Customise your own romance
REMEMBER “Choose Your Own Adventure” books? At pivotal points in the plot, readers were asked to decide a question that would ultimately determine the main character’s actions and the story’s outcome. In My Lady’s Choosing: An Interactive Romance Novel, American authors Larissa Zageris and Kitty Curran have followed the same premise, allowing readers to choose their own happily ever after.
The creative duo made a name for themselves with their 2016 novella, Taylor Swift: Girl Detective – The Secrets Of The Starbucks Lovers, but their latest is a send-up of the romance genre that puts the reader in the role of heroine during Regency-era London. Women hold jobs such as governess and “orphan-helpin’”. Expeditions into the Scottish Highlands and Egypt await. And whether you favour Mr Darcy or Jamie Fraser of Outlander, this book accommodates.
Readers are challenged to answer tough questions like: “Are you a lover, not a fighter?” Or choose between these options: “Yes, you want to be a spy and have sultry intrigues with your sultry ex-lover” or “No, I prefer a career that doesn’t involve getting shot at”. But by book’s end, if you fancy the brooding type or a “free-spirited woman with a past”, this book delivers agency with a side of humour.
With a nod to old-school romance genre tropes, we talked with Curran and Zageris about their book.
How would you describe the book to a reader?
Curran: I would call the book a loving satire, kind of like Hot Fuzz. That’s an action movie satire, but done by people who clearly love action movies for people who love action movies. I feel the same sort of thing with ours.
Zageris: I think send-up is a bit of a softer term, because there are moments that are satirical, where we do get our little edge of social commentary in there ... we make a joke in the first few pages where we ask: “Do you want to choose to go out on your own and do this?” And we say, “You can’t, because it’s Regency England and you will literally die”.
And we wanted to make those rules pretty clear to the reader – that though it’s a fantastic world, it’s not sheer fantasy where you can break off on your own and say, “I did my own thing”. That’s kind of the satirical edge.
At the time, you had to bend to these rules, and we make fun of how some of the rules are completely stupid. That’s not the rules of romance, that’s societal rules. What was your inspiration? Curran: Larissa discovered (the Masterpiece TV series) Poldark, and I rediscovered Poldark in the writing of this. And obviously Outlander was a large inspiration as well.
Could we use your book as advice for the lovelorn?
Zageris: One hundred per cent. Kitty and I talk about this a bunch, because a lot of what we’re working on has to do with a strong female perspective.
We talk about what we wish we could see or the things that we really like, and one of the shows is Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries.
When I started watching it, I said, “What’s this feeling I’m having?”
Miss Fisher gets to wear these great clothes, she gets all these guys and then she has this hot, unconsummated romance, and she’s smart, and Kitty says: “It’s wish fulfilment.” That show for me helped me kind of raise my own standards.
You might never be a world-class, really rich, hot lady detective, but you can kind of want that out of your life – that feeling of confidence and being open with your desire. Even though it’s pure entertainment, it helped me kind of be like: “Yeah, feel your bad self.”
Something like our book allows you, as a reader and a character, a lot of agency and expects it of you.
I would hope people have a really good time doing what they want or doing things far outside their comfort zone as a character and maybe take a little bit of that into their dayto-day life.– Chicago Tribune/ Tribune News Service