Embrace the inner romantic
Kylie Klein-Nixon is happy to admit her novel love
Hello, my name is Kylie Klein-Nixon and I love romance novels. There, I’ve said it now and I can’t take it back. But, there’s more: I also write romance novels. I’ve been doing it in secret, cloaked in a deep and abiding personal shame for 20 years.
The reason I feel up to owning it now is that, thousands of kilometres away in Boston in the United States, there’s a one-woman cheer section rooting for me to own my romance with romance novels in all their wish-fulfilling, society-healing, feminist – yes, feminist – glory.
The driving force behind Hot and Bothered ,a podcast that explores the healing, spiritual and emotional power of the genre, is Vanessa Zoltan, and she’s not just rooting for me, she’s rooting for all closet rom-heads, everywhere.
‘‘It’s just so strange how much people look down on romance novels,’’ says Zoltan, when I express some of my secret shame to her.
I’ve called her to chat about Hot and Bothered, ostensibly, but I have an ulterior motive. I also want to thank her for the opening salvo in Justice for Dragons, the first episode in the podcast, the one where she explodes the myth of romance as lightweight and unimportant ‘‘girls’ stuff’’, and anti-feminist, and reframes it as effective self-care in times of social, political and environmental turbulence, that is fiercely pro-women.
‘‘The patriarchy doesn’t just want to shame you for your body and then try to control it,’’ she says in that episode.
‘‘The patriarchy also wants to make your pleasure and your desires seem dumb. It wants to ruin romance novels for you.’’ Preach it, sister!
Zoltan’s right to say the flak that romance gets is strange. It’s a NZ$2.23 billion industry, which takes up ‘‘the largest percentage of readers and sales of any genre in the fiction category’’, and while she admits it’s not perfect in the diversity stakes, it strives to be and compared to, say, mainstream TV, it is leagues ahead.
There are romances reflecting almost every group, sub-genre and trope imaginable. Want an alien space romp? You have it. US historical romance with African-American leads? Done. Want a series of novels based loosely on H P Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, with supernatural elements galore, a gay primary romance, straight mixed-race secondary romance and inter-species tertiary romance? You need only ask.
With Netflix optioning romance novels left, right and centre, publishers shelling out for more sophisticated covers and flashy marketing campaigns, and the novels popping up on reading and bestseller lists like never before, the genre is ‘‘definitely having a moment’’.
‘‘I think it is because of this despair around the state of love and sex and the patriarchy. Romance is so exciting at the moment. Actually, I think romance novels have always been exciting and interesting,’’ Zoltan says.
In her view, reading and writing romance isn’t just a pastime, it’s practically political dissent and patriarchy-smashing defiance.
‘‘There’s something really radical about the fact that women read these romance novels, and in a world where it has just been revealed again and again that there’s a cabal of men that have organised to silence us, that we keep reading of men to be hopeful about.
‘‘It seems so beautiful to me that we are hoping in the face of despair. I wanted to explore that.’’
And that’s where Hot and Bothered, in which Zoltan asks a group of her most game friends to join her in writing a romance novel, was born.
In each episode, she uses a discussion of what they’ve chosen to write as a way to explore ideas of love and romance in the 21st century. In fictionalising and, in some ways idealising, those ideas, they try to better understand themselves. In short, it’s romance as a kind of guided self-therapy.
Together with bestselling romance novelist Julia Quinn (author of the Bridgerton series and Zoltan’s all-time favourite romance author) they set writing challenges for listeners, too.
Zoltan writes romance ‘‘the way other people do jigsaw puzzles’’, entirely for the pleasure of putting it together. ‘‘I don’t write it to be distributed. I write it very much as a devotional act. It is just a joyful act,’’ she says. ‘‘It’s just get your butt in a chair and do the hard thing the way prayer is hard, the way showing up for our loved ones is hard. These acts of devotion are difficult and I think that is really meaningful to me.’’
To be effective, it’s crucial that romance novels ‘‘don’t skip despair’’. In the current climate, when we have so much to actually despair about, contemplating a way out of it is ‘‘beautifully important’’.
‘‘In order for the romance novel to be good, you have to really write a high-stakes problem that could keep this couple apart, and then you have to figure out a really creative solution in order to get them together in a satisfying way, a way that satisfies both of them and doesn’t undermine their identity entirely.
‘‘Sometimes it’s hijinks despair, like weird kidnappings, or someone is a vampire and the despair is they can’t be together. There’s always the dark place that you have to go to.’’
A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, when she’s not podcasting about romance, Zoltan is a humanist chaplain. That calling is reflected in the podcast, which is a deep well of emotional generosity, patience, acceptance and, overwhelmingly, love.
The show is the emotional equivalent of a vitamin shot.
‘‘There’s an epidemic of loneliness, suicide rates are on the rise, and depression anxiety rates – all these things are on the rise and it’s very much based in technology. That’s very well documented, and part of that is we don’t go to church on Sundays. We don’t turn to each other and shake hands and say ‘go in peace’ to each other any more. We need that connection.’’
To find our way back to it, she reckons we should use any ‘‘texts that we want’’ to help us ‘‘get better at living’’.
If that includes stories like The Scotsman Who Swept Me Away, The Duke and I (coming to a Netflix profile near you soon), Rebel, Red, White and Royal Blue, or even Harry Potter, as her first podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text does, so be it.
‘‘I think, now more than ever, we need radical imagination. And we need our imagination to be rooted in despair and gazing towards hope. Romance novels force me to do that, again and again and again.’’
I have a long way to go before I can own my romance with romance as openly as Zoltan, who freely offers to share her writing efforts with me, but I’ll get there one day.
For now, don’t ask me where you can find my romance writing, it’s momentous enough that I’m even admitting I’ve done them.
That’s OK, Zoltan says. In fact, with its long and noble tradition of pseudonyms, that’s romance.