I don’t think there is a particular way to read a romance so as not to get depressed by the dissonance between story and reality. I think Art is a highly personal experience and the relation between text and reader and the reader’s reaction to the text is based on many, many variables that you just can quantify.

But for me personally, I have two general reactions when reading romance. One postive and one negative. On the postive side when I finish a romance I have the feeling I get whenever I read a well told story; I am satisfied, gratified and just a little bit sad it is over.

When my response is negative reading a romance can spin me into a miasma of misery and depression. But this also true of other genres, both popular and literary. I’m not sure why this happens in either case. It depends both on the story and on my mood before hand; yet, it isn’t mood dependent. That is, I can be perfectly fine before but for some reason that particular story makes me either angry or melancholy. I don’t know why this is so, it just is.

So I would say there’s no particular secret to reading romance. Reading is a risky endeavor. It can engage our feelings and our perceptions in ways we’d rather it didn’t; often it does this unexpectedly. There’s no guarantee that you won’t be dissatisfied. But then there’s no guarantee that you will. I think a good story is always worth that particular risk.

You wrote: “I’m in a highly healthy and mutually satisfying marriage now, and I’m almost afraid to start really getting into romance now, at the peril of reducing my own infatuation with my husband – does anyone have any suggestions?”

Maybe you could get your husband reading romance too?

But I’m the wrong person to ask, as I haven’t run into the problem you describe. Anyone out there with better advice?

As for romantic fiction making real life seem less satisfactory, when I was a mostly-single mum with babies who didn’t sleep, romantic fiction got me through. I knew they weren’t real life, but they gave me little breaks and I badly needed breaks.

The support these books gave me are the reason I wanted to become a writer, (several years later.)

Katie (don’t let’s be formal, KFH’s never are!)

Anyway, thank you, Eric, for again articulating the many positive and useful qualities of romance fiction; I do feel better about life in general when I’m reminded of humanity’s potential for goodness.

I would like to renew my comment from PCA, though, as one of those “surprising number” of (female?) readers who has shied away from romance fiction in the past because of the feeling that the texts “made real life less appealing by contrast”…since then, I have been actively trying to break out of this mindset, and actually rejoined one of those bank-draining book clubs to increase my own collection. So to all of you who have learned valuable life lessons from romance fiction, I sincerely applaud you, and I would like to ask how you HAVE avoided negative comparisons between the fiction and your own relationships (or singledom) – was my past misperception entirely based upon my own psychological failings, or should I be reading in a different way? I vividly recall reading romance novels in the past and feeling genuine euphoria when the “happy ending” I wished for actually came about, only to put the book down and return to my (at various points, quite romantically unsatisfactory) everyday existence. I’m in a highly healthy and mutually satisfying marriage now, and I’m almost afraid to start really getting into romance now, at the peril of reducing my own infatuation with my husband – does anyone have any suggestions?

[insert Colin Firth picture here]:

“Right. Crikey.”

OK, enough of that! [Now bouncing and grinning from ear to ear in most unmanly fashion.]

Thank you so, so much for stopping by…er…Ms. Fforde! (What is the protocol, anyway, for this sort of encounter? Better to err on the side of formality, I guess.) What a wonderful end to a very stressful week.

And for what it’s worth, you are an institution, or at least a byword, in our house. You’ve brought a lot of pleasure to our lives, and I look forward to my daughter discovering you books as well. (My son? Maybe in his 30s, like me.)

By the way, my wife is very impressed that my column drew a comment from you–yet another thing to thank you for!

Life Skills was my first KF. When I lived in Seattle, the King County Library, a fabulous institution, had all of KF’s work (could I say oeuvre, because I’ve never said it before and this seems to be the appropriate place to trot it out for the first time) so I could indulge in even the now out of print KFs at any time. Now it is a little more difficult but I recently read Living Dangerously and turned right around and read it again so that I didn’t have to leave the company of those characters quite yet.

As far as life skills from romantic fiction? I used to move frequently. I found that if I would locate the library and indulge in a little bit of D.E. Stevenson, Elizabeth Cadell, Georgette Heyer (if they had them) or Jane Austen, I would be able to feel that I already had friends in my new town.

I think one of the best lessons I’ve learned from romances is from ARABELLA, the first Georgette Heyer I ever read. In it, the heroine’s brother, having been sent down (IIRC) from Oxford, has been roistering in London and gotten himself into debt–by the hero’s standards, a trivial amount, but to a vicar’s son, overwhelming. The hero finds him where he’s hiding out and offers to help him, as he intends that they be brothers-in-law. The brother vows to reveal all to Arabella and his parents, to which the hero replies, in effect, “Have you considered that doing so would clear YOUR conscience admirably, but would cause THEM a great deal of wholly unnecessary pain?” I think that’s a very important lesson, and not unrelated to the issue of apology and forgiveness.

ARABELLA also contains what I think is one of the key scenes in romance, so much so that it has become a cliché: The hero doesn’t become seriously interested in Arabella until he arrives at her aunt’s house unexpectedly and finds her defending a chimney sweep’s climbing boy from his brutal master. Very often the thing that differentiates a HEROINE from the rest of the chits of the Ton (or whatever) is her concern for others; and the hero is usually shown to be one by his care for his estates and tenants, or perhaps for the crippled soldiers who served under him in the Peninsula. This is part of what Northrop Frye means by “a new and better society forming around the hero and heroine.”

Oh, the other thing I learned is that if you want to avoid trouble, exile the wicked cousin to the Colonies.