you run after them at breakneck speed, hoping your brain will be able to make sense of the needle they’re threading. Inevitably, because they are exceptionally skilled writers, you do. By the time I reached the end of One Burning Heart, I was, quite literally, breathless. Eluned of Fair, Bright, and Terrible entered a hall of fame reserved for very few FMCs in my entire romance reading history. I’m never going to forget what it felt like to read Melanthe’s plea to Ruck at the end of For My Lady’s Heart or Maddy’s cheeky, “‘Thou hast not guessed it yet?... I fear I’m only good enough to be thy duchess,” at the end of Flowers from the Storm. Magic, witchcraft, sorcery. It’s the very stuff that made me a romance reader, packed into four gorgeous books.

I don’t bring up Kinsale and Kingston as direct comparison points for Huang– they couldn’t be. I think their work meets entirely different needs and sometimes serves different audiences and requires different skills to develop. I am fiercely protective of the right for both Twisted Lies and One Burning Heart to exist in and be celebrated in romance, but it’s hard not to feel concerned about the fact that One Burning Heart is so lonely among 2024 releases. If one is to believe the gossip mill, publishers certainly aren’t interested in acquiring stuff like it, even as they fight to the death (to varying levels of success) to acquire poor imitations of Ana Huang’s work.

I’m going to keep grumbling about this issue as is my god-given right as a romance reader. For now, I still have a TBR to work through.

1. This does not apply to Chuck Bass, who was attractive for two episodes as a little lad in Paris and never again.

2. The only person with a brain, the only actress worth her salt.

3. Everyone wants to know reading order. I say you should really be reading The King’s Man, then Fair, Bright, and Terrible, then you can skip to One Burning Heart, if you want, but also they are technically standalones and you can start wherever you choose. I haven’t read the 3rd yet but will be returning to it ASAP to eke out every last bit of juice from this lemon.

4. Lord if we, as a culture, never ask this question ever again it won’t be a day too soon.