I Read Romance

Grumpy sunshine: exactly what it sounds like. One character is all warmth and stoke and refusing to have a bad day. The other one is wrapped up, hiding, a little bitchy, happiest hidden away. They fall into each other's orbit and something sparks between them. The easy read is that one of them fixes the other, or that the difference is a problem to solve. It's not. What this trope actually...

I have read so. Many. Romances. And hidden all of them. Always on a Kindle, face down, no one sees the cover. Or I'll skip the part in the conversation where we all share what we're reading. And while I was embarrassed about all this reading, I was also just so. Very. Interested. Couldn't stop. So: this is the part of this series where I go into the dark parts of myself (or, keep going...

Episode 3 is basically about the shadowy parts of our psyche and one of the ways romance likes to look at that topic: forcing your good hidden bits to the surface. Romance is all about shadows—this is essentially the intersection of desire and shame, one of the core parts of these stories—but this episode is kinda around the  rupturing  of shadow stuff up into our conscious lives. You're stuck...

As humans, we need stories. They help us focus on meaningful information in a sea of chaos. Help us learn, heal us, bond us with others. This is neuroscience. Stories also often follow predicatable patterns so we can get the right information out of them. This is also neuroscience. Romance novels do this, because they're stories. They do this about relationships, emotions, and about forms of d...

The confession episode. The “hi, I’m Kristin and I read almost 700 romance novels in three and a half years” episode. It starts in summer 2022, on accident, but somehow it becomes book a day, sometimes more, for years. Staying up too late. Reading during other obligations. My family noticing, my family commenting, my family not loving it. But this isn’t just me. Romance is huge. Something is going...