’I want my readers to be less critical of themselves’
Many of India’s male romance writers are dear friends, says Kiran Manral, 50, laughing. But they do have a rather unfair advantage: the female reader (and most readers of the romance novel are women) can turn the male author into an aspirational romantic interest; very rarely can a woman romance novelist hope for that.
The advantage that women have is the female perspective, the female gaze, Manral adds. “We write about romance the way women experience romance. It comes from lived experience.”
In Manral’s romance novels — books such as Once Upon a Crush (Leadstart, 2014), an office romance; All Aboard! (Penguin, 2015), set on a cruise ship; or Saving Maya (Bombaykala Books, 2018), a romance between a divorced single mother and a mysterious man who moves in next door, tackling trauma from his past — the landscape is familiar, but the details are intricate and lived-in. There’s the search for love, but it occurs amid divorce, or turning 30 while single and not wanting to be, or in the aftermath of being left at the altar.
Manral, who married her college sweetheart and personally holds on to old-fashioned ideas of romance (one person, happily ever after), says she wants her readers to experience hope and joy through her books, but also see themselves and their lives reflected.
It’s not about an unrealistic happily-ever-after, she says, so much as a “happily right now”. “I write about second chances and tell my readers that you just have to pick yourself up and keep going.”
For instance, in Saving Maya, the protagonist goes from a very comfortable married life to a nasty divorce. In the course of the book, she learns to support herself, rebuilds her life. She returns to her career in the corporate world, reskills herself as she works, builds up her self-confidence, navigates being a single mother. Love comes along again, but at the heart of book is the tale of how she survives.
In Saving Maya, the protagonist is chubby. She attempts a makeover while going through a divorce, but feels uncomfortable with the superficiality of it and concentrates on building up her self-confidence. “I want my readers to know that they can set things aside. Society keeps badgering women — you’re not tall enough, not pretty enough, not fair enough,” Manral says. “We are too critical of ourselves.”
In her own life, as with women writers through the centuries, Manral finds that time is rarely her own to claim. “When you sit to write, people treat it like a hobby,” she says. “It’s very difficult to find the vacuum needed to create. But I was a journalist for 15 years, so I’m used to working amid distraction.”