Smile When You Say That

Coincidentally enough, the same week I started this blog, one of the two local free papers ran this article on the romance genre. Although the article is mainly about diversity in romance characters and writers, Mr. Miller employs the usual snarky hooks. In the print version, the teaser page starts off "Between the kitty litter and the toothpaste..." and ends with "A better question is: Why would anyone want to write them?"

Of course, this teaser has nothing to do with the rest of the article. But if you really want to know, Mr. Miller, you might check out
one of my favorite essays about the romance genre. A choice sampling:

Fairy tales, Luthi says, promise the reader a just universe, and so do the genres. Mystery fiction promises a morally just universe, and speculative fiction promises an intellectually just universe, but romance fiction trumps all of these because it makes the greatest promise of all. It says that if you truly open yourself to other people, if you do the hardest thing of all which is to make yourself vulnerable and reach out for love and connection and everything that makes life as a human being worth living, you will be rewarded; it promises, in short, an emotionally just universe.

The author, Jennifer Crusie, is a published and popular romance author and incidently possessed of some rather impressive literary creds.

And if that doesn't give you enough food for thought, Mr. Miller, before you let your disdain bubble over onto the works of an ENTIRE GENRE, you could try something really radical: you could try actually reading one.