(With affection and apologies to Rick Nelson.)
Part of this post was written almost a year ago, then tucked into the draft folder and more or less forgotten. Since then, I've dipped into the drafts now and then, debating whether to post this essay or any of the others that have been simmering for various lengths of time.
What prompted me to finally resurrect this post and the whole Be Still, My Heart blog? I'm not sure. Maybe it's a bunch of different things. Maybe it's frustration with the format over on Twitter, where so many conversations start, but they never develop because there's always another shiny object or fifty popping up in the timeline. And we are all too easily distracted.
So this afternoon I decided it was time for a reactivation. Maybe there will be other old drafts given another life. Maybe there will be reviews -- yes, I know I said this wasn't going to be a review site, but times and minds change -- and maybe there will be how-to lessons. Maybe I will repost some of the articles I wrote for the now moribund BookLikes.
When I began this blog some ten years ago, I designated myself a resurrected romance writer. Now it's a resurrected romance blog.
I am in the middle of a huge decluttering project, which means I often fall down metaphorical rabbit holes when sorting through vast files of papers. It happened again this morning, and the adventure prompted some serious reflection.
Back somewhere in the 1980s, I wrote a contemporary romance titled Mind Over Matter. Though there were no overt psychic phenomena on stage in the book, research into "the unexplained" did play a major part in the conflict between the romantic leads. When I shared the opening chapters with a critique partner, she returned it with severely negative comments.
She found the lead characters particularly unlikable.
The female main character is divorced, and the dissolution of her marriage was acrimonious. On the advice of her lawyer, she extracted as much compensation, if you will, as she could get from her very wealthy ex. She used some of the settlement to pay for her education, eventually earning a PhD in her chosen field. Without the divorce and the cash, she would not have been able to go to college. My critique partner -- whose spouse had been married twice before -- wrote a lengthy condemnation of divorced women as romance heroines, especially if they had "profited" from the divorce.
The male main character was a computer specialist hired by the heroine. He is quickly revealed, however, to have formerly been a dentist, a career he was forced into by his parents, who were Jewish refugees after the Second World War. "I'm the youngest of their three offspring," he tells the heroine. "My sister is the doctor, my brother in the middle is the lawyer, so as the obedient son that I was, I became a successful Jewish dentist. But I hated it."
Did my critique partner find the stereotypes of Jewish lawyer and Jewish doctor (neither of which characters are ever even mentioned again in the book) offensive? No, she had no problem with that. She found just his being Jewish offensive. She said she felt uncomfortable believing the heroine was Christian -- nothing to that extent is ever stated or even hinted at -- and falling in love with a Jew.
I could have changed it. I could have had the heroine work her way through college never married, never divorced. But the divorce had made her wary in a specific way related to the plot, and I didn't see any other set of circumstances that could have established that kind of vulnerability and caution. Her financial security also gave her an independence that allowed her to make life decisions free of economic pressure, but she still knew from her own experience that not everyone has that liberty.
The hero didn't have to be a Jew. He didn't have to be a former dentist. But in those days of contemporary romance, Jews were almost never depicted at all. (Outside of "inspirational" romances, neither were Christians, but that's another issue.) They just didn't exist in Romancelandia then. As someone who grew up with Jewish relatives, I felt that was a serious lack. I had encountered some minor anti-Semitism in high school, but I didn't identify as Jewish and I wasn't practicing, so my attempt to include a Jewish dentist turned computer programmer was intended as just a nice little gesture to my family.
Today, more than a generation later, no one would blink twice at a divorced heroine.
But what about a non-practicing Jew?
Does he have to be a "real" Jew? Would I have to write all about his Jewishness even if it's not part of who he is in the story? As a non-practicing non-Jew would I even be allowed to do that?
Thirty years after I wrote Mind Over Matter, I read Kathryn Stockett's The Help. I read all of it, but I didn't like it, or at least not as much as most of my friends, who raved about how wonderful it was. I didn't find the maids' stories unbelievable; I imagined the truth was probably even worse for many Black domestic workers. But I always got the sense that because the women were telling their stories to a white woman, they were holding back. Yeah, even though it was fiction, they were real enough for me to imagine what went on when they weren't talking to Skeeter. And because the novel-within-the-novel was written -- and published -- by that white woman, the story had to have been sanitized. This wasn't Ann Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi, and yet I suspected even that book was cleaned up for public consumption.
The Help reached an enormous audience. Mind Over Matter was never published.
I think it was at the 1989 RWA national conference in Boston that Walter Zacharius, then president of Kensington Publishing, aka Zebra Books, brought up his plans for a line of African-American romances. How clear did he make it that he wanted authors of color to write the books? I don't know; I don't remember. What I do remember, however, is my making the comment out loud and in public that writers shouldn't be constrained. If we can (sic) write about people in other times and other places, why not about people with different color skins? This was the heyday, of course, of the "Indian" romance, often featuring a Native American "brave" and a white woman. (Connie Mason, Georgina Gentry, Cassie Edwards, Janelle Taylor, Madeline Baker, et al wrote them by the dozens. I didn't say they wrote good ones.)
I didn't understand then, and I will express great thanks to fellow book blogger John "Darkwriter" Green for taking the time and having the patience to explain "own voices" to me in a Facebook conversation, that it was a question of opening the door to those writers who did bring the personal experience to the arena. That they -- and they alone -- could write their stories to their audience with authenticity and trust, not as exotica for a white readership, not as lessons in ethnicity for a white readership, but as stories of their humanity for all of us.
I can't write about the experiences of people of color. I can't write about the experiences of LGBTQIA+ people. I can't write about the experiences of disabled people. At least not from the perspective of having lived those experiences.
But I don't want to write just about and for an all-white audience. I want to write about people who are inclusive. I wrote a character in one of my books who expressed affection for and did not condemn another character who was homosexual. I couldn't write that character from my own experience, but I could write one who accepted him without reservation.
I wrote a hero in a historical romance who was half Mexican. the illegitimate son of a white Texas rancher and a Mexican servant. He was a wagon train scout, skilled at what he did but not wealthy, not powerful. He was also not exotic, or at least I didn't write him that way. But he was a man who needed someone to believe in him and I gave him a heroine who would do that. She saw him as a man, period. Should I have made the heroine a racist who saw him as less than human but then learned to see him as a man? I suppose I could have, but I preferred to have her not be a racist. In the 1850s? When she was born and raised as a pampered Creole belle in New Orleans? Why not?
Maybe I didn't make him Mexican enough. Maybe I was wrong to put opportunities in his path that a half-Mexican wagon train scout wouldn't have had in those days. But I was writing romance, not a social history of the American working classes in the decade preceding the Civil War.
I was writing a romance, and now I fear I did it all wrong.
I don't want to offend anyone. I don't want to insult anyone. I want to get it right.
But what if I don't? What if someone somewhere says I screwed it up?
There's a line from the first episode of the 1975 BBC production of Poldark that maybe applies to how I feel about what I write.
Captain Ross Poldark has returned to England after the American war and is in a coach on his way back to his estate in Cornwall. One of his fellow passengers asks Poldark about his experiences in America, and in particular what he thought of the native people. "Except for the clothes," Captain Poldark said, "they're just like us."
Today, of course, we are confronting the unresolved issues of colonialism and racism, not just in the US but in the United Kingdom as well, and by extension Canada and Australia and then into China. It's everywhere, it's everywhere. Ross Poldark didn't go on to deliver a dissertation on the evils of British colonialism in America, the then-current and to-be-foreseen genocide of those folks who are "just like us."
But we also have in Romancelandia that monumental issue of the Thousand and One Dukes. If we don't examine the issue of classism there, how is that different from not examining issues of racism? On the other hand, what right do any of us -- readers, reviewers, authors -- have to criticize those who read and write and love every duke and marquess who ever lived on the pages of a novel? Do we write it all off -- pun intended -- as guilty pleasures? Do we insist that books, especially romance novels, must be politically correct, must have a message, must be feminist?
Not every romance novel is going to appeal to every romance reader. The genre has expanded from what it was when I wrote Mind Over Matter almost forty years ago. There was a time when contemporary and historical were almost the only distinctions made between types of romance. When Walter Zacharius proposed Zebra's African-American line of novels, the idea was almost revolutionary. To have a whole line of romances that clearly defined was quite radical. How many of us in that room would have predicted the eventual rise of paranormal romances, erotic romances, gay/lesbian romances, and the rest of the panorama of sub-genres that has blossomed since then?
I don't have a clear and precise answer, except for myself. I'm going to write the books I want to write. I'm going to write them the best I can. And then, if and when I publish them, I will leave the rest up to the readers, those who like them as well as those who don't.
