When my husband was diagnosed with kidney failure, I went straight to the library: not to read up on transplants, or kidneys, or anything actually useful, you understand, but just to check out a giant pile of books that I could sink into and live inside for a while, handily shutting out the rest of the world in the process.
These would be my emotional support books, and they would emotionally support me in the way books had always done, ever since I was a little girl, being bullied at school, then coming home to read The Famous Five, and escape into a world where there was sunshine, and adventures, and a really quite surprising number of monkeys, tbh.
Well, ya gotta love those monkeys, right?
This had been my technique for dealing with every other traumatic event in my life so far (the aforementioned bullies, new jobs, that time I flew to London to dance in front of a room full of strangers…), and it had yet to fail me.
Until now.
Reader, I don’t know how it happened, but every single one of the books I checked out that day turned out to have either a dead or dying husband in it, or some other tragic chain of events which left our unfortunate heroine facing the prospect of spending the rest of her life alone. I swear to God, there was even one where the husband/fiancé/whatever got kidney failure. And he died.
It was as if the books had somehow managed to tap into my deepest, darkest fears, and mirror them. Because it was me, folks: I was the unfortunate heroine facing the prospect of spending the rest of her life alone — and every single thing I read (Literally every. single. thing.) only served to reinforce that fear. Somehow, without even thinking about it, I had developed an uncanny ability to always pick up what I came to think of as Dead Husband Books, even when there was absolutely nothing about the cover or blurb to suggest that this might be the direction the story would take, and I was. in. hell.
No longer able to rely on my old friends, books, to provide me with comfort and emotional support, I ended up doing something that still makes me cringe to this day: I started reading the end first. I would literally pick up a book, and immediately flick to the back and read the last few pages, just to make sure there was going to be a happy ending, and absolutely no jump scares in the form of … well, death, basically. Forget Save the Cat: for me, it was all about saving the husbands, and I would not subject myself to anything in which this was not guaranteed. I was already terrified that Terry was going to die: I desperately needed everyone else in my life — including the completely imaginary ones — to stay alive, thanks very much.
But this, of course, could only be established if I read the end of each book first: and given that my preferred genre was (and still is) mystery and thrillers (I honestly never really outgrew my Enid Blyton phase. I just moved onto more grown-up versions…), reading the end first was the kind of spoiler that rendered reading the rest of the book completely unnecessary.
Instead, I re-read a bunch of my old Famous Five books, before moving on to the Adventure Series, which, honestly, is even better. (Seriously, any time I read the advice to ‘write the book you want to read’, I think, ‘Yeah, but what if the book I want to read is The Castle of Adventure by Enid Blyton? What then?) This calmed me down, and allowed me to start functioning relatively normally again (well, for me…), but it also felt like something I should probably never admit to anyone, because, I mean, what kind of grown adult still reads kids books? Other than the kind of adult who desperately needs to escape into a world where everything always works out in the end (because even if you were to be kidnapped by smugglers, say — which was highly likely — you’d most likely be rescued by friendly circus folk, and all would be well), I mean?
I … just wanted to know that everything would work out in the end. I also really wanted to start re-reading books meant for grown-ups at some point, though… and therein lay the problem.
Back then, when Terry was ill, I wasn’t particularly a romance reader. I didn’t avoid romance books exactly (I’ve never been a book snob: I will read anything that takes my fancy, whatever genre it happens to be…), but my true passion was what most people would probably describe as modern gothic novels, but which I think of as Books With Mysterious Old Houses In Them. To this day, if a blurb has even a hint of there being a mysterious old house (or castle, or pub, or anything, really…) in it, I’ll be all over it. (Spoiler alert: my next book may or may not involve a mysterious old castle…)
Those books, however, absolutely could not be relied on to provide me with the happy ending I craved: because, the thing about mysterious old houses is that they normally harbor some kind of dark secret. And the thing about dark secrets is that … well, they’re dark. And often involve the kind of events that I found too triggering to even contemplate back when Terry was going through dialysis, and I was slowly losing my mind.
Eventually, though, Terry had his transplant. After that, things got slowly better, and I began reading more widely again. Even the Dead Husband Books came back into rotation, and, for a while, all was well.
Then I had Max, and everything went wrong again. This time, it wasn’t just dead husbands I had to avoid — it was anything and everything that involved something bad happening to a child. I just couldn’t bear to even think about it. I still can’t. Since I became a parent, there are certain topics that are so triggering for me that they have the ability to take out my entire day, with intrusive thoughts that just keep coming at me, no matter how hard I try to repress them. I’ve had to stop watching movies and TV shows when it became apparent that a child was going to die or be harmed in them, and while I no longer avoid trauma involving adults, I can’t even tell you how annoyed I was when I watched My Oxford Year last week thinking it was a rom com, only to realise that, guys, that movie is NOT a rom com. I repeat: NOT A ROM COM.
Don’t even get me started on dogs.
Never, ever recommend me a book or movie in which the dog dies. Just … don’t.
Fortunately for me, it wasn’t long after I had Max that I discovered romance books.
I mean, I say I ‘discovered’ them: I didn’t really. I obviously knew romance as a genre existed, and I’d read some of it in the past. It had never been my favourite genre, though, and that’s honestly a shame for me, because, as you probably know, the golden rule of romance books is this:
People read romance books because they know how it’s going to end. They know the two main characters will end up together. They know there will be a happy ever after — or at least a ‘happy for now’. What they want to know is how that comes about, despite all of the apparent obstacles in the way; and YES. ME TOO. I am ALL ABOUT the happy ever afters. If I know everything’s going to work out in the end, I can even deal with some sad stuff in the middle (Because not every romance is ‘light’ or happy all the way through…), just as long as I can be assured the author isn’t going to ‘Oxford Year’ me at the end.
(No, I’m still not over it…)
My love of happy endings isn’t the only reason I decided romance would be my genre when I started writing my own books, but it is a large part of it — because I might have spent a large part of my life imagining myself one day becoming a very serious writer of literary fiction, but, as it turns out, I am not a remotely serious writer, and when I write books, I have to do it with the knowledge that I’m going to make damn sure everything works out in the end. It might not be particularly realistic (Which is another reason romance is often criticised), but, honestly, I think reality is over-rated a lot of the time, anyway. Sometimes a little bit of escapism is what you need instead: and that, my friends, is why I choose to write romance.
I just hope to God at least a few of you will choose to read it …
