Like Kimber Chin, I find myself skeptical that a hero who has little to no ties to anyone in his life will make a successful mate. But I will go one step further and say I find it difficult to believe in a healthy, happy, successful HEA if the hero or heroine have terrible or lackluster relationships with their parents, siblings or other relatives. Oh, I know, it’s convenient to kill father’s off in historicals or the hero couldn’t be a duke or earl, and there’s more leeway for characters to get into scrapes with no parents to hinder them, but just once I’d like to read a romance where the characters have a great relationship with their parents. After all, a person isn’t trouble-free or angst-free with a set of loving parents or a loving single parent. 
There’s also the old adage that a man will treat you the way he treats his mother–which is why I fear for the heroines who end up with heroes who have “mama issues” (you know the standard: mama was whore/sadist/neglectful, so I hate all women!). It’s a bit trickier when the hero has “daddy issues”–who then was his role model for being a man? But I’m not neglecting the heroine: the woman with daddy issues isn’t exactly a comfortable person to be around (Grace Kelly anyone?), and a woman in constant friction with her mother finds us back in the familiar territory of the heroine having low self-esteem because her smarter, more attractive, and thin mother has terrorized her all her life.
Somehow, the angst stemming from parents is rather old. And ultimately for me, rather unbelievable that it is all “cured” by love. In conclusion my point is twofold: can we get more romances with healthy, loving relationships between the protagonists and their parents? And stop using “nasty parents” as a shortcut for character angst.
No related posts.
Good posts — when I was striking out into writing, I threw a bunch of stuff at my heroine, and one of my crit partners said, “But where’s here mother when all this is going on?” I was still afraid to juggle too many characters, so “Mom” lived in another part of the country, but they did have weekly phone calls.
The hero’s mother had been killed in a hit and run when he was a kid, which laid the foundations for his becoming a cop — but I didn’t know he’d been raised by his grandmother and how much she’d influenced him.
I realized I couldn’t write my characters in a vacuum, and from then on, I made sure I gave them roots.
I have a crappy relationship with my mother, and a fantastic marriage and seven awesome kids. I’ve never met my father, and never gotten along with my step until I got married.
I reject your heroine/hero parental qualifications. *g*
Most people I know who have problems with their parents become some of the most awesome mates/parents I know. They’re very self aware.
Sarah references Nora Roberts’s fabulous Chesapeake Bay series in an earlier blog, which provides great examples on both sides of your argument. On the one hand, the heroes’ childhood trauma results in some great internal conflicts. On the other, the family created by Ray and Stella Quinn makes it possible for those same heroes to be faithful, loving partners and parents.
The trick, I think, is that Nora grounds the conflicts and their resolutions firmly in the characters and their experience. These are not wallpaper angsts or plastered over traumas.
Sometimes I wonder if the whole publishing industry is anti-family.
In Middle Grade, the parents are usually dead. In Young Adult, they’re evil, mean, or totally self-absorbed. And in Romance they’re gone for one reason or another too, plus all Kick-Butt Heroines have their wombs removed to get their jobs as Romance novel heroines.
An editor even said children don’t like grandparents. Hello? Does he or she even know any real children?
Fantasy is nice, but too much and I just cannot relate.
But, I don’t think it’s an anti-family thing for the most part. Some individuals may have their issues. I think it’s simply that this is the way it’s always been done and it hasn’t occurred to many to do it any differently.
I’ll tell you what though, as a blogging book reviewer I jump on novels with believable families in them!
Right now, I’m reading MAN OF THE HOUSE. It’s about a stay-at-home dad.
I’m 100% in line with Eva Gale. While I think it’s wonderful when a person (or character) has close family relationships, I don’t think we can generalize about how childhood experiences affect one’s ability to develop healthy adult relationships.
I think it’s kind of like children who grow up in abusive homes: some grow up to be abusers because of their experiences, but many grow up to be wonderful, loving parents–and often because they know what the other side looks like. We’re all influenced by a combination of environment and genetics–not by environment alone–and there are other people with whom we can develop healthy relationships (aside from family members) that allow us to experience a different way of being and interacting with those around us…a teacher, for example, or a social worker.
I disagreed with Kimber Chin’s post for the same reasons. All people don’t respond in identical ways to similar experiences, and all people don’t have the same needs from their interactions with others: not having a lot of close family relationships (or same-sex friendships) can make some people better…and some, worse.
Just my two cents.
Some children from abusive homes do grow up to live happily ever after anyway, but that is the exception rather than the norm. Most struggle with it in some way for the rest of their lives and have great difficulty forming and maintaining long term relationships as a result. And the simple act of copulation does NOT ‘cure’ them, no matter how thrilling. I think the complaint here is that the *exception* in Real Life is the *norm* in Fiction. That’s not anymore believable than having all Fictional Kick-Butt Heroines childless when at least half of all Real Kick-Butt Heroines are mommies.
I’ve written plenty of characters with living, involved parents as well as those whose parents are not in the picture, for one reason or another. But I, too, don’t buy the one-size-fits-all argument, or that a person’s past/dysfunctional family life dooms him or her to a string of relationship failures or otherwise empty life. Everyone deserves love, and everyone IMO has the opportunity — and ability — to overcome those early experiences if they’re willing to NOT buy into the psychological stereotypes.
That’s not to say children from dysfunctional families don’t generally have more to overcome than kids raised in a stable, loving environment (or that, conversely, people raised in stable homes don’t screw up!) so an author who chooses to give her characters that sort of background definitely needs to handle the issue(s) with intelligence and sensitivity. Pat answers need not apply.
But the yearning for love is universal. To automatically assume a character — or, even more importantly, a real person — has no shot at their own HEA because of a crappy start in life seems a bit short-sighted to me.
My sister-in-law and I look at our inlaws and wonder how our husbands turned out to be the great guys they are. So I agree that you don’t have to have a family like the Waltons to be able to be a good husband/father. Actually, if a hero or heroine has too good of a relationship with his/her parents, that can be a problem, too. To function well as a spouse, one has to be able to break away from his/her family.
oops! Kinda overdid it on the italics, there–I thought I put the end-tag on it
Creating internal conflict is one reason to downplay parental influence. I also limit my characters’ outside relationships because of space constraints. It’s hard to tell a deep story in a mere 100K words; if you try to go wide, you can totally flounder.
I tend to have a lot of action and a complex paranormal world so I often run out of words before I get to the heroine’s relationship with her children, siblings, parents, grandparents, neighbors, friends, coworkers, etc. Heck, I can barely give all those people the time they deserve in my own life and I’m not out slaying demons.
One more thing: While there’s much discussion about how much reality can be imposed on romance before the much-loved fantasy elements are lost altogether, to me — as a reader and as an author — romance is first and foremost about hope — faith in humanity to overcome the bad with the good, that love is the most powerful force in the universe. So if sometimes our books seem to strain credulity in this regard, I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing, if they occasionally spur someone to take a look at his or her own life and realize…there’s something better, I can be better, I deserve better than what life’s doled out thus far.
That doesn’t mean there can’t be hints that the character will still need to work on some of his/her issues after the HEA. But if the author has done his/her job correctly, the reader should absolutely believe that the characters will be there for each other no matter what, because that’s what true love is all about. Or should be.
As with any other device, whether it works or not depends not on the device itself, but on how it’s executed.
As far as the YA/middle grade parents-are-dead thing goes, that is a classic element of the coming of age story. Basically, a character can’t have anyone left to protect her when she faces the crisis and defeats it, thus demonstrating her acquired mastery over her life and circumstances.
I think that’s a matter of classic story construction more than authors maliciously wanting to make every YA character an orphan.
As far as the families being the source of internal angst, I don’t know. It depends on if it is plausible or cliche. I think there’s this push for “real internal conflict.” And maybe authors are struggling with that pressure.
If we have internal conflict, it has to come from somewhere. If it has to come from somewhere, it’s probably going to come from the family, so there you go.
I’m a big fan of conflict in my stories, but so far, I’ve managed to keep the families out of it.
As a teacher, I’ve seen all kinds of wonderful kids come from bad homes and vice versa. There’s no set formula for a person to grow into a functioning, successful adult. And few families are perfect. I have more trouble believing a perfect, loving family than one where some of the members have issues of one sort or another. Thank goodness for all the creative authors who can think up all kinds of situations.
“romance is first and foremost about hope — faith in humanity to overcome the bad with the good, that love is the most powerful force in the universe. So if sometimes our books seem to strain credulity in this regard, I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing…”
Bravo, Karen! Well said.
Some excellent thoughts. It also brings to mind the pod people scenario – ie characters who appear to have no family at all!! I can’t recall who coined the term, but it was an article in RWR a few years back bemoaning a glut of Pod People books. May have been a trend in orphans at the time!!
“Some children from abusive homes do grow up to live happily ever after anyway, but that is the exception rather than the norm. Most struggle with it in some way for the rest of their lives and have great difficulty forming and maintaining long term relationships as a result.”
Well, I come from an abusive home
(my Dad is insane and abusive
and an all around baddie)
and yes, I have serious relationship issues.
It took my hubby 5 long years
to convince me to marry him.
I was damaged.
I’m still damaged.
We have a wonderful relationship
but it requires work and patience.
Since I write what I know,
I write damaged characters.
Usually either the hero or the heroine
has a ‘normal’ childhood
(if with 50% divorce rates,
that exists anymore)
because I think someone needs to know
what a healthy, working relationship is.
But the other person is damaged
because I think there are a lot of damaged people out there
and they need hope more than the ‘normal’ folks
Sorta long…
As a psychotherapist, I have to toss out an alternate theory….
I don’t think it’s true that people who come from troubled parent-child relationships are, de facto, less likely to have successful marriage/other relationships, in so far as what we’re talking about now is whether love can solve problems parental relationships created.
The more we learn about brain science, the more we are coming to realize Relationship is about the ONLY thing that can change old patterns in the brain and the heart.
Redoing things, in a new way, is what changes us. Having a new experience changes us.
Instead of being rejected, we’re accepted. Instead of being blamed, we’re forgiven.
And so on.
If that happens enough, it starts to change our brains. How we think and feel. And what we do.
And that’s exactly what happens in romance novels.
(Course, we have to be paying attention when these things happen. If our eyes are screwed shut and we’re white-knuckling our way thru an experience, well, that’s different.)
fwiw, some research shows the thing most important in the ability to form strong, secure attachments in adulthood is NOT how strong or healthy the attachment to the parents was.
That’s a strong predictor, of course, but it seems the key is . . . wait on it . . . the person’s ability to tell a coherent story about it!
Now, how cool is that?
In romance novels, the hero/heroine helps each other do exactly that.
They help each other learn to tell a different a story, about themselves and their place in the world. A different story about what’s possible.
And as far as the overuse of the evil/absent/ineffectual parent…from an exposure perspective, I get it.
As a reader, we get tired of reading the same plot strategies over and over, esp. when it feels pasted on. Like the requisite elements are just typed in and presto, emotional angst for a lifetime.
But I think we tap into the parent-child relationship for storytelling because 1) it’s so primal, and 2) well, it’s so primal.
I mean on a mythic level. It’s got legs.
I’ll stop now.
Kris, I cannot even begin to tell you how profound that is on so many levels. BEYOND cool. Thank you for that long post. It really meant something to me.
Eva,
)
Thanks for saying so! Made my night, to hear that.
(Tried to send privately, but couldn’t find your email addy.