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Rosalind Stanley's avatar

I’m excited to find this Substack and will be awaiting the next installment! (I already read your Emily Henry piece, which I thought was excellent.) My only question is how you/we are defining the romance genre. Maybe I’m a bit outdated, but I tend to think of people like Reid, Henry, others as contemporary fiction with romantic elements as opposed to romance per se. Am I splitting hairs here? To me, the difference is something like “X and Y have real feelings for each other but need to figure out a whole complex web of other things too” versus “X and Y have real feelings for each other and will spend the next 200 pages titillating me while they dance around each other.” If that’s a fair distinction, I think that can account for the lack of true criticism—there just isn’t really a ton to say about not-very-well-written-but-very-titillating prose. But am I being too narrow in my definitions? I’d be interested to hear what you think!

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Elizabeth Standish's avatar

I am so excited to find this Stack. As someone who finds herself caught between writing WF and not quite R romance, your piece in Emily Henry was so affirming.

Why CAN’T we have literary romance? People live complete lives every day, not one dimensional ones that are focused only on career, only on family, or only on love/titillation (as another commenter described it).

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