Sarah interviews Dr. Kristen Nielsen Donnelly, who studies women and religion in Northern Ireland, as well as religion in popular culture like video games and romance novels. She’s currently conducting sociological research into the intersection between romance novels and sex. This project began after many conversations with her mother about the sex scenes she does – or does not – like reading. We also discuss growing into and out of religious communities, and the portrayal of religious people and people of faith in the romance genre. Plus, Kristen has a ton of recommendations for readers who are looking for romance and fiction set in contemporary Ireland. Her husband is Irish and they’ve recently moved back to the US after living there, so she’s got a bunch of recommendations if Irish-set fiction is your jam.
You can find a link to the survey she’s running – and yes, she would be delighted to have you complete it, though you’re certainly not obligated – in the show notes for this episode.
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First, and most importantly, you can find the survey online if you’d like to take it – and thank you from Kristen if you do!
You can find Kristen at her blog Beverages and Books and her Twitter for reviews is @bevsandbooks. Her twitter for her other/researcher life is @klndonnelly.
She also mentioned:
- Marian Keyes’ YouTube Channel, which is adorable
- The Extra Hot Great podcast
- Two interviews with Drs. Jen Lois and Joanna Gregson, who are also sociologists studying the romance community: episodes 51 and 147
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This Episode's Music
Our music is provided by Sassy Outwater each week. This is the Peatbog Faeries brand new album Blackhouse. This track is called “The Chatham Lassies.”
You can find their new album at Amazon, at iTunes, or wherever you like to buy your fine music.
Podcast Sponsor
The podcast this month is sponsored by Loveswept, publishers of Good Girl by bestselling author Lauren Layne. In this steamy novel, country music’s favorite good girl hides away from the world—and finds herself bunking with a guy who makes her want to be a little bad.
Jenny Dawson moved to Nashville to write music, not get famous. But when her latest record goes double platinum, Jenny’s suddenly one of the town’s biggest stars—and the center of a tabloid scandal connecting her with a pop star she’s barely even met. With paparazzi tracking her every move, Jenny flees to a remote mansion in Louisiana to write her next album. The only hiccup is the unexpected presence of a brooding young caretaker named Noah, whose foul mouth and snap judgments lead to constant bickering—and serious heat.
Noah really should tell Jenny that he’s Preston Noah Maxwell Walcott, the owner of the estate where the feisty country singer has made her spoiled self at home. But the charade gives Noah a much-needed break from his own troubles, and before long, their verbal sparring is indistinguishable from foreplay. But as sizzling nights give way to quiet pillow talk, Noah begins to realize that Jenny’s almost as complicated as he is. To fit into each other’s lives, they’ll need the courage to face their problems together—before the outside world catches up to them.
You can find Good Girl by Lauren Layne on sale May 17th wherever ebooks are sold.
Transcript
❤ Click to view the transcript ❤
[music]
Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to episode number 194 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I am Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. With me today is Dr. Kristen Nielsen Donnelly. She is an independent researcher who is studying women and religion in Northern Ireland, as well as religion in popular culture like video games and romance novels. She’s currently conducting sociological research into the intersection between romance novels and sex. This project began after many conversations with her mother about the sex scenes that her mother does or does not like reading. We also discuss growing into and out of religious communities, the portrayal of religious people and people of faith in the romance genre, and Kristen has a ton of recommendations specifically for readers who might be looking for romance and fiction set in contemporary Ireland. Her husband is Irish, and they’ve recently moved back to the U.S. after living there, so she has got a bunch of recommendations if Irish-set fiction is your jam.
If you’re thinking, after you listen, I would really be interested in taking this survey, you can totally do that! I will have a link to the survey, and she would be delighted if you completed it, although you’re not obligated to. That’ll be in the show notes for this episode at sb-tb.com/podcast.
This episode is sponsored by Loveswept, publishers of Good Girl by bestselling author Lauren Layne. In this steamy contemporary romance, country music’s favorite good girl hides away from the world and finds herself bunking with a guy who makes her want to be a little bad. Jenny Dawson moved to Nashville to write music, not get famous, but when her latest record goes double platinum, Jenny’s suddenly one of the town’s biggest stars and the center of a tabloid scandal connecting her with a pop star she’s barely even met. With paparazzi tracking her every move, Jenny flees to a remote mansion in Louisiana to write her next album. The only hiccup is the unexpected presence of a brooding young caretaker named Noah whose foul mouth and snap judgments lead to constant bickering and some serious heat. You can find Good Girl by Lauren Layne on sale wherever eBooks are sold.
And the podcast transcript this month is sponsored by Everything Under the Heavens, book one of Silk and Song by Dana Stabenow. Johanna flees her homicidal stepmother in Khanbaliq, the storied city of Kublai Khan, and sets out on the Silk Road with companions Jaufre and Shasha in search of her fabled grandfather Marco Polo. You can find Everything Under the Heavens for free on Amazon, Kobo, and iTunes, and 99 cents on Barnes and Noble.
Our music is provided by Sassy Outwater. You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater. I will have information as to who this is at the end of the show.
And if you’re thinking, I really like this podcast, or I really like the transcripts, or both, and you would like to support the show, I would like to ask you to have a look at our Patreon campaign at Patreon.com/SmartBitches. Listeners who might want to contribute can make monthly pledges starting with as little as one dollar to help me reach some goals like commissioning transcripts for all the episodes that don’t have one. You can see all the options at Patreon.com/SmartBitches, and at the end of this episode, I have compliments coming up for some of the folks who have pledged to support the podcast every month. Thank you for doing so. Thank you for having a look at the Patreon campaign if you’ve taken a look at it, and thank you to everyone who encouraged me to set this up in the first place.
And now, without any further delay, on with the podcast.
[music]
Sarah: I want to ask you about your work with the, sort of the intersection of religion and sex.
Dr. Kristen Nielsen Donnelly: Okay.
Sarah: So I have a few questions, but I was hoping you could just start by introducing yourself and explaining what your research is.
Dr. Donnelly: Sure, yeah.
Sarah: Please do.
Dr. Donnelly: M’kay, well, my name is Dr. Kristen Nielsen Donnelly. I’m a director of research and personnel at a company in Philadelphia, and for the past probably fifteen years, both as a high school student, college student, graduate student, Ph.D. candidate, and general professional nerd, I’ve been really interested in how religion, specifically Christianity – ‘cause that’s my home and where I am most versed – talks about and deals with the female body in all sorts of various ways, through abuse, through the promotion of motherhood against all other priorities, the celebration of the female body, just, like, the wide gamut that you get. And so for my, some of my master’s and my Ph.D. research, I focused on the intersections of gender and religion, specifically with self-identified Protestant women or formerly self-identified Protestant women –
Sarah: Huh.
Dr. Donnelly: – and how they navigate, navigate their bodies. And primarily because we, I tend to do research, my first chunk of research was with women a little bit closer to my age. We of course ended up talking about sex –
Sarah: Of course.
Dr. Donnelly: – because that’s how it goes, and then I also was in seminary for a while with a whole – and I went to an Evangelical undergraduate – with a whole lot of Christian girls sitting around who have never had sex, but Lord alive, did we like to talk about it.
Sarah: [Laughs] Yeah.
Dr. Donnelly: And, and I, the more I interact with, with girls our age in other religions that have, have opinions about female sexuality, the more I find that that is really true. I mean, I spent a year teaching sex ed as, as a, a youth worker overseas. I’ve been a youth worker for a lot of years, and we just talked about sex a lot. And so, both, like, personally and professionally, in a lot of different professional hats, I know that I’m really interested in this. So, like, right now, I’m actually in the process of – I just launched the survey this morning – of trying to get respondents from all over the world of people who are, who would identify as people of, of some sort of faith, institutionalized faith in whatever god you want to identify with, but just somebody who would call themselves a religious person, and how they deal with sex scenes in romance novels, to try to discern if that has an effect on how people enjoy vicarious, fictional sexual intercourse, or if it’s something that they have tension about, or if it’s something that it doesn’t matter at all. So that’s kind of a basic overview, I guess?
Sarah: So there are a lot of depictions of sex, like –
Dr. Donnelly: Yes.
Sarah: – everywhere, overt and subtle and metaphoric and pretty obvious.
Dr. Donnelly: Yes.
Sarah: Why romance novel sex scenes? Why the particular intersection of faith and romance sex? Like, why that particular portrayal?
Dr. Donnelly: Well, I think some of it is that I grew up with, reading romance novels with sex scenes.
Sarah: As you do. [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: As I do. And when I went to Christian school, I hid them, for sure.
Sarah: As you do.
Dr. Donnelly: Uh-huh. I had, I was like, senior year, I remember, I was in a room by myself, and the ceiling tiles were pretty easy to push up, and so that’s where I kept my books.
Sarah: Ooh! That’s a good –
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: Why didn’t I think of that? That’s a good hiding place!
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, yeah, and it’s, it, it isn’t like I would have gotten in trouble; it was just the idea of – I absolutely would not have gotten in trouble – but the idea of shame that, that I felt would come with that. Additionally, my mother, who is a person of deep faith, is who turned me on to romance novels –
Sarah: Hmm!
Dr. Donnelly: – and she – for instance, for her birthday this year, we’re going to Nora Roberts’s B&B –
Sarah: Ohhh, you are –
Dr. Donnelly: – together, ‘cause we’re really excited about that.
Sarah: – going to love it.
Dr. Donnelly: Oh, we can’t wait.
Sarah: Just wait until you use the toilet!
Dr. Donnelly: Okay. Well, we’re in the Jane and Rochester room, so –
Sarah: Every toilet in that inn is a state-of-the-art Japanese toilet – I believe it’s Japanese – and it, like, it is incredible. There’s a washer and a dryer, and it, the sit goes up automatically when you walk in the room, like, hello! No, nothing? Okay, I’ll just put the lid back down. The, I, I brought my husband to the bed and breakfast because we couldn’t think of something else to do for our eleventh anniversary, and my mother-in-law was taking the kids, and I was like, all right, we’re going to BoonsBoro so you can use the toilet. That’s what we’re doing.
Dr. Donnelly: You know, there are worse reasons to go worse places. So –
Sarah: It’s a perfectly acceptable reason to go.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah!
Sarah: And the eleventh anniversary is now the magical toilet anniversary, and everyone can get involved!
Dr. Donnelly: I like it. I’ll, I’m, I’m coming up on anniversary four, so I will mark down –
Sarah: Yes, toilet!
Dr. Donnelly: – the eleventh anniversary. It is now the –
Sarah: Toilet magical –
Dr. Donnelly: – the toilet anniversary. I love it.
Sarah: Yes. I think it’s awesome that you’re taking your mom, by the way. That’s just, like, awesome.
Dr. Donnelly: Oh, thanks. I’m really excited about it! I mean, ‘cause she’s who taught me how to read, really. Like, not only how to physically read, but how to read. How to live in with characters, how to enjoy stories, how to sit with other people’s real-life stories, because you’ve already learned to sit with, like, fictional people’s stories.
Sarah: And how to practice empathy, and how to –
Dr. Donnelly: Absolutely.
Sarah: – listen.
Dr. Donnelly: Absolutely. I mean, part of my training is a social worker, and I was, every time I now lecture or teach about social work or even teach my classes in sociology, I always use fictional stories. I use YouTube clips and things like that, because that’s how, you know, it’s, there’s a safe distance in fictional characters. You can put yourself in someone’s fictional brain a lot safer than you can put yourself in your own sometimes. So, why, why, but back to my mother, like, the sex scenes are not her favorite part. Like, she reads –
Sarah: Huh!
Dr. Donnelly: – she just skips over them. And, and there are ones that I read now, I review for a couple different blogs kind of as a hobby, and I, I run my own romance review blog as well, just for fun, and there are things that, like, I’ll say in my reviews like, this would not be, this is not for my mother. [Laughs] Or this is definitely for my mother. And so I’ve, I wondered if there was a whole lot of other women like her who love, who love romance, but because of their, their views of sex and their understandings of sex are deeply informed by their faith, which is definitely her, how they negotiate that, ‘cause in a book it’s really easy to skip over a few pages.
Sarah: Oh, yeah, you just flip past ‘em.
Dr. Donnelly: Not a problem.
Sarah: My, the person, the person who first introduced me to romance had dog-eared all the rape scenes, because this was the early ‘90s and there were many of them –
Dr. Donnelly: Ooh, yeah.
Sarah: – and she’s like, if it’s folded over, just skip that part; it’s terrible. If you just –
Dr. Donnelly: Yep.
Sarah: – just skip those pages, and I’ll, I’d, like, pick up a book, and there’d be all these corners missing. Like, ooh, not reading that. Did you discuss this with your mom? Like, why don’t you like to read the sex scenes? Is it because of your faith? Is it because of your religious upbringing? Like, have you had a conversation or seven about this with her?
Dr. Donnelly: Only about four million, yeah. And –
[Laughter]
Dr. Donnelly: – she knows that I read things that she wouldn’t like, and she also knows that I read things I don’t agree with and don’t find sexy and don’t, don’t particularly enjoy, but that I’m usually there for the whole book, and that’s, you know, that’s kind of what I do, and her response is that, for her, it’s not, it feels almost too private sometimes? That that’s between those two characters?
Sarah: Oh, so she feels like she’s intruding almost!
Dr. Donnelly: Sometimes, and sometimes she just, honestly, she would, like, wrinkle her nose and say, I think that’s gross. And if she finds something gross –
Sarah: Oh!
Dr. Donnelly: – it takes her out of the story, and so she’d rather –
Sarah: Ah!
Dr. Donnelly: – just not take the risk.
Sarah: Ah, so she’s either going to feel like she’s intruding, or she is witnessing something that in her mind is much too private and shouldn’t, she shouldn’t be witnessing it, or there’s going to be something that’s portrayed that she finds abhorrent or frightening or rejects outright for one of many reasons.
Dr. Donnelly: I don’t think she would say frightening.
Sarah: Ah.
Dr. Donnelly: Because there’s nothing that, there’s, I mean, none of the books that she reads are, like, my, my mother is not going to read an MMA book or a biker gang. None of us read paranormal. We’re pretty, we’re pretty straight down the middle – like, our favorites are Nora and Sabrina Jeffries and Kristan Higgins, and I just got her turned on to Eloisa James, and she, and Robyn Carr, and she loves Sarah Morgan. Like, kind of the more –
Sarah: ‘Cause they write some sexy sex scenes, except for Kristan Higgins, who closes the door.
Dr. Donnelly: Indeed, and that’s kind of what, where this conversation actually started with my mother and me. We were on a vacation last summer together. I was still living in the UK, and she came over to see me, and we were talking about a lot of the difference between romance novels in America and romance novels in Britain and Ireland –
Sarah: Huh.
Dr. Donnelly: – and I brought up the closed-door thing. And, I mean, Kristan Higgins is right now, I think, probably who she would say is her favorite author, for a lot of reasons. She loves the funny; she loves the big, goofy dogs. Like, she loves, she just loves how Kristan Higgins turns a phrase. I have read all of Kristan Higgins’ books. My mother knows this. She will still, while reading them, read me passages out loud that she loves.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: Because she wants me to enjoy this with her, which is wonderful. And, so we were talking about one of the other authors that she was reading, and she was just saying, I just skip those scenes, and I said, why is that, Mom? And she’s like, it’s just too much – that’s not – and she kept stopping, and, like, I could tell she was trying to be really tactful and really kind, ‘cause my mother is always kind, and she just said, I just don’t think that’s what sex is. And that’s, that’s not what I want, how I want to ex-, how I want to read about characters experiencing it. And I was like, okay, that’s totally valid. Do you think that that’s, some of that comes from your, your ideas of sex come from your faith and come from Christianity and come from the church, and, you know, I, I clearly named some specific things that we’ve talked about before –
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Donnelly: – and she said, yeah, all, ‘cause all of my ideas of marriage and all of my ideas – and for my mother, sex belongs very primarily in marriage –
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Donnelly: – so there, it all goes back to that.
Sarah: I love how your brain and my brain are very similar. Okay, whatever works for you. How come?
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah. All God’s children, like, you know, I always describe sort of much of my –
Sarah: Whatever floats your boat, but I’m dying to ask why, ‘cause I’m –
Dr. Donnelly: Exactly!
Sarah: – an incurably nosy herman, human being. No judgment, just terrible nosiness!
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, we just, I mean, we, professionally, we just call that a sociologist, you know, so.
[Laughter]
Sarah: Okay, I can take that.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, I just, I mean –
Sarah: No stigma.
Dr. Donnelly: – I spent five years of my Ph.D. just going, interesting! Could I ask you more about that? So –
Sarah: Huh!
Dr. Donnelly: – yeah.
Sarah: Fascinating.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, yeah.
Sarah: Interesting and fascinating are such in-, are, are incredibly deep and layered words, too. Like, in the Midwest, if something is interesting, that could be very bad. That could be very, very bad!
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, it can be in academia, too. The worst comments I ever get on articles is when someone goes, interesting, and it’s like, …but. I’m like, ohhh, okay –
Sarah: Ohhh, shnap.
Dr. Donnelly: – there’s the death knell. Okay. You know.
Sarah: [Laughs] Two words, an ellipsis, and you’re raging angry.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, it’s interesting. But, I mean, so that’s just all, I, I mean, I, like, I need to say, my mother is, it, would probably be mortified if she knew I was talking about her like this?
Sarah: I promise not to tell her.
Dr. Donnelly: [Laughs] And one of the greatest things that she has offered me, then, is this opportunity to understand that different people interact with romance novels in different ways, and how, and they interact with characters, and they own it in themselves in different ways, and I’ve discovered that across the board in all my various research and my conversations and my youth work and my social work is that people interact with art in really different ways. And they –
Sarah: Oh, yes.
Dr. Donnelly: – and they interact with narratives in different ways, but none of us are sole people who only ask, who only inhabit one aspect of our personalities. I mean, in sociology, we call it intersectionality.
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Donnelly: So I am not just a woman: I’m a white woman who was born in America, who is married to someone who wasn’t born in America, and all of these intersections form to make sure who I am. And so there’re all these women, I’m sure, and some dudes, I’m sure, who read romance novels, whose main intersection is that they were raised in faith-based homes –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: – and may even still – and probably found about puberty through faith-based means of some fashion. So how does that interact with things? And so, I mean, as a, as a social scientist, you just kind of pick tiny slivers of questions, and you ask that question for a little while, see what data it gives you, and then ask a different question and see what data it gives you. So the question I’m on right now is, does someone’s religion affect how they read sex scenes?
Sarah: I’m –
Dr. Donnelly: So.
Sarah: – I find this particularly interesting just to think about, because I converted from Episcopalianism to Judaism long-assed-math time ago, ah –
Dr. Donnelly: Right.
Sarah: – 1999, so a long time ago.
Dr. Donnelly: Right.
Sarah: And we’re still, you know, the, the, still the dominant cultural aspects of sexuality as portrayed in America are very heavily intro-, influenced by Judeo-Christian, and specifically Christian, perspectives.
Dr. Donnelly: And specifically Puritan, yeah.
Sarah: Yo! Just a little!
Dr. Donnelly: Uh-huh, yeah.
Sarah: Somebody somewhere –
Dr. Donnelly: The pointy hats did not-
Sarah: Somebody’s having an orgasm, and they must be stopped!
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, God for-, literally, God forbid.
Sarah: [Laughs] Yes, exactly!
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: So the idea – and there are times when I don’t want to read a sex scene, but it doesn’t necessarily have to do with my own perspectives on sex. I’m more than happy to read some and dislike others. I get hung up on the language and the absence of dialogue.
Dr. Donnelly: Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s –
Sarah: You know, it’s a literary thing. Like, if there’s no –
Dr. Donnelly: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: – talking or anything, it’s just, like, descriptions of where the body parts are going? I’m like, na, na, na, flip, flip – okay, you’re talking again! But I am entirely a di-, dialogue person. If there were more romance novels –
Dr. Donnelly: Yes.
Sarah: – as plays, I would be all over that.
Dr. Donnelly: Yes, I mean, I would say I’ve listened to every episode of this podcast, and I –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: – I, I align with your tastes very frequently, and the books that you like, I tend to like, except I don’t go paranormal ever, ‘cause I’m a gender researcher, and I have, I can’t, I, I’m completely taken out of the story if there’s any sort of immediate sexual interaction without foreplay and no conversation about if, if she’s physically comfortable or not. And some of that comes from when I was a sex ed teacher, I had a couple students tell me that they didn’t need condoms; they could just use, like, potato chip bags?
Sarah: What?!
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: No.
Dr. Donnelly: Uh-huh.
Sarah: N-no.
Dr. Donnelly: Like, Mars bars wrappers.
Sarah: No.
Dr. Donnelly: Like, ugh. And I just, one, one kid, I mean, this is in, this is in the UK, and this one boy, I think he was probably –
Sarah: He’s putting chips on his chippy, then? Is that how you would say it?
Dr. Donnelly: Pretty much. Like, I just looked at him, and I was like, well, salt isn’t going to work that way, buddy. Like –
Sarah: Ouch!
Dr. Donnelly: He was, like, trying to tell me that, like, this particular crisp bag was, was going to be best, and I was like, oh, my gosh. He was like, or, you know, just cling film, which is like Saran Wrap, and I was like –
Sarah: N-no?!
Dr. Donnelly: I just, I was like, oh, God bless you and anyone – I mean, he’s clearly all never actually tried this; it was that bravado kind of thing?
Sarah: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Donnelly: And I was like, God bless you and the vaginas of any girl you ever interact with. I just, God speed, son. You know, please go –
Sarah: Is this all out of a fear of buying a condom? Like, God forbid I be seen purchasing a, a condom?
Dr. Donnelly: Probably, yeah.
Sarah: Yikes.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, and the fact that the particular area of the world that I was in didn’t have comprehensive sex education.
Sarah: There’re a lot of those areas in the U.S., too, unfortunately.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, so, so – yeah. There are quite a few, and the g-, yeah. And that, for me, that also goes back to religion. Our, the way we talk about sex, full stop, in both the UK and the United States goes back to a really interesting and ill-informed understanding of the Holy Scriptures’ relationship with sex, and so we can, we can twist it in that way to make it sound like it has to be only for procreation or for pun-, or, or if it’s – like, enjoyment’s never part of it –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: – and so the entertain-, the idea of contraception, therefore, exists outside of the church’s understanding of sex. Does that make sense? So it all goes back to religion for me. That’s just my brain.
Sarah: Right. So you started having these conversations with your mom about why she doesn’t like to read the sex scenes.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, and so I figured – but she doesn’t like Christian romance novels. Like, she can’t do inspirational, ‘cause it’s too saccharine. She hates saccharine.
Sarah: Huh, so she likes real people with, with snarky potty mouths and no sex scenes.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: She really is a Kristan Higgins read-, reader.
Dr. Donnelly: Oh, she is, like, genetically engineered in a lab to love Kristan Higgins.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: Yep, 100%, yep. Yep. Just like I think I’m genetically engineered in a lab to love Lauren Dane. It’s like, that’s where I go. That’s my happy place. Victoria Dahl and a couple others, yeah.
Sarah: Have you read Zoe Archer or Eva Leigh? They’re the same person.
Dr. Donnelly: They’re on my, they’re on the TBR, the ever-growing TBR.
Sarah: They did a whole panel about subversive heroines at Romantic Times.
Dr. Donnelly: Argh!
Sarah: Basically, like, we, we own our sexuality, and we own our sexytimes, and that’s how we roll.
Dr. Donnelly: Yep. Yep. It, it totally works. Yeah, so I just figured – and then I, I was talking to a couple other sociologists who study ideas of religion in women and things and such, and they were mentioning that there’s been a whole lot of research done on women who read inspirational romance novels when, particularly, like, the proliferation of buggies and bonnets?
Sarah: Oh, bonnet rippers! Bonnet rippers. Yep.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah –
Sarah: That’s the joke term for them.
Dr. Donnelly: – and, like, there’s a, there’s a book called Thrill of the Chaste, C-H-
Sarah: Thrill of the Chaste?
Dr. Donnelly: Of the chaste, yeah, and that’s an academic book, about a study of women who enjoy and interact with inspirational romance novels.
Sarah: How did I miss this?
Dr. Donnelly: Well, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s probably a little bit of a niche market, but I-
Sarah: Just a bit! But that, that’s, that’s a title that would make my internal mental groundhog go what, yep, gimme now!
Dr. Donnelly: [Laughs] Yeah, yeah, so I was talking to this wonderful scholar, her name’s Rebecca Fox, she’s, and she was saying that, that from her knowledge of this world and this academic research that’s being done, the, the stream that I was going down of mainstream, of Christian women’s interaction with mainstream romance, what would that look like? She didn’t know of anybody else doing it, so I did a little bit of a, a Google around, and it didn’t look like anybody else was asking the question, so I thought, ah, I could ask the question! And find out if my mom and I are the only people –
Sarah: Hmm!
Dr. Donnelly: – or if there’re more people like us, and I would –
Sarah: Well, it’s the internet, so there’s always more people who are into, like, into what you like.
Dr. Donnelly: Exactly, so, hoping that – you know, and if I found that it doesn’t interact with it at all, then that’s also interesting, and we move forward, so.
Sarah: Oh, yes, the absence of data is just as revealing as the presence of, of specific data.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, and sometimes more so. There’re definitely projects I’ve done where I actually hope I get a negative response, ‘cause that’s statistically more interesting.
[Laughter]
Dr. Donnelly: So, yeah, so that’s what, that’s part of what I’m, part of what I’m doing now, as I’m, as I’m poking around in the corners of Romancelandia and trying to figure out how I can interact with it as an academic. So.
Sarah: Wow. So have you, are you breaking this down by subgenre. Like, are you looking specifically at, at, at certain subgenres or certain readers of certain subgenres, or are you open to all of them? Because the thing about romance is that there’s a very wide variety of the amount of sex that you’ll find in a book.
Dr. Donnelly: Absolutely. This is just a really basic – I made it in SurveyMonkey. Like, I’m just trying to get out as far as I possibly can to get as much data as I possibly can. I’m not attached to an inst-, to a university right now –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: – so some of the, like, more sophisticated data tools aren’t quite at my disposal at the moment –
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Donnelly: – so I’m trying to keep it real simple. And so it’s a twelve-question SurveyMonkey. It’s real quick, but, I mean, the questions are, like, tell me your preferred, like, here’re all the genres that you read, and I, I picked, like, the eight biggest that I could, that are, you know, the, that I’m seeing right now. I kind of poke around NetGalley and listen to podcasts and do things like that, and then give you a check of other, and you can fill in however else you define it. And then, how y-, like, around what age did you start reading romance novels? Do you identify as a person of faith? If yes, which one of these makes the most sense to you? And what is your preference level of sex? And so, like, chaste, open door, closed door, you know, and I, erotica, and I give the, you know, level as I define them to that so that people aren’t confused.
Sarah: Of course.
Dr. Donnelly: And then, do you read outside your preference level? And I mean, and one of them is, I read all the things. Don’t be –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: – you know, I read all the things; I don’t care.
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Donnelly: ‘Cause that’s, there’s certainly that too. And the two kind of basic starter questions, you know, from my perspective, like, that are going to launch the rest of the research are, do you, if you said that you are a person of faith, do you feel that it informs your preference level? And if you are a person of faith, would you feel comfortable telling the other people in your community of faith the kind of books that you read? Why or why not?
Sarah: Oh, that’s interesting.
Dr. Donnelly: And then we’ll see what comes, what they come back with. And then the final question, as are all, personally, my surveys, always end with, and if you’d like to talk about this more, please let me know!
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Donnelly: And, so I will call you, and we will talk. So we’ll see! We’ll see what we get, and hopefully we get some interesting information to just kind of also inform, ‘cause this, I mean, one of the other things that kicked this off for me was a podcast that you did, I have no idea when. I was still living overseas. I remember puttering around my house when it was playing, but somebody was saying how there’s no religion in romance novels, which seems insane because, like, there’re so many Irish Catholics that they write about, but nobody ever goes to mass. Like, religion is in fact a part of people’s lives that is not often reflected in romance at all.
Sarah: It’s very strange, and the romance that is depicted heav-, most heavily is Protestantism, but of a very –
Dr. Donnelly: It’s conservative Evangelical Protestantism, usually, yeah.
Sarah: Well, it’s, it’s either conservative Evangelical Protestantism or it’s a completely bland, unidentifiable Protestantism. They’re going to go to church, they’re going to celebrate Christmas, but there’s not going to be any specific tell as to which particular Protestantism it is.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, or if there’s an actual impact of the faith on the characters. Like, if –
Sarah: Yes, that’s another thing that makes me baffled. Like –
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: – all these sheiks running around, not a single one of them takes a break to pray.
Dr. Donnelly: Like, yeah, like, buddy, like, you have to, you know, they believe in washing? You know, even just, like, simple, like, are you doing your ablutions? Like, what’s going on? But the on-, you know, one I read recently that’s actually a really fascinating treatment of this is called Key Change by Barbara Valentin, and he, the hero is an organist in a local Catholic church.
Sarah: Hmm!
Dr. Donnelly: And the heroine is someone who has no interest in church whatsoever, really, but they strike a deal because, you know, whatever plot that she has to come sing in his choir for a little while.
Sarah: Huh!
Dr. Donnelly: And it was so natural? Like, it, I loved it, ‘cause I’ve worked in churches, and so his navigation of staff meetings –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: – is so authentic.
Sarah: Oh, staff meetings, yes.
Dr. Donnelly: And it was such, there was such a concern over what his congregants would think of this girl and their interaction and what it would do, it was like a, it was one of those slice of life books. Like, I know someone who could have been in this story kind of thing. And it was so incredibly refreshing, because there are almost no other books like that. And so that’s the also driving factor of this for me is that religious people probably don’t see themselves in romance novels all that often, and if we want to talk about diversity in romance, there are other, there are lots and lots of populations that don’t see themselves –
Sarah: I’m holding up my lighter! You can’t see me right now, but I’m actually holding up a cigarette lighter.
Dr. Donnelly: [Laughs]
Sarah: That’s, that’s, that’s why I wrote a Hanukkah novella, because –
Dr. Donnelly: And I loved it, by the way. It’s –
Sarah: Oh!
Dr. Donnelly: – it’s one of my favorite Hanukkah books, one of my favorite holiday books, so.
Sarah: Thank you! There’s, there’s only, like, nine Hanukkah books total, I think, so I’m super, super pleased that you read it. Thank you.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, you are the only one, you are definitely the only Hanukkah romance I’ve ever read, but it is, I absolutely adore it. I recommend it to my, to friends all the time, so.
Sarah: Oh, geeze, I’m going to, I’m going to turn purple and start to, like, cry. Thank you!
Dr. Donnelly: You’re welcome!
Sarah: Yeah. Yikes! I wrote that in part because I was really tired of not seeing any mention of Hanukkah, but also there – [sighs] – one thing that makes me bonkers about this sort of mass appeal Christianity that is constantly –
Dr. Donnelly: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: – portrayed is that it doesn’t really talk about people who interact with faith in very different ways –
Dr. Donnelly: Right.
Sarah: – that don’t necessarily mean going to a house of worship. Like, so much of –
Dr. Donnelly: No.
Sarah: – Jewish practice happens in the home. Like –
Dr. Donnelly: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: – one of the things I like about it is the food and the fact that nine times out of ten, if I’m going to observe a holiday, I might not even have to put on real pants or shoes, ‘cause I’m doing it at home. [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, I mean, I, when I was in seminary, I went to a house church.
Sarah: Oh, nice.
Dr. Donnelly: That met, I mean, my last three, two years of seminary, yeah. It was in a, it was in a living room, we read a book, and there were always snacks, and I never wore shoes. And now I’m Episcopal.
Sarah: [Laughs] See, how many people would be like, I’m going to church?
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, yeah, I mean, we didn’t even call it church. We called it, we stole a phrase from a book we all read together and called it something else, you know, so we were really experimenting with what church could look like for us, but, yeah, I mean, I, the emergent church movement, where there’re lots of people that walk labyrinths and are trying to bring body back into it, and that way you’re right. I mean, so much of Jewish practice, it is a private thing and a private idea of practice.
Sarah: Yes, and it’s also very home and ritual focused, and that’s true of –
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: – many other religions as well.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, Hinduism, absolutely, and Buddhism is so internal, you really don’t ever need to go to temple if you want to in so many strands of Buddhism.
Sarah: No, it, and, and the ways in which that type of cultural religious infusion, because it’s both, it’s both a, a practical culture, a language culture, a, a food culture –
Dr. Donnelly: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: – all of that infuses an individual’s life –
Dr. Donnelly: Mm-hmm?
Sarah: – and you can’t separate them out. Like, you can’t just be like –
Dr. Donnelly: No.
Sarah: – okay, well, she’s only, she’s only going to be practicing this particular part of her life in this particular location. No! It’s kind of everywhere.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, and it’s, I mean, I grew up Evangelical Protestant, and, like, during the crazy boom of professional Christianity in the ‘90s and oughts, where there were all the rock music and the concerts and the T-shirts and everything else.
Sarah: Yes, I was at a women’s, I went to a women’s un-, a women’s college –
Dr. Donnelly: Okay.
Sarah: – and I went, I was there from 1993 to 1997.
Dr. Donnelly: Right.
Sarah: So it was a women’s college, it was very small, in Columbia, South Carolina, and it was a Methodist college. I had mandatory chapel my freshman year. I still have my little –
Dr. Donnelly: Right:
Sarah: – ticket book, and I remember all of the rock bands that were –
Dr. Donnelly: Yep.
Sarah: – that were so popular were all Christian rock bands. There was so much –
Dr. Donnelly: Yep.
Sarah: – Jars of Clay, I can’t even tell you.
Dr. Donnelly: Oh, I have so many, I have a couple, like, selfies with Jars of Clay, yeah, so I get ya –
Sarah: Oh! [Laughs] That’s awesome!
Dr. Donnelly: – I get ya. Yeah, I worked at a music festival for one of those for, like, four years, so I was super into that world, and one of the things that I was always frustrated about is that no one ever looked like me in the books that I read. No one ever was having the, the pro-, the struggles that I was having. No one was ever as frustrated by the things that I was frustrated by because, while – and, look, I completely respect that I’m still, like, a white Christian girl in America, so I should shut up. It’s still a challenge to still feel like you’re a little bit on the outside. And so I’m really fascinated with this idea that we have an assumption, it seems, in the publishing world, and this is in Hollywood, too, like, in how we create public art in America, that everyone is, is just about middle class, ‘cause you can’t be too rich ‘cause then we’re pissed at you, and you can’t be too poor ‘cause then we don’t want to deal with you, and everybody is nominally Protestant, you were probably baptized somewhere, but it doesn’t really affect your life, and you don’t really do anything, because God forbid anyone have an active faith, and then you’re weird.
Sarah: Right, because then if you have an active faith, in some way you are unreasonable or –
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, and threatening.
Sarah: – threatening –
Dr. Donnelly: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: – or just easily dismissed as, as, as accepting whatever you’re told and not questioning it. I’m like, dude –
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, the number of times –
Sarah: – [laughs] no.
Dr. Donnelly: – yeah, there were times I’ve been told that I’m brainwashed. I’m like, mm, am I, though? Like, I’ve got a doctorate, so I’m pretty sure I’ve had to think about some things.
Sarah: Are you still Evangelical Protestant, or have you moved into –
Dr. Donnelly: No.
Sarah: – a different faith group.
Dr. Donnelly: No, I would be, I’m more, I would still claim Protestantism, but I would be probably pretty moderate to liberal. I’m a member of an Episcopalian church now. Even, like, when I look back onto adolescence – and I’m very critical of the things that I was told in adolescence. I’ve written against it. I’ve certainly tried to deal with some of the things that I was taught which I find to be now questionable at times. I’m still not super comfortable with the word brainwashing, because I also think it, there are people that were brainwashed, and that really, like, disrespects them?
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: There are people that escaped from cults, and they have much different baggage than those of who have just walked away willingly from Evangelical Protestantism.
Sarah: Who don’t generally come after you.
Dr. Donnelly: No, they’re pretty nice to us. It’s a lot of the people who were raised, I think, by people who were, they were raised by people who were raised in the church and have their own baggage. Which is fine; baggage is fascinating. It’s how I make money if you’ll talk to me about it, so I’m not really that, that frustrated with it, but all of this goes, all of this idea of identity and identification and intersections goes back to why I want to know this question, ‘cause one of the things I find about romance novels that I love is that we all read about a ton of, a ton of kinds of sex we’re never going to have?
Sarah: Oh, yes, it’s true.
Dr. Donnelly: And –
Sarah: Sex in space –
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: – with werewolves –
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: – vampires, yep.
Dr. Donnelly: Mm-hm. I read, I reviewed a book a couple months ago about, like, a Norse god. Like, I don’t know any of those. My husband certainly isn’t one.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: So –
Sarah: Are you sure?
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah. Yeah, he’s, he’s a lovely little leprechaun, so –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: – he goes, he goes to the other end of the spectrum, but – and either way, my husband loves it when I read him passages out loud that are funny, ‘cause he just, I mean, he dies laughing at some of the descriptions, but it’s, I figure that of all of the groups of humans in the world, romance, like, readers are the most used to reading things that they don’t fully identify with. And still going –
Sarah: Huh!
Dr. Donnelly: – okay, cool! And moving forward.
Sarah: That’s a really interesting idea, because in another aspect – and I don’t mean interesting in a bad way – I mean, romance readers are, for example, notoriously hard on the heroine? She has to –
Dr. Donnelly: Oh, God, yeah.
Sarah: – you know, she has to be identifiable but not too much, and, whereas the hero, we will tolerate all kinds of terrible behavior from the hero because he’s the hero.
Dr. Donnelly: Absolutely.
Sarah: And so there’s this deep identification and then lack of identification at the same time.
Dr. Donnelly: Mm-hmm. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I call it the Logan Echolls Effect. Like, if I had a friend –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: – who was Veronica Mars I would lie in front of moving vehicles before I would let her ever date Logan Echolls, but, like, on the show, as a fictional person, he’s the only one I wanted her to, to end up with.
Sarah: He was, he, I think he was the only one who was as much a determined, self-actualized person as she was?
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah. And it –
Sarah: She was his on-, only equal in a lot of ways.
Dr. Donnelly: Absolutely. But I just think, like, if I was sitting over drinks with her I’d be like –
Sarah: No.
Dr. Donnelly: – so, babe, y’all, like, that’s a lot of bag- – do you want to be a therapist or do you want to be a wife? What are you thinking about here?
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: But, like, I totally go with it in the plot, and I think there’re a lot of books like that too, where we are, we are very hard on the heroine, absolutely, and I think, there are times that we are too hard on the heroine.
Sarah: I agree with you there.
Dr. Donnelly: Because, like, crying, different people are different, man. Take a deep breath. But if, but we still put ourselves in situations that we’re never going to read. Like, from my limited understanding of publishing and readers outside of romance, ‘cause I will completely admit this is my home –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: – this is where I live, this is what I love – other people don’t read about as many different – other genre readers, I should say – don’t read about as many varieties of different things as we do, with maybe the exception of fantasy or sci-fi, but it’s still pretty, like, it’s still a little bit, I don’t know, more down the road. Like, if you read a, if you read category and then you go to, like, Sonali Dev and then you go back to Kristan Higgins and then you take a, then you go into paranormal, if you’re someone who dips into a lot of the different things –
Sarah: That would be me.
Dr. Donnelly: – you – yeah! And I would, from my colloquial knowledge of, of, you know, reading Twitter feeds and things like that, that’s actually a lot of readers.
Sarah: Oh, yes.
Dr. Donnelly: I think most people genre hop. My friends that read, that don’t read romance, that just read, like, what they buy at Barnes and Noble, do not genre hop. You know, they pretty much read the same kinds of stories. Literary fiction is not a genre-hopping type thing. I mean, the, the stuff that wins the Booker Prize is the same, you know, everybody’s depressed kind of – they finish sentences in the middle of sentences and stare into the middle distance every single year –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: – versus, like, romance novels, where everybody, everybody jumps around, so I’ve, my other part of my hypothesis is that as a romance novel reader, I’m pretty used to reading about people’s lives that I don’t identify with. I have never, for instance, been a cupcake baker in a small New England town, but I have read probably 300 books about cupcake bakers in either –
Sarah: Oh, easily.
Dr. Donnelly: – the, the Rockies or a small New England town. I am not – so there’s, there’s all that kind of stuff too, so if I’m used to doing that, if I’m used to putting myself into somebody’s shoes, do I do that with the sex scenes as well?
Sarah: Huh! That’s really interesting, because I also look at the, the, at the sameness, the aspects of similarity between all the genres, the story is still the same structure. It’s just what gets –
Dr. Donnelly: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: – filled in that’s so different, and those differences can be substantial.
Dr. Donnelly: Yes. Yeah, I mean the, the structure’s what provides us comfort, right?
Sarah: Yep!
Dr. Donnelly: The structure is what makes us feel like we’re safe.
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Donnelly: And I am one of those, I am one of those reviewers that I’ll get on a soapbox pretty quickly if it’s, if your series is a series that I have to read the whole thing, and you don’t tell me that, and you want to drop me in a series at book four? Because then that’s a, for me, that’s a marketing decision and not a relationship between the author and the, and the reader. Like, if you put a line on the front of your thing and you’re like, listen, this is book four; you are not going to understand a single thing unless you read book one, I get that, I respect that. But if you drop me at book four and I don’t understand what’s going on, I don’t feel safe. You’ve broken contract with me.
Sarah: Huh.
Dr. Donnelly: And I don’t know what to do, and I don’t know the map, and I don’t know the characters, and I don’t know what it is, and so I really value the people who can do that really fine line of writing a really big world and writing things that could totally be a standalone but then are richer when they’re part of a series versus other stuff where you have to read it from the beginning and you don’t tell me that. Like, one of my favorite authors right now is Cecelia London. She’s independent, and she’s writing the Bellator Saga, and at the beginning of every single one of the books it says, you cannot start here.
Sarah: Huh!
Dr. Donnelly: You cannot start here; you have to start at the beginning. And she is so invested in that that she was, for a long time, giving away the first one for free on Amazon.
Sarah: Well, yes, that, that –
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: – that would make sense.
Dr. Donnelly: Exactly. I mean, so, I mean, but it’s – so she wants to build a world that’s huge and big and varied and variety, and she can’t keep build, she can’t keep producing new people in, you know, she doesn’t want to keep, like, producing episodes of House. She wants to do Game of Thrones.
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Donnelly: And so you have to, there’s a contract with the, with the reader there, and I know there’re other people that this doesn’t bother. Everybody has a hobbyhorse; this is one of mine in particular. But the contract is a really important thing with the reader, which is why I think we’re seeing all this hubbub about, that now romance is defined by the Happily Ever After, and if you don’t give me the Happily Ever After, I am not comfortable with it being called a romance, because you’ve then broken the contract.
Sarah: Right, and that’s the, that’s the expected agreement between the reader and the, and the author, which is also why you see so many reviews that warn people about a cliffhanger.
Dr. Donnelly: Yep.
Sarah: Like, you have to know there’s a cliffhanger.
Dr. Donnelly: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: Es-, and it, it really ticks me off when there’s a cliffhanger for no reason other than it’s ending here. Like, nothing is resolved even partially; we’re just going to stop. Like, n-no! Please don’t! I like the end!
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: That’s why I’m here. I like the end.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah. Yeah, I’m here for that too.
Sarah: This is also why I don’t trust TV writers, because there is no end.
Dr. Donnelly: That’s fair, but please tell me you are involved with Jane the Virgin?
Sarah: Oh, yes.
Dr. Donnelly: Good, okay. That’s fine. That’s acceptable then.
Sarah: I mean, that’s a very –
Dr. Donnelly: Just kidding.
Sarah: – although I will say this: I was super bummed when they renewed it for second, for a second season –
Dr. Donnelly: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: – ‘cause I was like, it’s, it’s, it is a send-up of the telenovela.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah. It’s perfect.
Sarah: Having an end is part of the telenovela. You know how many episodes you’re in for; you know how long it’s going to be. You know exactly how long the story is going to be and when the end is, and so when you extend it and there is no end, I was, I was pretty pissed off.
Dr. Donnelly: That’s fair. I can see that.
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: I mean, especially because it is, it is dwelling so heavily in that particular genre, which has an end. Same with, for example, Korean dramas.
Dr. Donnelly: Yes.
Sarah: There’s an end. The story has an end point, and then it’s done.
Dr. Donnelly: That’s one of the things that I’ve been – I mean, my, my husband is Northern Irish, and so he grew up watching Irish television and British television, and he talks all the time about the Americanization of British television, and it drives him insane –
Sarah: Ohhh.
Dr. Donnelly: – in that when he was growing up, Broadchurch would have been one season, done, that’s it, done.
Sarah: And written by one guy!
Dr. Donnelly: And written by one dude, and, like, it would have been, that’s it, we’re done. And he completely, I mean, ‘cause we are people that think that Broadchurch did not, was not particularly strong in its second season, and we’re not really looking forward to season three, even though we’ll watch it.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: And we just looked at each other in the middle of season two, and it was like, they’re only doing this so that it, like, the money aspect of it and the Americanization of it. You can just keep telling stories, and it’s really frustrating, and we are on a massive rabbit trail right now. [Laughs]
Sarah: I can completely understand.
Dr. Donnelly: People down them.
Sarah: And, and, and it’s fascinating, because the way that we consume narratives is changing so quickly.
Dr. Donnelly: Yes.
Sarah: Like, even, even within fanfic com-, communities, there are all these jokes about how you discover the fic that is all of the things that you want, it’s every hook in the conflict, and it’s not done, and it hasn’t been updated in two years, and you know it’s probably abandoned, but you can’t stop yourself from reading it, even though there’s no end.
Dr. Donnelly: Yep. Yep.
Sarah: Yep. I mean, that’s a very particular kind of agony.
Dr. Donnelly: Oh, absolutely, yeah. When, I mean, I, I started, I, like, started, probably, my fan interaction with television and books and things doing fanfic when I was in high school and college, and when I was on fanfiction.net, my immediate filter would be Finished, because I can’t handle –
Sarah: Unfinished.
Dr. Donnelly: I just, it bo-, it just, like, okay, well, do it or don’t do it, but it bothers me, but that’s me. Like, I’m also, but I’m also someone who’s okay reading series –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: – that I have, like, decent hope will, you know, will end, but I’ll also quit TV shows in the middle of the season. I’m not like Tara Ariano on Extra Hot Great; I won’t stop stuff in, like, the middle of the episode.
[Laughter]
Sarah: That is a very special skill.
Dr. Donnelly: It’s a very special skill that that woman has, but I will, I, I broke up with How I Met Your Mother three seasons, five, four, five seasons, maybe even, before it ended, and –
Sarah: Yeah, I broke up with that one too.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: And, and when it, when we, when the end happened and, you know, ‘cause – it’s funny, my husband and I were talking about this last night – he needs closure.
Dr. Donnelly: Right.
Sarah: Even if he doesn’t like it, he needs to see and experience the end, and until there is no firm closure it’s not over, and I’m like, I’m perfectly happy to be done with this show, and so the fact that there are, like, two shows that we both like, three now, is amazing, because we never like the same things, ‘cause I’m always like, they don’t know where they’re going. They’re just going for the sake of going. There is no reason to keep watching it, these characters are boring, and the jokes aren’t doing anything.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, I –
Sarah: Like, there’s no development here, and he’s like, yes, but it’s not over, and I’m like, it’s never going to be over.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, I can’t, I’m not a bitter-ender. My husband definitely is as well, and so there are things where, like, he just saves them on the DVR for when I’m out.
Sarah: Yes, that’s exactly what he does.
Dr. Donnelly: ‘Cause I’m, I’m completely over it, and I don’t really even care, and if I cared a little bit, I would read a recap on the internet somewhere –
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Donnelly: – and that’s it, because I, ‘cause for me, what that means is if you’ve lost your way, you’re going to break the contract with me. And it’s possible that the contract you have with me is not the contract that you really wanted to write. Like, for How I Met Your Mother, I realized in the middle of it, they’re making a different show than I thought they were making?
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Donnelly: And I’m not interested in that show?
Sarah: Nope.
Dr. Donnelly: And so that’s why, like, you know, I think romance and, and even, like, crime fiction and things like that are a lot more, are consumed at a much higher and more popular rate than these TV shows, because we know what we’re getting into, and they’re going to keep that contract with us. Like, that killer is going to die or get caught –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: – at the end of that thriller. Done.
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Donnelly: The couple in romance is going to get together, or you’re going to get a whole lot of people who are going to be really upset calling it a romance.
Sarah: Yes, it’s true!
Dr. Donnelly: And you have that safety net, and so you can lo-, lose yourself in the vicarious narrative.
Sarah: And I also have a very limited number of shows where I have seen evidence that the writers are not only developing the characters but remember the developments that they’ve assigned –
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: – and so the characters are consistent?
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: And they grow; like, that’s a rare thing too, because otherwise you get sort of like, here are six characters recycling the same six jokes every episode for the next five years. And they don’t –
Dr. Donnelly: Yes.
Sarah: – and, and, you know, who, who gets with whom and who breaks up with whom is really the only thing that changes. Like, I remember doing this with Beauty and the Beast with Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman?
Dr. Donnelly: My gosh, yes!
Sarah: Okay, she’s not dead in my world. She is –
Dr. Donnelly: Okay, fair.
Sarah: – perfectly alive, and it ended fine, and it’s a perfectly acceptable Happy Ever After. They, they live underground, and things are great.
Dr. Donnelly: That’s fine, yeah, ‘cause for me, The West Wing ended at season four. The last three seasons, I don’t know what people are talking about.
Sarah: Oh, yeah, it’s like that other Matrix movie that didn’t happen.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah. There’s just a lot of that.
Sarah: And it’s funny that my, my, my kids are the same way? Like, they love Steven Universe, which is a truly amazing show in so many ways, but one of the ways is that it, it maintains its consistency?
Dr. Donnelly: Okay.
Sarah: So the characters develop, and they change, and things happen, and then those changes continue to affect them, so if two characters are having a fight and they’re angry at each other, that tension exists for the next few episodes. And the, the show is doing this in eleven-minute storylines; it’s incredible. But the same is true of, like, for example, Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
Dr. Donnelly: I love that show.
Sarah: It – the same thing! The characters, the, the things that happen to them in prior episodes affect them in later episodes, ‘cause –
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: – logical human development.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, like, and, like, back to Jane the Virgin, that’s one of the other things I really appreciated, especially about the first season less than the second, is that the relationship between Abuela, Xo, and Jane were, was so rich, but also that all, that their interactions with Catholicism were so both authentic and distinct for each character?
Sarah: Ohhh, yes. Yes, and Abuela really represents what you’re studying.
Dr. Donnelly: Yes, absolutely. And so does Jane!
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Donnelly: I think, like, and this is going to sound strange but, like, one of the things that I, my friends and I were, my, some of my colleagues and I have been talking about is how interesting it is to us that the two most recent Bachelors have identified as Evangelical?
Sarah: [Tone of interested curiosity] Ohhh!
Dr. Donnelly: And that this most recent Bachelor actually, I mean, he has a tattoo of a bible verse on his rib, goes to a pretty decent-sized, like, it sounds like church in his home town.
Sarah: Mega church?
Dr. Donnelly: You know, what I – yeah, I mean, mega by, like, some standards. Like, this, one of the churches that I knew about was 21,000 people, so –
Sarah: Oh, God, as an introvert that makes me want to crawl under my desk.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, we used to call it Six Flags over Jesus.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: [Still laughing] Six Flags over Jesus! Oh, God! I’m crying!
[Laughter]
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, very, that’s one of the, yeah, Evangelicals, we can make fun of ourselves better than most people actually can.
Sarah: [Still laughing]
Dr. Donnelly: So, yeah, anyway. But he still took all three women to the Fantasy Suite.
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Donnelly: And in, like, Evangelicalism in mainstream America, like, he should be shunned, and that should be really awful. Now if a girl Evangelical did that, that would be –
Sarah: Mm, no.
Dr. Donnelly: – it would be like, we can’t even, we don’t have time to get into the gender disparities of religion and Protestantism –
Sarah: Mm.
Dr. Donnelly: – but, like, whatever. So all of this is going along, and we’re like, is it the shift in, in, like, younger millennial understandings of Evangelicalism? Because Jane would be on that spectrum. She’s a younger millennial understanding of Catholicism where she still, I think, holds to some sort of faith. It’s still important to her. It would be really important that Mateo is baptized, and I guarantee you if it keeps going it will be really important that he makes his first, his first communion and gets confirmed. Like, she will go to mass probably more often than just Christmas Eve if this is a real authentic person –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: – but the sexual, like, understandings of femininity and saving oneself are different than from her abuela.
Sarah: Right, because her, her, her abuela is the source of sort of the, the, the flower motif of the whole show.
Dr. Donnelly: Exactly.
Sarah: That once you crush your flower, you cannot get it back.
Dr. Donnelly: Which is absolutely what I was told at so many conferences growing up at, like, True Love Waits and stuff like that, and all of those really problematic, awful, you know, analogies that are used for this kind of thing.
Sarah: And teens being so teenager-y, well, like, we’ll, we’ll just have anal! It’ll be fine!
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, I remember the really, the fun moment where I had to tell parents, like, it, the, the, the people who took the True Love Waits pledge are the, like, a statistically really high population for sexually transmitted diseases because no one ever talked to them about anal or oral.
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Donnelly: And, like, parents blinking at me and, and, like, you could tell that a lot of them it, like, had never occurred to them that was even sexual intercourse to begin with, and it’s like, oh, we’ve got to dial it back even further here.
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Donnelly: Okay, you need sex ed too. Awesome. Like, let’s keep going here. [Laughs]
Sarah: Oh, boy.
Dr. Donnelly: So –
Sarah: So who are you doing this study for? ‘Cause you mentioned that you’re not, you’re not affiliated with a university. Are you looking –
Dr. Donnelly: I’m not.
Sarah: – to do research for your own project, or –
Dr. Donnelly: Yes.
Sarah: – is this part of something else?
Dr. Donnelly: Nope, it’s my own stuff.
Sarah: So you are a determined academic.
Dr. Donnelly: Independent researcher.
Sarah: Yes. I –
Dr. Donnelly: Mm-hmm. So, and I run a research firm as well, a concierge research firm for small businesses and small non-profits.
Sarah: Oh!
Dr. Donnelly: So I’m also just trying to build our, our own database and research knowledge and, and our own stuff, so I kind of, I try to help small businesses and small, smaller non-profits who don’t have the money for some of the bigger firms but who have a question to, to ask –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: – that I can help answer. So.
Sarah: That makes sense.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah. So, no, it’s my own, it’s my own bag.
Sarah: That’s very cool!
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah. I, I like it. I like being independent. I miss the university, but academia is an interesting place at the moment, so.
Sarah: Interesting, eh, yes? Mm.
Dr. Donnelly: I’m happy –
Sarah: It’s something.
Dr. Donnelly: – happy to be adjacent to it at the moment.
Sarah: Well, I mean, I remember being told when I was in graduate school that my desire to study what I didn’t realize was the intersection at the time –
Dr. Donnelly: Okay.
Sarah: – because that word was not a word I’d heard yet, but I wanted to study the intersection of feminist literary theory and romance novels.
Dr. Donnelly: Hmm.
Sarah: And specifically the idea of the Sedgwickian Triangle where two men –
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: – establish homoerotic and homosocial – what’s the word I’m looking for? Homosocial something; there’s a word that I can’t remember. Either way, two dudes are interested in each other, and they use a woman as a conduit to express their –
Dr. Donnelly: Yes.
Sarah: – homo-, homosocial erotic desire. Thank you. Tired brain is tired. So I was told that it was inappropriate for me to study romance novels, and sort of –
Dr. Donnelly: Yep.
Sarah: – I sort of look back and go, well, I didn’t get my graduate degree, but I sure did it anyway. Sorry! Did it on my own! Ha-ha. Thank you, internet. [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. The guardians of academia are very limiting, and so it’s, I was, I was given the tools and, I mean, I have, I have research degrees, and I’ll be using that, you know, to, to contribute to the academy for sure. Like, I’ll probably write this up and give it back to a, to a journal, ‘cause this is the kind of knowledge that, that we need in the academy as well, but I also want, there’s so much knowledge in the academy that we don’t translate out –
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Donnelly: – because some academicians are trapped by tenure needs and a whole lot of other things out, and they just don’t have the time to communicate it out, and I am –
Sarah: And committees. Lots of committees.
Dr. Donnelly: Committees. I have no committee, and I’m really lucky and blessed that I can kind of straddle both worlds, so hopefully I can produce something that’ll be really helpful for the academy and people studying romance, the growing community of people studying romance within the academy, but as well, people like yourself who aren’t going to buy an academic journal but who really want to know about the social and political and cultural implications of intersectionality with romance novels, so that’s kind of, my hope is to be able to bridge.
Sarah: You’ve met Jen Lois and Joanna Gregson, right?
Dr. Donnelly: I’ve met them through your podcast. I’ve never talked to them, no.
Sarah: Okay, ‘cause they’re the other sociologists that I’m most familiar with who –
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: – are studying the, specifically the community of women and the sociology of that community and also the stigma attached to reading and writing romance.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, they do a fantastic, they do fantastic work.
Sarah: Oh, it’s so cool. Every time they talk –
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: – I’m like, oh, my gosh! That’s that, there’s a name for that thing? That thing that we do? That’s a, that has, there’s a name? Holy cow.
Dr. Donnelly: That’s, it’s, largely sometimes what I feel like my job is as a sociologist, is someone’ll tell me a story, and I’ll be like, right, okay, so if you ever want to read more about this, the word you want to use is this –
Sarah: Is, yes.
Dr. Donnelly: – because we say it this way.
Sarah: It’s an entirely different language –
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: – for things that people do every day.
Dr. Donnelly: Correct. Correct. And I think sometimes we make it up just to have new words to say so that there’re new keywords at conferences.
Sarah: Oh, totally.
Dr. Donnelly: So, yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty much what we do.
Sarah: So one last question for you:
Dr. Donnelly: Please.
Sarah: Any books that you have read recently that you are dying to tell people to read.
Dr. Donnelly: Well, the one that I read, I mentioned earlier, the, the Bellator Saga by Cecilia London.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: It, so it’s, she just published the, well, she’s about to publish the fourth, I think on Tuesday –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: – and it’s a dystopian America –
Sarah: Ohhh?
Dr. Donnelly: – but not, like, post-apocalyptic, just, like, essentially Donald Trump became president and then what happened, but it’s, it’s dystopian erotica?
Sarah: My, my, my stomach just turned very sour. [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: Uh-huh. That’s why it’s dystopia.
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Donnelly: So, it’s two politicians, Caroline and Jack, who are part of the resistance, and you, in flashbacks and flash-forwards, are shown how they come together and are also trying to save America, but it’s deep and rich, and the writing is insane, and the sex is Kindle-meltingly hot –
Sarah: Oh!
Dr. Donnelly: – and so that’s one of the ones that I really, really, really recommend to people. Anyone who’s, like, up for a really long story. Like, they’re all, you know, 400 pages, and the whole thing’ll be over by the end of year or early next year, she says. That’s one of my recommendations for, like, people who are looking for really deep kind of adult-y themes –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: – kind of stuff. Then, I mean just to, I’ll, like, signal boost: if anyone who’s listening to here hasn’t already heard that you need to be reading Sonali Dev –
Sarah: Oh.
Dr. Donnelly: – again, please, please, please be reading Sonali Dev.
Sarah: She’s amazing.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah. And then just from the Irish perspective, ‘cause the other thing I originally emailed you about was a whole bunch of Irish authors that people don’t really always know about?
Sarah: Yes, because the romance portrayal of Ireland is not –
Dr. Donnelly: Is Irish Disneyland? Yeah.
Sarah: It’s – Irish Disneyland – [laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah. So there’re a lot of reasons for that, and there’s a lot of, you know, there’re not a lot of romance novels set in, in contemporary Ireland, and there’re even less written by Irish people. They do a whole lot more chick-lit, so where, it, there will be a happy ending, but it’s usually a lot more with, like, middle-aged folks who are finding themselves again or empty nest women or women finding a Happily Ever After in their friendship with each other?
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: And it’s, so, if anyone is like, you know what, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll ditch the Happily Ever After for a book, I just want Ireland, like, I just really, contemporary good Ireland, then you need to be reading Marian Keyes, and if you don’t need to, don’t know where to start, ‘cause she’s got a gajillion – first of all you start with her YouTube channel, ‘cause she’s hilarious, she posts vlogs, but the best place to start is Sushi for Beginners by Marian Keyes, is one of, is one of her best works. And then, of course, Cecilia Ahern, who if people don’t know that PS, I Love You was once a book. It was, in fact, a book –
Sarah: Yes.
Dr. Donnelly: – and it was written by Cecilia Ahern. So there are two of the big ones to know about, writing about contemporary Ireland, but again, searching for that Happily Ever After is going to be, going to be a little bit elusive. I know Susanne O’Leary is writing, she has a couple books on Amazon, the Kerry Romance series. I think they’re a box set that she does right now, and that’s, she is an actually authentic Irish person writing Irish romance. I’ve only read the first one, and I really enjoyed it, but I’m told that it just, it is just as delightful as you move, move on. But beyond that, I’m reading, I finished a really lovely one by Erin McCartney – McCarthy? McCarthy – called Heart Breaker, about two Nashville folks, and that one is like, there’s a lot of sex in that one too. That is o-, that is an open door.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: A very, very open door, if we’re talking about my research language, and –
Sarah: There must be a lot of specific language that you use also when you talk to your mom.
Dr. Donnelly: Oh, oh, yeah. I’ll just tell her, I just read something that you, that’s not your, your cup o’ tea.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Donnelly: And she’ll go, okay, and then I introduce her to other people. Like, I’ve just introduced her to Sarah Mayberry, and she’s really into that right now and super – she, she’s also one of those people, by the way, that when she reads an author, authors love, you know, just to hear this – there are a lot of women that do this, I’m learning – she just goes onto the internet and buys the entire back catalog –
Sarah: Yep!
Dr. Donnelly: – and puts ‘em in a pile and then just reads down the pile?
Sarah: Yep!
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, so –
Sarah: Glomming is a thing that –
Dr. Donnelly: See –
Sarah: – absolutely happens.
Dr. Donnelly: – we’re the original binge watchers, I think, we romance novel folks.
Sarah: We’re up there, yeah. No question.
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah. Yeah. And then there’s a, a cute little one that is, is again bordering on Happily Ever After but is really a different kind of romance novel. It’s called Without Borders by Amanda Heger, and it’s about a girl who goes and does a, like, study abroad before grad school kind of thing?
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: And she ends up becoming a doctor, like, she goes with a doctor on medical mission – not a religious one –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: – but a medical mission in Nicaragua –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: – and fall, I mean, falls for the dude that’s there then, so it’s a cross-cultural thing, but you also get some of the really hard things about medicine in rural Nicaragua, so if you’re, like, an insider baseball kind of – I love process-y books –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Donnelly: They have long conversations about, okay, when do you intervene in villages and when do you not, and how does that affect the character, and that one’s been, that’s one that I have been recommending to a lot of folks who are looking for something that’s still the contract and something that’s still good, but just a little bit outside of Adirondack chairs or boater, or motorcycle gangs, and that would be my, that would be another one I’m recommending right now, which is Without Borders by Amanda Heger.
Sarah: Does it have a happy ending?
Dr. Donnelly: It does. It’s a very rushed one. I’ll give you – and I said this in my review – it, the epilogue, you know that they’re going to get together. They have a big conflict, they end up having sex at the end, and the epilogue’s a little rushed, but there is a definitive happy ending. I’m hearing from some readers that they don’t think it’s quite as realized as they would have liked, but it is her debut novel, and so I think she’s only going to grow strength to strength from there.
Sarah: This is very cool.
Dr. Donnelly: [Laughs]
Sarah: I’m looking at the listing for the book, and I’m like, oh! I see!
Dr. Donnelly: Yeah, it’s really different, and I’ve done a lot of cross-cultural stuff, and there’s stuff about the heroine’s inner journey that, God, she just nails right on a head. And that the differences between the two of them, I’m, I’m in a cross-cultural marriage, and I mean, my, he’s not, my husband’s not a Nicaraguan doctor, but there’s cross-cultural stuff there, again, she just nails.
Sarah: Wow.
Dr. Donnelly: And there’s not a, for some of the same reasons that I think we all started recommending A Bollywood Affair?
Sarah: Yeah.
Dr. Donnelly: Like, this is a world I know nothing about. These are characters I’ve never met. These are, oh, my gosh, okay, I want to dive in this world and swim, and swim around for a little while. I mean, I, I read, I’m on my, like, 200th book of the year already. Like, I read obsessively. Without Borders has stayed with me.
Sarah: Wow.
Dr. Donnelly: All the ones I just mentioned are ones that have stayed with me across some other folks that haven’t, and so I’d really just – and some of it’s just my taste, you know. This is – but Without Borders, Ann, Annie is the heroine, and she’ll stay with me for a little while. I’ve been Annie before in my life. And then if anyone’s listening to this and is super into it, when you get to the scene with the birth in the cabin? Message me, and we can talk about it, ‘cause that’s quite a piece of writing. So.
Sarah: Okay!
[music]
Sarah: And that is all for this week’s episode. I want to thank Dr. Donnelly for hanging out with me and talking all about her research. If you’re curious about the survey, you can find a link to take that survey at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.
This episode was sponsored by Loveswept, publishers of Good Girl by bestselling author Lauren Layne. In this steamy novel, country music’s favorite good girl hides away from the world and finds herself bunking with a guy who makes her want to be a little bad. Noah should really tell Jenny Dawson that he’s Preston Noah Maxwell Walcott, the owner of the estate where the feisty country singer has made her spoiled self at home, but the charade gives Noah a much-needed break from his own troubles, and before long, their verbal sparring is indistinguishable from foreplay. But as sizzling nights give way to quiet pillow talk, Noah begins to realize that Jenny’s almost as complicated as he is. To fit into each others’ lives, they’ll need the courage to face their problems together before the outside world catches up to them. You can find Good Girl by Lauren Layne on sale wherever eBooks are sold.
Every episode gets a transcript, and this episode’s transcript is brought to you by Everything Under the Heavens, book one of Silk and Song by Dana Stabenow. Johanna is fleeing her homicidal stepmother in Khanbaliq, the storied city of Kublai Khan, and setting out on the Silk Road with companions Jaufre and Shasha in search of her fabled grandfather Marco Polo. You can find Everything Under the Heavens for free on Amazon, Kobo, and iTunes and 99 cents on Barnes and Noble.
And now it is time for a little bit of fun. If you’ve sponsored or supported the podcast on Patreon, one of the reward levels is a random compliment from me, which is most heartfelt, at the end of every episode, and I’ve got five compliments. Are you ready?
This is for Kendal B.: Kendall, you are more adorable than 99.99% of all kittens.
Jayne H., your friends took a survey, and you’re the bestest one, and you have the best pants.
For Bree: Your thoughtfulness is world-famous, as is your snark, and also your brownies!
Katharine M., you are the best kind of weird. Everyone thinks so.
And for Caroline, whose husband made sure that I thanked the right person, if you had a coat of arms, it would just say Awesomeness.
And if you’re curious as to what this is about or you’re thinking I could totally go for a silly compliment, please have a look at our Patreon at Patreon.com/SmartBitches and have a look at the various levels of supporting the show. I’m hoping to do transcripts of all of the episodes that currently don’t have one, and if you give a little bit of help for that, I will most definitely compliment you in a very strange and random but, as I said, most heartfelt way.
The music you’re listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater. This is Peatbog Faeries from their album Blackhouse, and this track is called “The Chatham Lasses.” You can find it on Amazon, iTunes, or wherever you like to buy your music.
Future podcasts will include me talking to people about romance novels, ‘cause that’s how we roll. If you’ve got ideas or suggestions or feedback, please feel free to email me at [email protected].
But in the meantime, on behalf of Dr. Kristen Nielsen Donnelly, myself, and everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a great weekend.
[good music]
This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.
Transcript Sponsor
The podcast transcript this month is sponsored by Everything Under the Heavens, Book I of Silk and Song by Dana Stabenow.
Raised in a prosperous family of 14th century Chinese merchants, Wu Johanna has grown up on camelback, in bustling city marketplaces, and in the cool, shaded depths of Silk Road caravanserai. Hers is a world of spice merchants and pearl divers, bandits and troubadours, servants and sheikhs. A world in which trust is more valuable than gold, and the right name can unlock a network of contacts from Japan to North Africa. Johanna is, after all, the granddaughter of Marco Polo.
In the wake of her father’s death, however, Johanna finds that lineage counts for little amid the disintegrating court of the Khan. Dynastic loyalties are shifting, petty jealousies lead to cold-blooded murders, and the long knives are coming out. If Johanna is to find a future for herself, she’ll have to rely on her wits, the vagaries of fortune, and a close-knit circle of friends and traveling companions. Her destiny—if she has one—lies more than a continent away, at the very edge of the known world.
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OMG Six Flags over Jesus!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My sister-in-law and brother-in-law got married there. It was INSANE. No church vestibule should have an alternate use as an aircraft hangar!
I’m still listening, but this episode has made me really think about my religion, sexuality, and my reading habits. I totally filled out your survey and would love to talk.
Touching on your discussion of the lack of books that involve religions other than evangelical Christianity: I am not a religious person, but I was raised Presbyterian, so my experience of non-Christian religion is mainly through books and movies (I did not grow up in a very diverse community). Inspirational books are not really my thing, but I am one of those people who will try reading anything. I really enjoyed reading Craving Flight by Tamsen Parker (which is a BDSM erotic romance). The best parts were the heroine’s religious journey into becoming an Orthodox Jew. I would love to read more books like this, of any heat level (i.e. chaste all the way up to erotic).
As a seminary professor who loves romance, I am so thrilled to hear about this! I have definitely noticed a difference in the way I talk about what I read with my current colleagues vs. my previous colleagues at a state university. So excited to see where this goes!
I’m laughing so hard as I’m listening to their talk about TV shows, because YES, yes, I so completely agree. For me, that show that broke it’s “contract” with me was Downton Abbey; that’s why for me, that show ended mid-season 3: Sybil and Branson are raising that beautiful baby and having more
Omg Six Flags Over Jesus. I’m dying.
I love this podcast so much. I grew up Baptist, but we all pretty much identify with nondenominational Christianity now (which I swear is actually a denomination). I read more closed-door in my private high school days, but I really didn’t hide anything I read. My mother has never penalized me for what I’ve read. She’s never been much of a reader (when she did, it was beach-appropriate chick lit), but she grew up around books thanks to my aunt, her extremely smart older sister, who literally has an exclusively romance mini library in her house. I had a conversation with my mom in the late teen years about how my classmates mocked my friend and I for reading Margaret Moore’s Gwyneth and the Thief, and her response was, “I don’t know why it matters what you read. I was always jealous of people who read a lot because to me that means they’re smart.” So I never felt ashamed until college when I compared myself with other English and theatre majors who only read death and depression while I was hiding Toni Blake and Nora Robert’s on my Nook (because B&N recommended some open door romances and I was hooked).
But back to religion, I also have a hard time with inspirational. I always give it a chance because my faith is important to me, but they’re frequently just so artificial and preachy. I have only found three total I would recommend, all Harlequin Love Inspired. And I am the only person I know who has even read inspirational romance, and am far from the only religious person I know.
Also I totally am on the same page as you Sarah on TV. I realized this when I watched Season 1 of Scandal (three seasons were out at the time) and it hit me that the love story could suffer from too many seasons; so I decided to let it go because Season 1 was perfect and reevaluate when the series actually ends. Now I only watch shows that have ended already so I can look up the basic plot and how it ends so that I know if the journey is worth binging.
Loved this episode – although I come from a different angle – not particularly religious but like all sorts of novels – almost every genre (and sub-genre) in romance. However, no one around me reads and it is a pretty conservative environment – so they only admit to history/nonfiction books. So I definitely don’t talk in depth about my reading habits at work or with friends – they don’t get it. Especially when I got hooked, on both erotic, paranormal and and m/m So when I tell people that I read instead of watching TV (totally with you Sarah). I tell people I read – romance, sci-fi, and some mystery and history. There eyebrows normally raise at the romance and If they want details I explain that frankly you can learn a lot about people, cultures and dealing with situations from all kinds of novels and besides I prefer to get away from work with reading – it’s an escape. Then I tell them – if they don’t have time or want to read – they might want to consider audiobooks and can download them from the library and show how on my iPhone. I’m just so happy for blogs, podcasts and Twitter – so I can feel a part of the community and know there are others out there like me.
@HollyG: I’m glad you’re part of our community. I know how isolating it is to be the only one in your environment who reads, and reads a wide variety of genres, many of which are dismissed and denigrated by others.
Also, I’m so glad I’m not alone in terms of being mistrustful of television writing!!!
What an enjoyable interview. Thanks for posting the transcript.
I really enjoyed this podcast. I never thought much about how my faith affected my reading. I will say that although my reading is eclectic, as I have gotten older, I tend to prefer sex scenes with dialogue that seem to advance the plot If it is too clinical (tab A, slot B), I skim through it.
I especially appreciated the book recs. Coming from a very Catholic family (with an uncle who is a priest and cousins who are very involved in church activities), I have heard many stories about parish meetings and parish staff. Despite my hefty TBR shelves (and Kindle folder), the description of Key Change made that book a one click for me and I intend to start reading as soon as I finish this comment.
Loved the 6 Flags Over Jesus story. When I was young (in the 70s) my family church was very modern (built in early 1960s). My uncle (the priest) used to say that it looked like an A & P (a supermarket chain that was pretty common in upstate NY during that time period). My parents were appalled — but looking back, I have to agree.
I hope that Dr. Nielsen Donnelly will be a return guest when she has findings from her research to report.
LOVED this episode! It was the kind of episode where you get weird looks on the subway, because you’re laughing out loud!!
Of course right after It was over I went to fill Dr. Donnelly’s questionnaire, and I found it very interesting that as an italian catholic the ONLY genre i don’t read is inspirational. To me it says A LOT. As a both an italian, a catholic and someone in her mid 20’s, I have all the feels and the opinions on the depiction of religious people, especially heroines (I loved Amanda’s podcast on tinder!) But don’t even get me started on italian heroes!
Also, of all the people in my life I’m the only one reading romance, not necessarily because it talks about sex, but because romance novels are viewed (especially from my mom) as lesser quality. There is shame to it, but it’s more like admitting out loud that you love the Kardashian kind of shame. When she asks me what I’m reading I usually tell her a subdued version of the plot, which is a LOT of fun to do, especially with the weirder and kinkier books.
Great episode. Although I don’t identify as religious now, I do think my upbringing in the Roman Catholic Church does rear itself in the romance books I read and the level of sex I can handle. I’m more of a closed door sex kind of reader, with the occasional dips into inspirational (usually Harlequin’s Love Inspired historical line). Erotica and steamier contemporary romances don’t really do anything for me personally.
You definitely see this showing up in certain romance reviews where you sometimes see complaints about there being sex scenes in books. An online friend and I have had long (aggravated) conversations about no sex romances being labeled ‘clean’. The ‘unclean’ thing about sex bothered me. I’m totally okay with someone not caring to read sex scenes. Everyone has preferences. But the implied judgement of ‘unclean’ in the ‘not clean!!!!’ 1 star romance reviews bugs. Seriously bugs.
I am late to the party because I’m catching up on podcasts (you can tell how long it’s been since I’ve done my long walks by how many podcasts I have in the queue) but I LOVED this! So many things I wanted to jump in on–we also have a mega church in the area we call SFOJ and it actually has the same shuttles that amusement parks have to take people from the parking lots to the church…and I swear that the people who go there are a colony of androids (hey…there’s a book series right there). One series that I really like is Noelle Adams Willow Park, set in NC in a conservative Presbyterian congregation but NOT inspie. It’s open door all the way, but very much about how the characters live their faith and how it affects their relationships. I’m always looking for books that reflect me, which can probably be summed up by one of my favorite t-shirts–“I love Jesus, but I drink a little.”
And, finally, I randomly sat at the breakfast table with Jen and Joanna at RWA in NYC last summer and I have to say that was probably one of the most exciting things that happened the whole week. I don’t squee and fangirl over authors so much, but I thought it was pretty cool to meet them.