Friction

Death before (and after) conflict

I have notes in my phone called, “Cuevas words” which is what it sounds like: a catalogue of new-to-me expressions I’ve gleaned from historical romance author Judy Cuevas (better known by her pen name with Avon, Judith Ivory) and tried to commit to memory through forced repetition. I’ve had the most success with onanistic.

Onanistic. Masturbatory.

This is a personal essay. *Jerk off motion*

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Everyone in the book world is always saying “BookTok is saving publishing” and nobody ever tells you what it is really doing, which is making me argue with a wall. I’ve lost the taste for posting on the app regularly but I still scroll, accumulating some of the most baffling opinions on romance novels then and adding them to my repertoire of Things I Need to Publicly Dissect.

Third act breakups should be avoided. Miscommunication is unnecessary. Romance novels are for pleasure, and any inclusion of on-page grief should be heavily televised in the marketing so it can be isolated out.

Nothing is more boring to me than arguing about preference and boundaries (fine to have, I don’t need or want an explanation for either) but I can’t help but notice the collective air of suspicion heaped onto romance novels that are a bit thornier. If joy is a moral imperative, that means that experiencing baser feelings —disgust, jealousy, agony, frustration — are antithetical to the idea of romance.

That’s what I told my wall, anyway.

My mother wrote paranormal romance novels, which is a funny occupation for a dead mom. Paranormal is a subgenre where life is no longer ephemeral— a vampire or a God or a demon can spend half a millenia in rotting torment before finding their true love— and the “E” in HEA (Happily-Ever-After) slowly shifts in connotation, from threat to loving promise.

Christine Feehan, one of my mom’s favorite paranormal authors, helped the subgenre skyrocket in popularity with the first in her Carpathian series, 1999’s Dark Prince. In the book’s opening paragraphs Mikhail Dubrinsky, an ancient vampiric being called a Carpathian, ponders suicide after years of ennui when a telepathic message from his love interest Raven Whitney halts his plans in their tracks: “The trouble is not really in being alone, it’s being lonely. One can be lonely in the midst of a crowd, don’t you think?”

Confused by her invasion into his mind and his sudden revitalisation, Mikhail tracks Raven down. When he sees her for the first time he is overwhelmed by a rush of color— Carpathian’s without a lifemate can only view the world in black and white.

I used to describe the HEA in a romance novel as a safety net, because you know the main characters won’t die. In retrospect that seems a bit naive. Living isn’t safe. Loving someone isn’t safe.

In an interview with Fated Mates, Christine Feehan spoke about her experience after her son’s death:

“We always played Dungeons and Dragons together, and I always talked to him about vampires, made-up stories. And one of the things we talked about was, why would somebody want to give up your soul? And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, ‘If you have no feelings, if you can't feel anything and nothing can touch you...’

And I honestly felt like I couldn't see in color anymore. Everything felt so dull. And I thought, ‘I have to find a way back to the people I love’ and that’s when I started writing Dark Prince.”

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I can hear the arguments forming against my take on grief. “Anguish is part and parcel with paranormal romance,” says the wall. “But cutesy contemporary rom-coms with it are misleading.” I’m not much of a contemporary romance reader, but I can’t stay in my lane here because that would be mixing metaphors.

First I want to point out that “rom-com” is a term that has been reverse-engineered by publishers, who have been known to indiscriminately slap the label on any contemporary romance with the barest essence of wit. (My friend Beth has a devastating rebuke I think of often: “That had the cadence of a joke.”)

The Oxford English Dictionary traces rom-com to its film-specific roots in 1963, when a newspaper used the term to describe the British comedy The Bridal Path. According to OED rom-coms are films with “a light, comedic tone and a plot centring on a romance,” which notably does not mention the necessity of an HEA. This is why My Best Friend’s Wedding, where Julia Roberts famously does not get the guy, is still a rom-com.

Generally, I think applying rom-com (vibes, mostly) to genre fiction with structural requirements is missing the point. This is not something I care deeply about, but it’s my roundabout way of talking about Muriel’s Wedding.

PJ Hogan directed both My Best Friend’s Wedding and Muriel’s Wedding, and the latter is quite possibly my favorite movie, let alone rom-com. In Muriel’s Wedding, Muriel (Toni Collette, absolutely stunning) has dreams of grandeur: a big, lovely wedding, and the public adoration that comes with it. Her father is a local businessman who hates his layabout children and publicly disrespects his meek wife. After Muriel is caught shoplifting, she pretends to follow in her father’s snake-oil footsteps by selling makeup, only to take his money (a “business loan”) to trail the popular girls she wants to impress on their resort vacation.

In cultural memory, Muriel’s Wedding is pure fun. Muriel’s ABBA obsession, previously the butt of the joke with the mean girls (“You listen to seventies music. This is the nineties!”) is where she finds her independence: she hits a breakthrough when she and her best friend Rhonda triumphantly perform “Waterloo” at the resort.

But all of this comes at a cost. While Muriel is later rebranding herself as a video rental hottie in Sydney and plotting a grand marriage to an Olympic swimmer, her father turns his ire on a familiar target: his wife.

Muriel’s mother dies by suicide, and Muriel returns to her hometown with feelings that can’t be so neatly described as regret. The requisite “What if —” never forms into a full question. If it did, I imagine it would be: What if I never left? What if I never lived?

The Romance Writers of America was founded in Houston, Texas in 1980. Decades later, my mother, whose website boasted she was from the “sizzling Southwest,” joined the Dallas chapter. I left Texas in 2013, and she died four years later. Muriel’s Wedding is my favorite rom-com.

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Inchoate. That’s another Cuevas word. Recently or partially formed.

I always imagined that when someone close to you dies there’s a great withering, where you break apart like a days-old meringue. Instead I was elbowed in solidarity so frequently that I couldn’t ignore the obvious: those elbows were attached to arms which were attached (by way of shoulders, etc) to heads that were responsible for similar sleepless morosities. No other mourner had collapsed really, just calcified from distress. Also: I might be a bit self-absorbed.

Black Silk by Judy Cuevas is a Victorian romance between two people: Graham Wessit, the Earl of Netham, and Submit Channing-Downes, the widowed Marchioness of Motmarche. Graham is a rake with a soft underbelly: a dilettante by reputation, which is immediately repudiated by his interest in Submit. To other aristocrats, the soft-spoken lowborn heroine is more akin to a piece of work than a piece of art. But Grant has an appraiser’s eye: he loves the downy hair on her cheeks, and the sh-sh-sh sound she makes in motion, encumbered by widows weeds.

I said Black Silk was about two people, but there is also a third: Henry Channing-Downes, Marquess of Motmarche, whose death precedes the events of the novel. Henry raised Graham, and their contentious relationship solidified Graham’s reputation as problematic. As an orphaned child Graham would act out, then Henry would swiftly rebuke him — not just for course correction, but as a public statement: He’s not really one of mine. He’s not like me.

Long after Graham estranged himself from his guardian, Henry married a teenaged Submit. As a product of middle-class ambition, Submit was groomed, molded, and plucked into being the perfect aristocratic wife, but she doesn’t see herself as a victim. She found Henry’s interest in her invigorating, and that her marriage had been “the most healing, salutary event in her life.” Now widowed in her mid-twenties, Submit is still saddled with her tell-tale Puritan name, and is very, very alone among Henry’s set.

“Grief, Submit discovered, could be a very selfish thing. Though she was sure she had felt grief for the loss of Henry, whom she had loved, on the day of the tears at Whitehall, she knew that her sorrow was for the Henry who loved her.”

The complicated truth is that Graham and Submit knew two different Henrys — a larger-than-life figure that had a unique, alchemical reaction to whoever stood closest to him. Less self-assured authors would probably try to reconcile both versions of the man so that Graham and Submit can be at accord, but Cuevas skirts refined neatness here. Graham doesn’t ask for the catharsis of vindication— he knows that Submit, his greatest love, won’t rebuke his former tormenter.

I have a few well-worn copies of Black Silk; I think it’s the perfect romance novel. Great love and latent grief can exist at odds with each other. As Graham tells Submit: “What an unspeakable mess life can be.”

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After my mom’s funeral a relative nudged me about writing thank you cards to the people who sent flowers. I didn’t realize this was something I was expected to do. (Truculent. Aggressively defiant.)

I was briefly head of the household, which now included an ant infestation in the kitchen pantry. (Do you know how Richard Burton says, “Creatures that swarm and multiply” in his narration of War of the Worlds, as if it’s actually his vowels that are engulfing you?) When I called an exterminator he told me I would have to kill the queen. Fair enough. I could keep my title through other methods, but the most expeditious way was for someone else to die.

“Some of the duke’s forebears had lived long, and some had lived short, but all had lived hard because that was their nature. They were hellions, born that way, notorious for it.” This is how Loretta Chase introduces Vere, the Duke of Ainswood, in The Last Hellion.

Vere made his first appearance as Dain’s rude brawler friend in Lord of Scoundrels, and when he gets his own book he continues on with the same thick veneer of carefree wastrelism. The prologue in The Last Hellion chronicles the slew of familial deaths that led Vere to inherit, ending with his beloved predecessor, a sweet nine-year old who contracts diptheria.

Vere’s extremely funny, almost slapstick romance with the no-nonsense hoyden Lydia Grenville would seem at-odds with the tragic prologue if it weren’t for the air of frenetic desperation that Chase gives Vere. Even the name hellion conveys something much more turbulent than rake, the more common term for a profligate aristocrat. He’s living on borrowed time; it’s easy to hide grief-induced apathy behind smiling self-destruction.

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There’s a college trick for ending essays where you reference something you said in the beginning, creating a false sense of closure.

Pellucid. Transparent or easily understood.

Now imagine I’m your college professor, pausing for a quick beat before I take your temperature: “Clear as mud?”