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Dear Bitches, Smart Authors, October 3, 2011
[music]
Sarah Wendell: Welcome to another podcast from Dear Bitches, Smart Authors. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me is Jane Litte from Dear Author. This week, Jane interviews me about my new book, Everything I Know about Love I Learned from Romance Novels, which came out October 4th, and seriously, y’all, she had no mercy. She asks some really tough questions, but I really enjoyed our conversation, and I hope you do too!
[music]
Jane Litte: So why don’t you start by telling us how this project came about?
Sarah: I have been writing an advice column online called “Everything I Know about Love I Learned from Romance Novels.” I like long titles, by the way. If you’re going to title something, it needs to be, like, eight or nine words long, as far as I’m concerned, or apparently, anyway. So I would answer real letters from people. I believe that you and I originally came up with this idea a really long time ago.
Jane: Yeah, we talked about it. I thought it would be a good idea for you. [Laughs]
Sarah: Yeah, you were right! Because people just, people really tell me their business, like really private business, and I answer their letters using the wisdom of the romance novel, which I decided was one of the best sources for how to work out your problems ever. But I didn’t really think much beyond the column, and when Sourcebooks approached me about doing a crowd-sourced, nonfiction book based on that concept I thought, oh, this could be a lot of fun, because not only would it be me sort of framing what I think is valid and valuable about romances, but I would get to talk to readers and authors about the genre that they love, which was really fun.
Jane: So how many –
Sarah: So that’s how it came to be.
Jane: How many readers and authors did you talk to in order to create this book?
Sarah: A crapping ton. Huge number. I would say, in terms of percentages, it might be fifty percent readers and fifty percent authors. I know there’s at least thirty to forty different readers quoted who told me about why romance is important to them personally and how it’s helped them identify other people that are valuable to them. Each chapter is, is divided by the lessons that we learn from romance novels. We learn how to treat ourselves and how to recognize what we want, we learn how to recognize a good partner, we learn about sexuality and our own sexuality, we learn how to overcome problems, and we learn that happy endings take work. But my bigger surprise was the number of authors who were willing to give me really interesting perspectives, including some authors who shared some reader letters with me, and I wasn’t able to use them, but they shared them with me to explain how much the books that they’ve written have become valuable pieces of other people’s lives. And it was, it was an element to sort of celebrating the genre that I didn’t expect, but at the end it was my favorite part, how truly valuable people find the romances that they love.
Jane: So one of the things that I was concerned about was that you present this story, or this book, as a way of what readers can draw from romance novels in a positive fashion, but romance as a, as a genre and romance readers are often confronted with this idea that we can’t separate fantasy from fic-, from truth –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: – and that what lessons are we learning from romance? And your book focuses on the positives, but if, if, if readers are learning positive lessons, can’t they also learn negative lessons?
Sarah: I think so, but I also tend to err on the, the side of believing that readers are intelligent, and the number one motivation, I believe, behind the accusation that we can’t tell fantasy from reality is that we are not intelligent, and I just don’t believe that that’s true. I don’t believe that most readers are unintelligent. Readers are by and large quite intelligent, and I believe that we can tell the difference between reality and fiction, and I can see where people can take a fictional construct and understand how pieces of it apply to their real life. I agree with you that accusation is thrown around a lot. What I wanted for the book was to be a sort of a cagey answer: well, yes, there are a lot of lessons and, and pieces of information in romance novels, but they’re all good! And, and let me tell you all about them.
Jane: Well, there’s also, though, the idea that the romance fiction normalizes certain behaviors. The virgin, for example: the virgin is so highly prized –
Sarah: Yep.
Jane: – in romance that you have virgin courtesans and virgin widows.
Sarah: Yes!
Jane: So –
Sarah: Enormous acrobatics to preserve their virginity! God forbid!
Jane: And if they’re not virgins, they’re re-virginized.
Sarah: Yes, they are re-experiencing some sort of purity.
Jane: So there are definitely things within romance that normalize behavior that isn’t so empowering.
Sarah: I agree with you there; there are definitely things about the genre that I would love to change. However, even though there is a really unfortunate focus on virginity and there is a construct of purity that often bugs the crap out of me, at the same time, the genre is still one of the few places where women can explore their own sexuality in a judgment-free zone, aside from the purity and, and vir-, virginity aspects. There’s no real denigration of female sexual experience. It’s, it’s valid for women to have orgasms in romance novels; in fact, it’s expected, and if she doesn’t have one it’s very strange. Most of the time when I encounter sexuality portrayed in the media or elsewhere, it is from a male point of view, and it’s from a male-dominated perspective, and it casts the female in a thoroughly unrealistic role. One thing I like about the genre right now is that it, that there are so many authors breaking away from the concept of virginity or playing with it to put it on the other person, for example. Courtney Milan’s latest book is all about a, a male virgin hero, and I’m fascinated by that, because there are writers who are tackling that old, I think archaic and outdated idea and revealing what more could be done with it.
Jane: One of the things, I think, that was central to Pam Regis, a romance scholar in the, what, ‘70s? was that romances are largely about the heroes and that the women are, the, the heroines are placeholders for the female readers, but your book suggests the opposite. In fact, I, it, you know, the, the book starts out with Loretta Chase, and she writes, or you have it in all bold caps, THE WOMAN IS IMPORTANT. That the, that the world revolves on the heroine, and, and the lessons that you relate throughout the book are very female-oriented, so –
Sarah: Yes.
Jane: – how would you respond to that?
Sarah: Well, I don’t know if it was Pam Regis that said that it was the male experience, that the woman was a placeholder? I think that was Laura Kinsale that said that. The book that you’re talking about is by Janice Radway, and it was called Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature.
Jane: Okay.
Sarah: But I’m not sure; I’d have to pull my copy of that book off the shelf. I read that for the, when I was researching the Bosoms, and I don’t remember exactly what it was. What I remember was Laura Kinsale talking about how her book was the first one to have Fabio front and center by himself on the cover, and she derived from the success of that cover the idea that the woman wasn’t so much as, the center as it was the hero and that the female was a placeholder. I personally believe that there are different types of readers. Some readers identify with and need to sympathize with the heroine and may see themselves in her role in some ways. I think some people also read for the hero. I think I read for both, but romance is a genre that is written mostly by women, and it is consumed mostly by women, and if you go to a romance conference and you look at all the editors, it’s produced mostly by women. So there is an undeniable strength to the idea that this is a female experience being written and coded over and over again.
Jane: One of the things that you had in your book was – [laughs] – which I thought was hilarious, was who was your preferred dictator –
Sarah: Yes! [Laughs]
Jane: – and it was for different ones. How did you come up with this idea of asking who is your preferred dictator? And why is Stalin the Western dictator?
Sarah: Well, I, that chart is actually something that Candy and I initially developed for the Bosoms; it was one of the things we put, wanted to put in the Bosoms, and we, and the response was it didn’t really fit, and we were like, but it’s awesome! Because there’s, I think there’s a question there about what your favorite dessert is and what kind of pants you wear and how many pairs of black pants you have and who’s your favorite dictator? It was, it started off as something silly, but it was much more fun and interesting to develop once we thought about each dictator in each place, so there’s a reason every dictator is in every, in, in the different genres.
Jane: So how did you come up with Stalin?
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: That’s really my question.
Sarah: How did I come up with Stalin? Oh my goodness. I mean, come on, Stalin was sort of hot, except for the decay and the, you know –
Jane: I just don’t understand where Stalin and Western fit together, ‘cause all of your other dictators make sense to me.
[Laughter]
Sarah: Why is Stalin in the West?
Jane: And I’m like, cowboys of the West have an affection for Stalin?
Sarah: Totally! Yeah, sure, why not?
Jane: I don’t get that.
Sarah: Actually, the reason, by the way, the reason that Stalin is in there, it wasn’t so much that Stalin had a man-crush on him as he wanted to assassinated, assassinate him. He ordered the KGB to kill John Wayne because of his popularity and because he had anti-communist beliefs.
Jane: [Laughs] So?
[Laughter]
Jane: Well, I guess that goes, I, I mean, that probably even fits even better, because dictators are all about the suppression of people.
Sarah: Yes. And cowboys are very determined to, to sustain their way of life and their manly cowboy action and, you know, never shave and make sure that they keep their shirts untucked and have a lot of sex on hay bales, depending on what book you’re reading. So how –
Jane: That’s so uncomfortable.
Sarah: I know, doesn’t it? And, and there’s a lot of hay-bale sex in some erotica I’ve read, and I’m just, oh, it makes me break out in hives.
Jane: You have a very humorous tone in your book. I think Kirkus said sometimes you descend into silliness?
Sarah: That was my favorite review.
Jane: So –
Sarah: Occasionally – clearly I was not silly enough; it was only occasionally.
Jane: How much – but I know from talking to you that you’re very passionate about this book, or about romance in general, and you certainly wouldn’t have written two books on romance if you weren’t passionate about it, and you wouldn’t run your blog if you weren’t passionate about it, so how much of this book is serious to you, and how much of it is just for fun?
Sarah: I think it’s about fifty/fifty of both, because I don’t take myself very seriously at all, and there are things that I do take seriously, but I think that with romance novels, there is a lot of valid and, and important things going on inside the genre, but at the same time there are some places where the genre is so silly it’s hilarious, and that’s sort of been the, the rhetoric of the site from the beginning. We love romance novels, and we’re not afraid to also poke a little fun at them because, come on, sometimes they’re totally goofy. I adore the genre, and I will defend anyone who takes any crap having read it. It, it makes me sad that people take, take crap from other people and get, receive a hard time from random strangers just for having read a book in public with, you know, a mullet. If anyone should be ashamed, it’s the people who have the mullets!
Jane: [Laughs] Are mullets a necessary requirement for a hero, because I did not see that on your list of hero traits on page thirty-nine.
Sarah: Really? ‘Cause there’s a, there’s a, there’s a quintessential romance hero graphic where step one is acquire a mullet. If I didn’t write it down on that page, it’s just because it’s commonly understood. You really, you just can’t be a romance hero without a, an effective mullet.
Jane: No, because what makes an excellent alpha male hero, and you have some bullet points, mullets is not, is not there.
Sarah: Oh, dear. I’m going to have to send the book back to press and, and have them grind up all those copies and fix that, ‘cause you have to have a mullet. I apologize for having left that out.
Jane: Does that mean that New Jersey automatically has a higher ratio of ideal men than any other state?
Sarah: Yes, and Canada too. Actually, Kristi J challenged me on my knowledge of a Can-, of, of what a mullet is based on the Canadian strength of mullet, and her examples of Canadian mulletude were just glorious, so I think that if you go to Canada you’re going to find a much higher concentration of romance heroes, but barring Canadian access, you can always come to Jersey.
Jane: Well, where’s Billy Ray Cyrus from, because he’s, has the most iconic mullet for me.
Sarah: Billy Ray Cyrus and Dog the Bounty Hunter. Dog the Bounty Hunter’s mullet is, it’s got shells in it. Like, there’s sea life, it’s an aquarium in his head. But Billy –
Jane: I just want to say that neither of them seem to be ideal heroes, but –
Sarah: No, they aren’t.
Jane: – in any event –
Sarah: Billy Ray Cyrus with the little chin beard is kind of creepy. He is from – where’s he from? – he’s from Kentucky. I suppose that there’s a, a higher concentration of mullets in Kentucky and Tennessee, but I haven’t been there enough to, to verify. What about where you are? Are there, are there mullets where you are?
Jane: No, I don’t remember seeing a lot of mullets. You have, I think mullets are kind of a fashion, trendy sort of thing, and we’re just not very trendy.
Sarah: Mm.
Jane: We believe in the bowl cut.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: My next question is also another difficult question. I tried to think of really difficult questions so people didn’t think I was going all softball on you.
Sarah: I, I just tweeted, you’re asking me really hard questions. I’m like, ooh, I should have done my homework for this!
Jane: [Laughs]
Sarah: Holy crap!
Jane: Do you think that romance novels create unrealistic expectations in women about what their significant other or what their prospective significant others should act like?
Sarah: No, no, I don’t. I think that the propensity for simultaneous double orgasm is a lot lower in real life than it is in a romance novel. These people are always coming together just like, my God! Just, somebody lights a match and poof! Everyone has an orgasm! I don’t think that’s terribly realistic, but I think that when you look at romance heroes, ultimately, you know, it actually goes back to what you said in a prior podcast about the Caitlin Crews book about how he was going to figure out and learn how to love the heroine the way that she deserved, and I think that there is a lot of that type of determination and affection played out in romance novels, and I think that’s an entirely appropriate way to be. One of the things that I focus on is how the person who’s reading it, who probably reads a lot of romance novels, can look at their own relationships, and one of the things that Teresa Medeiros says is that you should never stop courting your spouse, and that works both ways. And when you, when you think about what makes a romance hero, the things that I think an ordinary woman would find ideal in a partner are things that people do in real life. For example, I don’t ever expect my husband to, you know, battle terrorists with neat gadgets. He’s an attorney; he’s a little bit taller than me, you know? [Laughs] I’ve known him since he was seventeen, and he totally, by the way, had a mullet in high school. I’ll go on the record – I have to find a picture of it. It was curly. He had a puff mullet.
Jane: [Laughs]
Sarah: And it had a big old hockey-puck puff in the back; it was really steamy. When he does something like unloading the dishwasher or, you know, leaves a note for me or does something small and affectionate to let me know that he’s thinking of me, I think, that’s totally a romance-hero moment. I’m glad I can appreciate that. I think most people are intelligent to know that real romance and real affection isn’t demonstrated in giant, huge gestures. You know, like buying your company and attempting to make you redundant unless you sleep with the boss? You know, that’s, that’s not going to happen in real life, I hope please not really often? But in-, individual moments of affection really do happen, and when you learn to appreciate them and recognize them, I think it strengthens your relationships. And that doesn’t necessarily just go for romantic relationships. You know, I appreciate – like, you sent me a book today, and I was all happy for, like, an hour. Like, yay, I got a new book, and Jane sent it to me! Yay! I mean, that just totally made my day! Course now I can’t –
Jane: So you’re saying that I’m a real-life hero?
Sarah: Yes! You are all man. [Laughs]
Jane: I could have a mullet!
Sarah: You could! Actually, I don’t know if that would be a good look for you though.
Jane: So what was the most interesting piece of reader mail that you did not include in the book?
Sarah: I received a few email messages from readers who said, I wanted to respond to your queries – ‘cause I would post about the book as I was writing it on the site and ask for people to contribute and make clear that I was going to draw from the comments for the book and to let me know if they didn’t want to be included, and I had people who emailed me privately to say, I didn’t want to be saying this publicly, and I didn’t, I don’t want you to include this, but I need to let you know how I feel. It’s sort of like the advice column: people confide in me problems that really surprise me, but I’m also very honored by the fact that they trust me with this terribly personal information. There were a few women who emailed me to say that more than anything else about the genre, more than anything that they’ve read, the positive portrayal of female sexuality was one of the most valuable things for them. One woman told me that she had survived really horrible sexual abuse and that she believes that she will one day have healthy sexual relationships and be able to engage someone else and to go after someone else personally because she sees that it, that sexual relationships are not all bad, and I found that really brave and amazing, because I think that from her experience, her understanding of sex was all bad and painful and scary and shameful, and that’s true for a lot of people. In romance novels and in the genre, sexual experiences are not always shameful, and they are emotionally climactic and a lot of times very positive. I’m looking for a stronger word than positive; I’m having a hard time coming up with one. Heh-heh, hard time. The idea that sexy is healthy and normal, and it is okay for women to have hornypants can be revelatory for people, and the women that I heard from were most affected by that, that they had a place where they could look at their own sexuality without shame and fear and panic.
Jane: So what is the takeaway that you – was there any kind of commonality amongst the letters that you received from the romance readers?
Sarah: Yes, that, there’s a sense that – [laughs] – even though sometimes they are wonderfully silly, and I love it when they are – that romances are terribly valuable and important to the women who, who, who like them. Nora Roberts said in, in an interview for the first book that romances are an easy target because they’re, they’re a hat trick of easy targets for ridicule: they’re about relationships, emotions, and sex. Well, when you’re reading books about relationships and emotions and sex, those are some of the most intimate things that people deal with in their lives: how to navigate relationships; how to deal with giant, scary, overwhelming, painful emotions; and how to deal with sex. These are all difficult things, and here is an entire genre that’s devoted to exploring those things in all of their variations, and because of that, reading is an intimate experience. One of the things that drives me insane about the way that some people respond to reviews online is to say that the reader’s experience wasn’t valid because someone else disagrees. That just makes my head explode, because every individual reader’s experience with a book is valid. It’s, it, every individual’s experience with a book is their own. Every time you read a book, that book becomes yours in a way, and my experience with some of the books that I love is im-, very intimate, and it’s very personal to me, and there’s books that I have a hard time talking about because I can’t articulate how they made me feel or how they changed the way I think. That intimate appreciation was present in every reader’s communication with me, whether it was on the site or by email or on Twitter, that the books that we read in the romance genre are so important to us on a very personal and intimate level that it’s nice to see them taken seriously and discussed honestly, and that’s one of the things that people were most happy about, actually, that there were so many places online where they could talk about romance novels with like-minded and friendly people.
Jane: All right, so –
Sarah: Anyway.
Jane: – your, your book suggests –
Sarah: Back to what we’re talking about.
Jane: – that romance novels have the capacity of teaching us how to be MacGyver.
Sarah: [Laughs] Yes! Either theoretically or literally, depending on what genre you like.
Jane: But here’s the problem that I have: I think that duct tape is seriously underused in romance novels, so I’m not sure that these are legitimate survival guides.
Sarah: [Laughs] That’s my next book: Everything I Need to Know about Survival I Learned from Romances.
Jane: And it would be, like, one Linda Howard book after the other.
Sarah: Yes! [Laughs] The first thing you need is some ferns, lots and lots of ferns.
Jane: ‘Cause in, ‘cause in Prey, I think they talk about the five different ways you can start a fire.
Sarah: Oh, and Jill Shalvis did a whole thing about how you can start a fire with a bag of Fritos, because the oil in the bag will light fire, will, will light, and the bag will burn, and you can use that to start a fire. Like, how awesome is that? No, I don’t know why duct tape is not sufficiently used, but it should be; you’re right. If only to hold the boob, the bosoms up; you know, give them a little lift.
Jane: So you think that we know how to solve problems based on reading romances.
Sarah: I believe so. Yes, I, I believe that the more you see problems solved, the more you think, okay, there’s a way out; there’s a way I can solve this problem. This has not – this has happened before; I am not the only one to experience this, and I think that’s something that happens on the internet too. No matter what it is that you’re dealing with, no matter what it is you want to learn more about, someone else has that information, or someone else has that same experience, and romance novels are, are like that in a lot of ways, because no matter what problems you face, someone else has faced a similar problem, or has faced a completely off-the-wall, fantastical version that lets you see your own solution when it’s not so immediate and pressing on you.
Jane: So there’s emotional duct tape in the stories.
Sarah: Yes, that is exactly it: there’s emotional duct tape. Well said! [Laughs]
Jane: It’s full of emotional duct tape.
Sarah: Yes. The, the, the colorful ones, too, like the leopard print and everything.
Jane: You know the biggest thing that I’ve learned from romance novels –
Sarah: What?
Jane: – is that if I would just talk to my partner that we wouldn’t suffer these big misunderstandings that would lead to people jumping to erroneous conclusions, and I’ve learned that people hate the people who jump to erroneous conclusions.
Sarah: Yes! I, that is so true; you should not presume to know the motivations of why someone said or did something, because most of the time you’re wrong.
Jane: [Laughs] Oh my God, I just read Sweet Betrayal –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Jane: – which is by Helen Brooks, which, and Helen Brooks is an HP author that I really enjoy, and I’ve just kind of been making my way through the Harlequin Treasury books. I mean, I was –
Sarah: Oh, I’m sorry.
Jane: – able to buy ‘em at Fictionwise for, like, a dollar-something. And this book was just horrible! The heroine was constantly jumping to conclusions, all, and always the worst conclusions, and then she wouldn’t just jump to the conclusion, but she would say really horrible things based upon this erroneous –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: – conclusion that she drew, and, you know, that’s a good life lesson!
Sarah: That is a good lesson!
Jane: Don’t be the heroine in Sweet Betrayal.
Sarah: No, don’t, don’t be passive-aggressive; don’t, don’t refrain from saying what you mean and saying what you want; and for God’s sake, don’t ever presume that you know why someone is saying or doing something. Most of the time, you’re totally wrong.
Jane: [Laughs] So how many men did you talk to?
Sarah: Not a lot. There were a few men who responded on the site that I included, and I talk a little bit about Doc Turtle, who was the, is the professor of mathematics in North Carolina that challenged me to, to select a romance novel that he would read, and I found him three that he liked – heh-heh-heh – and he had to stop reviewing because he was finishing his, his tenure application. Such a lame reason, I swear. There are a few dudes quoted. What’s interesting is that there used to be a lot more men writing romance that were sort of known, like, men who were writing under female pseudonyms, and now whenever I encounter a male writer who is trying to pitch me the fiction that they’ve written and they say it’s a romance, most often it’s not.
Jane: [Laughs] I think that – ‘cause I’ve had those queries too – but I think in men’s minds, male writer minds, it’s if there’s sex and people are in love that that equals romance.
Sarah: [Laughs] Yes.
Jane: And sometimes, and sometimes it’s just, my book has sex in it. [Laughs]
Sarah: You know, that really is the pitch that I get sometimes: this book is, is, is an untraditional romance, but with lots of sexual content. What, like somebody dies in the end, but they had good sex beforehand? Great! Exciting! No! That’s not what I want! [Exasperated sigh]
Jane: [Laughs] So did, did the men that you talked to come away with different things than the women that you talked to?
Sarah: Not really, because I was mostly taking from them. I was very selfish; I was, I was taking from them and asking them questions about their own experience reading romances. Even the authors that I spoke to, I asked them about books they’ve written but also books they’ve read, because romance authors are often very well-read among the genre, particularly if they’ve read books that are a little bit older than my first experiences with the romance genre. The men I spoke to were also, I was, I mostly targeted a, the target of many questions about what they’ve read and what they thought, so I don’t think they took away anything different, except maybe, God, that woman’s really annoying; I’m never talking to her again.
[Laughter]
Jane: So what’s your next project?
Sarah: Well, I have this podcast. My next project is to actually release the book, which comes out on the 4th of October, and to do as much as I possibly can to promote it and the genre. The nice thing about writing books like this is wherever I go and whoever I talk to, I bring the genre with me, and I try to elevate the reputation of it as much as I can, because it doesn’t deserve to be dismissed out of hand. Yes, there are totally goofy and silly things about it, and yes, there are some crazy plots that I love, love, love, but it does not deserve to be dismissed entirely as the fluffy porn of unintelligent women. There’s so much wrong with how romance is just immediately dismissed as invalid or not worthy of, of real criticism.
I think my next project is to continue with the podcast, to expand into audio, because I, I really love our podcasts – I think they’re really fun – and to continue to create a community online where people can come and talk to me about romances, because the nice thing is, there’s always more romances coming out to talk about!
Jane: Well, I think you’re a great ambassador for romance, and –
Sarah: Thank you.
Jane: – as a romance reader, I’m very pleased that you’re our spokesperson.
Sarah: Oh, thank you! I really appreciate that. I don’t know I’m the on-, if I’m the only spokesperson; I think there’s some really smart women out there talking about romances as well, like, you know, you, but I am happy to do whatever I can to make sure that people take a second look at the genre and don’t immediately dismiss the women who read and write it, ‘cause there’s some extraordinary people that I’ve met through the website.
Jane: Yeah, one of the things that I, really struck me was Loretta Chase’s contributions to your book, because Loretta Chase and authors like Claudia Dain and Courtney Milan, in their books you can really see how much they love other women, and how much they appreciate women, and how they want everyone to appreciate women, and when I was reading Courtney Milan’s book, it really struck me, because I read it –
Sarah: Unclaimed?
Jane: – yeah – ‘cause I read it shortly after I read the Loretta Chase book, ‘cause I read them both around the same time for some reason – I can’t remember why, ‘cause they don’t come out anywhere near other –
Sarah: Mm-mm.
Jane: – but I did end up reading them very close in time with each other, and I thought, these are two women who really love other women, and, and the heroes are great, and I note in your book Loretta Chase said she likes to write men that are hot and tall because, you know, why not make them fantasy –
Sarah: Mm-hmm!
Jane: – creatures? [Laughs]
Sarah: Yep.
Jane: And I’m all for that, Loretta.
[Laughter]
Jane: I like them hot and tall too.
[More laughter]
Jane: But they, they really love on the woman, and that’s, that’s just tremendous. I don’t know how much you’ve read of Claudia Dain, but she’s like that too.
Sarah: Yes.
Jane: She really glories in showing how women are smart, resourceful, funny, engaging, and how wouldn’t you want to be with these type of people?
Sarah: It’s totally true. Especially because so often women’s relationships with other womens are – with other womens, nice – women’s relationship with other women are portrayed negatively? That there’s always some element of jealousy or, or greed or distaste or dislike, that no one is really, truly your friend? Especially Loretta Chase and Courtney Milan; not only do they appreciate women, but they like women’s relationships, and they have respect for the way that women think of things. It’s certainly not a hero-only centered narrative when they write a book, which is one of the reasons why I love them. I also love Loretta Chase’s contribution, because when she sent it to me I was so pissed off because I thought, God damn it, she wrote the whole book!
Jane: [Laughs]
Sarah: I don’t have to write anything now! Because it was so perfect! I had to include the whole thing, and it’s in the beginning. It’s, I think it’s, the chapter is LORETTA CHASE PRETTY MUCH KNOWS EVERYTHING –
Jane: Yes.
Sarah: – because she broke down why romances work and, and when you read it you’re like, oh! Yes! She’s right! The other person to do that was Robyn Carr; she almost wrote the whole book for me in a paragraph, and I wanted to, like, go find her and, like, yell at her a little bit, because she talked about how what you learn romances is often the opposite of what you would expect, that when you see a heroine leave an abusive relationship, you cheer; when you see a woman stand up for herself and, and go out and find what she is deserving of, you are happy for her; and when you see a character or a hero move away from a damaging circumstance and embrace a more healthy way of being and thinking, you are happy for them, and you encourage them in, in your own interactions with that book; that when you see people get out from under bad crap, you’re inspired and confident, and you want that to happen, because you are, these are your heroes. These are the hero and the heroine; they are people who you’re, who you want ultimately to have a happy ending. So when you see the examples of what’s not healthy and what’s not happy, you also, I think, learn to recognize it in your own life. Even though so often that negative female character is a, is a stereotype and a caricature, I’ve also recognized really venomous people by their similarity to characters who I really did not like and who ended up being really crappy human beings.
Jane: Well, there’s, you know, authors who do communities really well, like Robyn Carr does communities –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jane: – really well, but I think that there’s some authors who really, maybe it’s their focus, maybe it’s just part of who they are, or maybe it’s intentional, but really elevate the, the status of woman, and I just felt like when I was reading Courtney’s book Unveiled, and when I was reading Loretta Chase’s book Silk Is for Seduction, these authors are really loving up women, and I, I really enjoyed reading those books.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. I agree.
Jane: I think Kate what’s-her-face, and I can’t remember her name – Kate Collins, Kate – oh God. She’s a Berkley author; she writes in trade; she did that really cute video.
Sarah: Kate Noble?
Jane: Yes! Kate Noble.
Sarah: She –
Jane: I think Kate Noble’s kind of like that.
Sarah: She wrote The Summer of You and Follow My Lead.
Jane: Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah. I, I agree; I love her books, and I love the way that she portrays women’s friendships. That was one of the things that, I mean, I think that Lisa Kleypas was one of the first to really build a series around just women when she created the Hathaways and the Wallflowers, and I remember her telling me one of the – gosh, this is was in 2005. This was right after I’d started the website, ‘cause I remember I was hugely pregnant with my older son at the time I went to the New Jersey Romance Writers book signing, and I met her, and she was talking to a reader who had just bought one of the books and was saying how much she had loved it, and I remember Kleypas saying that originally the response to her idea was very negative, because readers wouldn’t want to read about women who were all friends with each other, and she didn’t agree with that, because her female friendships as an adult were among the most valuable friendships in her life, and I thought, I totally agree with that, especially the friends that I’ve made through blogging, which sounds like I meet all my friends online. I guess I kind of do? No shame! But –
[Laughter]
Sarah: All my friends are virtual! It’s like a giant Match.com for intellectual women.
[music]
Sarah: And that’s all for this week’s podcast. Thank you for joining us again. In future episodes we’ll be talking to authors – no, really, I promise we’re going to talk to people other than each other – and we’re going to take a look at some of our listener mail.
This week’s music is from Shadow Orchestra, and it’s called “Matilda Reprise.” It is available on iTunes and was provided to us by Sassy Outwater, who is apparently connected to every musician ever. As usual, we do feature original music in every podcast, and I hope you enjoy it.
And finally, if you listened this far and if you are one of the first four people to email [email protected], I will send you a copy of Everything I Know about Love I Learned from Romance Novels. Y’all, you have to touch this book. It’s so nice. The cover is just incredibly touchable. I think my mother-in-law fondled hers for, like, twenty-five minutes. So if you’re one of the first four people to email S for Sarah, B for Bitches, J for Jane, podcast at gmail dot com – everybody’s running to their computers right now, right? – you will win a copy, and I hope you enjoy it.
That’s all for this week, and I wish you the very best of reading.
[dreamy music]
This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.