In the last few decades, writing about romance has become big business — from Fabio-adorned paperbacks in the 90s, to self-published e-books like “50 Shades of Gray” in the early 2000s, to more than 39 million print copies of romance novels sold in 2023 alone. Even Portland public libraries said they’ve seen the number of romance novels being checked out double since 2018.
OPB’s Crystal Ligori talked with Lily Chu, author of “The Takedown,” and Katelyn Doyle, author of “Just Some Stupid Love Story,” at the 2024 Portland Book Festival.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Romance novels have become a huge part of the book publishing business in the last few decades and they’ve evolved a huge amount over that time – from Fabio-adorned paperbacks in the 1990s to the self-published e-book juggernaut “50 Shades of Gray” series, 15 years ago. Last year, more than 39 million print copies of romance novels were sold. And it’s not just book sales. Local libraries in Portland said the number of romance novels being checked out has doubled just since 2018.
We’re gonna bring you a conversation today from the 2024 Portland Book Festival. OPB’s “All Things Considered” host Crystal Ligori talked with two romance novelists. I’ll let Crystal take it from here.
Crystal Ligori: I think it’s fair to say that we are officially hot and bothered for this genre. [Audience laughter] It’s a genre that’s also almost entirely female dominated. The books are written about women, by women and for women. So it is my pleasure today to share the stage with two such women: Lily Chu and Katelyn Doyle.
Lily Chu loves ordering the second cheapest wine, wearing perfume all the time and staying up far too late reading a good book. She writes uplit fiction set in Toronto with strong Asian characters. Her latest novel is titled “The Takeown.”
Katelyn Doyle is a writer based in Los Angeles. “Just Some Stupid Love Story” is her debut rom-com, though she also writes [as] the USA Today bestselling historical romance novelist, Scarlett Peckham. Thank you both for being here.
[Applause]
Alright, so let’s get cozy. We’re gonna start off with a big question. Why romance or maybe, specifically, why rom-coms?
Lily Chu: First, I wanna say that one year I went as Fabio for Halloween because I found a fake chest and I had pillows for biceps. [Laughter] So I’m a long-time romance reader and lover. And why rom-coms? Because there is no other genre that is so hopeful and so joyful. The entire point of romance is that, at the end, people will be happy – however they determine their happiness. But they will be together at the end. So whatever they go through, I’m OK with it because I’m going to have that satisfaction at the end, which, I don’t know about you, but in my day-to-day life, I do not get a lot of. I don’t have a lot of days where I wake up like, “I know it’s gonna happen at the end of this day and it’s gonna be perfect.”
But when I pick up a romance, I know that I’m gonna go on that journey with them, I’m going to fall in love with them, they’re gonna fall in love with each other and we’re all gonna be happy at the end. And for me, in particular rom-coms, I don’t know, I think I just grew up … like Bridget Jones just imprinted on me as something that, romance is so funny, love is so funny, people are so funny. It just seems like the perfect match for me. I’m not super into angsty-angsty books. I have high anxiety, so when things start going bad, I’m like, “I don’t know about this!” But throw in some slapstick and I’m pretty happy.
Ligori: Katelyn, what about you?
Katelyn Doyle: I came to rom-coms by way of historical romance, which is the genre I first wrote in and the genre that I started reading when I was like 9, highly inappropriately. My grandmother had like 500 Fabio-covered paperback bodice rippers, hidden on bookshelves throughout her home. And she would be reading them and we would not know what she was reading because she had these cloth bound covers that she would put them in. It was like, oh, I’m innocently reading this Laura Ashley thing, why could I be blushing and giggling all the time? Of course my cousins and I would rip the Laura Ashley chaste cloth-bound cover off and then find these absolutely just riveting images of undressed people. [Laughter] So I started reading them in secret and then it really stuck. I mean, how could they not?
So, yeah, I read millions and millions and millions of historical romances growing up. And then I continued to read them when I was working in horrible, stressful corporate jobs and they were just like a break from my brain – we were on the moors or the cliffs of Scotland and people were tearing each other’s clothing off. And I was like, yeah, thank you. [Laughter]
I had a dream of writing one of my own. I tried it and it took a lot of tries, but it eventually worked. I did that for a long time and I still do that. But I was also just consuming so many contemporary rom-coms that were so absolutely brilliant and it was like, wow, these jokes they can write because they don’t have to use like, “thee” and “thy.” So I thought it would be really cool to not have to consult the OED every time I had a punch line. And I started writing my first book, “Just Some Stupid Love Story,” and it was just really fun and liberating to set it in Los Angeles [or] in Florida instead of, you know, Cornwall. [Laughter]
Ligori: So, Katelyn, what are you able to include in a modern day love story that you couldn’t include in a historical romance under the Scarlett Peckham pen name?
Doyle: Text messages. [Laughter] Yeah, the wonders of modern technology are very nice. People have showers. They have bathtubs. It’s really awkward when you’re trying to write a love scene in a historical book and it’s like, well, they’ve been on the road in Scotland on horses for six days; yeah, get under the covers, sure, I’m sure that’s great. But it’s funny because I feel my contemporary books are actually kind of less spicy than my historical books, so it has nothing to do with sort of our notions of progressive sexual politics or anything like that. It’s just literally more like, “oh, we have a car.” So they can just be driving and having a tense argument, as opposed to a historical book where they might be doing that in like, a carriage.
Ligori: Lily, I know before you started writing romance novels you wrote in a sci-fi genre – is that correct?
Chu: Yes.
Ligori: So I think the beauty of sci-fi or fantasy is you get to write characters that you wanna see in the world, characters that maybe you missed seeing as a reader. In both “The Takedown” and a lot of your other stories, your two main characters in “The Takedown” – Dee and Teddy – are both biracial, Chinese Canadian, and they both explicitly talk about being biracial. It’s not something that’s hidden and [they] talk about the impact that has on their lives. So what part of the process, when you started writing in this genre, was explicitly something you were like, I wanna write characters that I wanna see?
Chu: Yeah, I’ve always written racialized characters … except in “Paranormal,” no one seemed to notice. It was kind of like an Asian person was the equivalent of a vampire or something. It was just like an aspect, it was very… The shift, when I moved to contemporary rom-coms where suddenly that became the key point of the book, was very odd to me. And I don’t actually understand why. I can’t explain why, but I’ve always wanted to write characters that reflected people I knew, reflected my experience.
When I was growing up, there were not a lot of fiction books about Asian people. I can actually remember the three that I read. One was a YA historical fantasy [and] one was this bodice-stripper about the Tang dynasty that I remember fondly to this day – again, way too young. And then “The Joy Luck Club” came out. I saw that movie, I read the book. I was like, “Whoa!” Then I saw the movie and bawled. I called my mom, bawling. She’s like, “What’s the matter with you?”
But when you don’t see yourself in the books, you don’t really realize at first what you’re missing. Because when I was growing up, I grew up in a small town. Mine, I think, was probably the only biracial family. I didn’t have any vocabulary to talk about it. You didn’t talk about race back then. You didn’t talk about how people were different back then. I tried to explain this to my kid and they talk about it all the time, they talk about their sexuality, they talk about race, they talk about gender, they talk about all their different identities. And I’m like no, you don’t get it, that’s not what you talked about back then, so you didn’t know how to talk about it.
Even now, when I write the books, I’m still working through and thinking about, how do I talk about it, how do I think about it? And it will shift and it has shifted. So I’ve always wanted to write [about] people like me, in the hopes that other people don’t have that experience I had growing up of never seeing themselves, never seeing their experience, having things happen to them and think, “Was it me? Was I too sensitive? Maybe it was me, it’s because I’m weird. Definitely because I’m weird.”
And I’ve had people DM me or email me, to say, “Oh, it was nice to see myself. It was nice to see my family there. I had that experience, and it was great to actually know someone else also had that and it wasn’t me.” Someone emailed me, she’s in a mixed marriage and her daughter is biracial. And they’ve never talked about her daughter’s experience as a biracial child of a mixed marriage. So she read the book, she gave the kid her book and then they talked about the daughter’s experience. She’s like, “I didn’t know she had been going through these things. I didn’t know these have been things that she’d think about, wondering about.”
So I think, hopefully, by writing these characters, it can start more conversations and have other people feel seen. That was a very long, kind of meandering answer.
Ligori: No, but you sort of answered my follow up question which was just sort of the response you’ve gotten from readership saying, “Oh, hey, finally there’s someone who looks like me in this story.”
I think it was interesting … Doing some of the prep, I went on Reddit and went down a lot of different threads, a few different ones where explicitly the person writing said, “I’m looking for a lead female who is Asian. I want the male character to be Black and I want a second chance romance to be … ” And then someone hopped in and said, “All right, here are three books that you might be interested in.” That just blew me away. I think this genre has that flexibility that a lot don’t, where it is like fantasy and sci-fi, you just get to choose your own adventure when you’re writing.
Before we get too far, I wanna talk about something that I’m just gonna call “writing the cringe,” or “writing the hurt” – these scenes that, as a reader, you get this pit in your stomach and you’re like, oh, how is this gonna end? How is this gonna resolve? I had anger, I had sort of like the pit in my stomach going, oh, why is this? And I feel like I could relate. So how do you write the hard stuff, the sections that leave the readers looking for that resolution? And how do you close that loop?
Doyle: I like to think that one of the reasons we like romance novels is that they’re kind of like thrillers of intimacy. They are taking human relationships and that’s oftentimes the things in the books that are really getting their fingernails under our skin. I think, actually, the moments that are painful or cringe are kind of what gives a lot of books in the genre their backbone. So I lean into kind of looking at uncomfortable themes because we’re trying to really get into the depth of the person. That’s because you have to know the person in order to really attach to their romantic journey, like these two people are falling in love with each other, so they have to know each other in order for us to really go on that journey with them and to learn who they are, as well.
I think kind of knowing what their demons are, knowing what causes them pain and kind of knowing what their primordial romantic wounds are can be really helpful. So in the case of the passage I read, Molly has this deep-seated issue with a father who is detached and often unloving. And that definitely plays into the relationship she’s building with Seth over the course of the book. And her, let’s call them attachment issues, and instincts to pull back at exactly the wrong time.
So I wouldn’t say it’s fun to write those scenes, but I do think it’s meaty. It’s what you wanna kind of dig your fingers into when you’re trying to craft a full person.
Chu: I love that “thrillers of intimacy” phrase – that is so good, that so concise and perfect because that’s really what it is. I think, for me, it’s more selfish because I’ve been in those meetings, I’ve been in those situations, and I’m mad. And I couldn’t say anything at the time because I had rent to pay and you kind of try to do the coded soft language of like, “Is this the direction we wanna go? Maybe we should parking lot that one.”
But now, I’m free to write what I think, and I’m mad. I’m mad we have to sit in those meetings. I’m mad we have to deal with people’s hypocrisy when we can all see what’s going on, and you don’t have the power in that room to say anything because you need that job and you can’t risk them being mad at you. You can’t risk losing your position. You can’t risk a whole lot of things, even though it hurts. You probably should, but you can’t because we live in a capitalist society and we need to pay for things with money that we get by trading our labor.
In that particular scene, I think I was probably working through some things. I think clearly I am still working through them. But I was mad, I still am mad. Even when I read it over sometimes, I’m like, “Pfft, suggestion box.” [Laughter]
Ligori: Very articulate, yes. I feel like setting this in this world of a person who is a DEI consultant, that feels very current. There’s probably tons of people in this audience who’ve worked for or are working for companies who are doing this kind of work, both in earnest or on the surface level – that’s happening at Celeste. I think, because of that, there’s everything from the microaggressions to outright racism woven throughout. Can you talk me through your decision to use this specific DEI theme for this book?
Chu: Yeah, I do wanna say it is a romance and it’s fun.
Ligori: It is fun.
[Laughter]
Chu: I know I’m going on a lot of rants here. But I swear it’s about love and stuff, and this is part of the stuff. Some of this is so serendipitous. The decision to make Dee a DEI consultant is because in the book before this, “The Comeback” – which is about a lawyer who falls in love with a K-pop idol – one of the characters is a DEI consultant. And of my editors is like, “I would like to know more, but I would like a character who does this for a living.” And I was like, I also would like a character that does this for a living. I worked in corporate comms for over 20 years, so I worked for equity departments, I’ve worked with consultants, I’ve worked to help implement [and] communicate about programs like this. I’ve been in many meetings on many things.
I have friends who are DEI consultants and I think the work that they do is very difficult. I think it can be very … Like in “The Comeback,” she’s really struggling because every day she has to go in, and try and change people’s minds. You have a lot of people who are very willing to learn and change, and they kind of see the point. And you have a lot of people who are like, “I don’t see the problem,” because for them it is not a problem. So, we’re in 2024 now. I was writing that book in what, I don’t know, 2021 maybe, because of how publishing goes, so it was a while ago. And it was kind of as we were coming through, yes, suddenly DEI was so important. It was the most important thing your business could do – “You don’t have a DEI program? We’re boycotting you.” Where has all that gone?
If you actually look at the studies, if you look at what’s going on, there are many places that it either just died quietly or it exploded. And I really feel for people in those environments who kind of got sold a bill of goods. They’re like, oh things are gonna change. And DEI, I think a lot of people think of it like, oh it’s only helping marginal people. It’s helping women, people with disabilities or whatever your marginalization happens to be. No, it helps everybody. It actually makes for much stronger businesses, makes for much stronger communities, when you have different people who are free to say what they think, free to bring in their experiences and free to talk about it.
I think it is actively harmful to get rid of these programs. But back then, everyone was super excited about it. Everyone suddenly was hiring consultants, everyone had a task force. And then what happened? So a lot of businesses changed, a lot of businesses took it seriously, they really made an effort. They understood why it’s important that people feel that they’re treated fairly. And a lot of businesses just stopped doing it because now there’s the economy to worry about, now there’s other things to worry about.
I thought it was an interesting perspective from Dee’s perspective, and Vivian – Vivian is older management. They’re at different points in their careers, Dee is still very like, “Yes, fightin’ the good fight. I’m there, I’m making changes.” And Vivian’s like, “Yeah, we tried.” Depending where you are in your career, you go up and down. For any career, you go up and down through those peaks and valleys of like “Yes, I’m in there. I’m doing what I was meant to do.” And then some days you just go into work and you’re like, “Ugh, God, it’s Monday every day of the week.”
So I wanted to call attention to the importance of this kind of work and what a lot of consultants have to go through … in a very fun, escapist, romantic way. [Laughter]
Ligori: So yes, let’s talk about the fun, the romance. I wanna talk about romantic tropes. “Enemies to lovers” is one that I feel like feels familiar to a lot of people that’s in everything from “Taming of the Shrew” to “You’ve Got Mail.” Both of your books have this “will they, won’t they” tension woven in. I’d love to know what are your favorite types of romantic tropes to write and also just to read or watch as a consumer?
Doyle: My all time favorite romantic trope is the “only one room” at the intro. Yeah, also called the “only one bed” trope. I think I wrote one once that was like the “only one spot to sleep on at the floor of the old mill in the snowstorm” trope. [Laughter] Yeah, anytime there is intense forced proximity and our lovers must suddenly find themselves navigating the tension of a shared sleep space, I get very delighted.
I also really love “second chance romance,” as we call it. This book is about two high school sweethearts who part very, very viciously and then find themselves reunited. That is just dear to my heart and I look for it everywhere. I don’t know, there’s something about reading a story where the intimacy is already kind of established, and we kind of get to learn the past and it’s intermingled with the present, that I really like. So yeah, those are my two faves by far.
Chu: I also love “first proximity” so much. I thought I really loved “enemies to lovers,” and then I realized I actually love “rivals to lovers.” So yeah, when either they have competing goals or the exact same goal, and then they have to work together, but they really dislike each other, but they respect each other – I love that one.
And I just learned about micro-tropes! Has anyone heard of micro-tropes? [Audience murmuring] OK, so I learned about this when someone was like, “what’s your favorite micro-trope?” I’m like, “I don’t even know what that is.” So micro-trope is the little mini-beats. So one would be, he’s backing up and puts his arm around the back of her seat, or the hair tuck behind her ear, or like …
Doyle: Forearms!
[Laughter and clapping]
Chu: Forearms! Or baking cookies, like she loves chocolate chip cookies, so he goes to her favorite shop and buys her chocolate chip cookies. I realize I’ve just said all of them are him doing things for her, but it can go the other way as well, whatever your pairing is.
So I’ve been thinking about micro-tropes a lot but just because it was new to me and it was something … like I’m a magpie, I’m like, “ooh that’s exciting.” I was thinking my favorite micro-trope is the hair tuck. Do you guys remember that zombie movie that came out years ago with I think Bill Murray and Woody Harrelson? “Zombieland” I think it was. And the guy, he’s like, “All I want is to tuck a girl’s hair behind her ear.” I think I imprinted on that. [Laughter]
Doyle: I’m a big fan of the forehead kiss. It’s so cute. It’s adorable. My editor was like, “You have four forehead kisses in this book. You can’t.” [Laughter]
Ligori: I feel like this is maybe a good time to transition to talking about the romance versus when it gets a little more spicy. So in my Reddit thread, I found out that it’s called “closed door” versus “open door,” sort of a “And then I had a night I would never forget,” versus something more explicit. I feel like you both write sort of different styles. I feel like Lily, your book is more closed door romance and [Katelyn], yours is more open.
How do you choose how far to go?You said, Katelyn, you feel that specifically this rom-com is maybe a little less sexy than some of what you’ve written before, but [I’m] curious how you decide how much to show the reader?
Doyle: So I think a lot of it has to do with the theme, the setting and the world of the book, if you will. Sorry, I was gonna say like the theme and the characters; it’s like, yes, that is a book. Thank you, you’re describing it well. [Laughter] No, but my historical books are wildly spicy. They kind of are a little bit on the cusp between like erotic romance and historical romance, let’s say. And there are two different series: one is set around a Georgian era whipping house, like a [swish, swish noise] …
[Laughter]
Ligori: I mean, I don’t know, but I know now.
Doyle: Yeah, but no, that’s an actual thing. People used to go to these BDSM kind of kink palaces, be whipped and enjoy other forms of adult entertainment. So there’s like this secret club at the center of the book and the themes of these novels are very much about finding the truth about yourself via sexual exploration, finding power in ways that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to have. They’re very feminist.
Obviously, in the 18th century, women didn’t really have any power by law. So one of the things I was interested in when I started writing was, OK, how do these women get power in this world? What would flip the script? So the first book, there’s this very rich and powerful Duke who is secretly a submissive, and he falls in love with a gardener who turns out to be very dom. They fall in love and there’s power exchange, blah blah blah. Which is just to say that if these books did not have a lot of sex in them, you would be like, “what are we doing here?” You can’t take us into the whipping house and then say like, “ … and scene.” [Laughter]
And then I have another series that’s inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft. It’s another one set in the Georgian era, but it’s about women who are fighting for rights. Part of the way that they fight is by monetizing their very bad reputations. So one is a writer. She writes memoirs that kind of tell the sordid tale of her past. She has a very bad reputation and she makes a lot of money selling that reputation. Another is a sex worker who auctions herself off in order to raise money for the cause that they’re all mutually supporting. Another is an artist who does portraits of like harlots, in the style of the Holy Virgin. So they’re using their scandalous reputations in order to gain power from that. And again, they’re all living in this milieu of sexuality and that’s just part of the world of the book. That’s part of what we’re trying to explore, whatever.
They’re very hot, steamy books, but the hot steam is for a purpose – it is! [Laughter] Tell your mom that when you’re reading it. Moms like steam, you can ask my mom. Anyway … I get lots of text messages. But so yeah, those books are highly, highly open door. I think that those sexual arcs are very much front and center in the way the characters developed, the way the plots developed. They’re not just there for scenery or for your spank bank.
And then in my contemporary books, it’s set in a lighter world, I think, like these deep, deep, deep themes of feminism, power and things are not so much at the forefront. It’s much more about the emotional journey of the two characters. They have sex and that’s fun. And we get to see them in the bedroom in ways that sort of show us what their vulnerabilities are, show us how they’re connecting and show us the deep in the chemistry that you see when you see them talking or you see them interacting. But it’s not like the sex itself is so central to the story that we really need to spend a lot of time there.
Chu: I don’t have books in whipping houses. I don’t have books in whipping houses and I see there’s a real lack in my stories now. [Laughter]
So I do very closed doors. I mean, basically you see making out and then once it starts getting heavy, yeah, it is a shut scene. I also write slow burn and both of those are because I prefer seeing the development of the relationship through the characters before we see anything sexual. I like the lead up and the anticipation. And I’m gonna say something that sounds weird, I wanna give them a little bit of privacy when it comes down to that. I’ve been living with these people for a long time. So I’m like, you know what? I’ll let the reader’s imagination, which is probably way hotter than anything I could write anyway, just take it on from here.
My mom also listens to my books … and the idea of her listening to anything I’ve written that involves the word “thrust,” is just so emotionally and psychically devastating to me. [Laughter] My kid also reads my books. And my very first one, “The Stand-In,” I based the parents’ meeting scene on my own parents' meet cute. And my kid, she read it and she’s like, “Is this Grandpa and Popo?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” She’s like, “Oh my God.” And all it was was them looking at each other. So I think she would just curl up, melt up and die if there were books on the shelves of hot and heavy sex that her mom had written.
Ligori: Katelyn, in “Just Some Stupid Love Story,” it’s written in first person with dual narrators, so this question is kind of a two-parter. First, in your book, Seth – the lead male character – is essentially a golden retriever type of man is how I would classify that. Permanently upbeat, positive, madly in love with Molly regardless of how she treats him. Was it exhausting to write from that perspective? And then second, how do you go about outlining a book and deciding which scenes get told from which person’s perspective?
Doyle: OK, so I am not like a nice person, which is not to say that I’m unkind,mean or anything like that. But Seth is an uber, uber, uber, sweetheart; nice, nice, nice guy. And it was almost like cognitive dissonance at times, being like, how would Seth respond to this? What if he were just full of grace, charm and warmth? It was a real stretch for me as an author. [Laughter] No, Seth was a blast to write just because the heroine of the book, Molly, is so much closer to my natural voice.
Ligori: And yeah, me too. I was like, Molly, I get this. Seth, I’m not here.
Doyle: Molly’s not an invention. But yeah, Seth is just so the diametric opposite of her and it was really, really fun to try to write just this sunshine person who just wants everyone to be happy, wants love and friendship, and without any sort of cynicism about that. The challenge was not making him too cloying. I also wanted him to come across as a person you would actually wanna have a conversation with and interact with in real life. So it was like, how can Seth still kind of be funny and sexy but have this great inner radiance of positivity and joy? So you can read the book and decide if I pulled that off. But yeah, it was really, really fun to write in his perspective and just be very wildly outside of my own more cynical way of seeing things.
And to go to the second part, how to decide which part of the outline to put in which character’s perspective – I think that’s always a question when you’re writing, unless you’re writing like a single protagonist. And to me, I think the rule of thumb is usually who has more to lose in the scene or who’s feeling more vulnerable. For instance, in the beginning of the book, the book opens at a high school reunion. We’re in Molly’s perspective because Molly is the one who hates high school reunions and cannot believe she’s there. And she’s just walking in, like, “what the [beep] is this?” She’s just very deeply unhappy to be there. Seth would just be like “hey, cool” … Well like literally the second scene from Seth’s perspective opens with the line “I love [beep] like this.” [Laughter]
But first, I wanted the book to open from Molly, seeing this world and being so just like put off by it. And then I wanted Molly to see Seth and be horrified that he’s there, and I wanted that to be in her perspective. Then I wanted to shift, so that Seth can enjoy Molly being horrified to see him. So yeah, it’s just these little moments like that – what’s more fun, what’s more dramatic, who has more to lose?
Ligori: I feel like the opposite side of the same coin to Seth is Dee, because Dee, throughout the majority of the book, has this very what I’m gonna call toxic positivity. Very toxic positivity vibes and Molly is this romantic pessimist, but both personalities are really shaped by their mother’s experiences. So how does family dynamics play a role in how your characters are shaped, how you’re thinking about that through line?
Chu: Yeah, I mean, we are shaped by our families and I think when I’m writing … These are characters in their early 30s, but I think when we grow we have a few stages of punctuated equilibrium, right? Like when we suddenly shift the dynamic with our family or we have the opportunity to shift the dynamic with our family, when you are a kid and you wanna do everything with your parents. [Then] you turn into a teenager and you’re like, “oh my God, gross, don’t talk to me, don’t be near me.” And then when you leave the home, you move in with your partner, you leave for school or something like that. Those are all opportunities to change the dynamic with your family, how you perceive each other and how you treat each other.
But, family is so strong. I know when I go back home – and I still say home, even though I’ve lived in my own home for decades, I still call it home – we all fall back into our old habits, our old routines and our old jokes. It’s like it’s a railcar that we can’t get off. And then I think when you’re in your 30s, you have another chance. Early in that, you’re kind of in opposition to your family and your parents. When you hit your 30s, you’re like, “oh no, we do have food at home.” Like all the things that you hear your mom and your dad’s, your parents' voices coming out, you’re like, “oh no, I am just like them?” And you have that moment of, “how did this happen?” I was supposed to be my own person and then suddenly, you look at a picture and you’re wearing sunglasses. And you’re like, “is that me or them?” Because you can’t really tell. And you find yourself agreeing about things like, “yeah, brussels sprouts are a good vegetable!” [Laughter] All this kind of stuff, right?
But for Dee, unfortunately, her mom is a goddess of toxic positivity. There’s always a silver lining. Just take a bath, make sure you get enough protein because everything is gonna be OK if you do those things. And if you don’t, it’s kind of your own fault if things go rotten, right? There’s no opportunity for Dee to be her whole self, instead of just the positive side of herself, so she has no opportunity to explore those negative emotions that make being human, being human. So she has hit that point of, am I going to be like this or can I get off that rail? Can I get off that rail and say, “Mom, I wanna be different. I am different.”
You can still love your parents very much, but you can also have that opportunity to be your own self. But who you are is still shaped by that family dynamic for good or evil, and then I think we all still kind of do end up a little bit … I was just at my parents' house a little while ago and I was fighting with my dad about the same things when I was 17. And I was ransacking my mom’s closet because all that stuff’s back in style. I was like, OK, yup … So it begins. [Laughter] Family is just such a core, integral part of who we are. For me it has to be explored through the books, because my books are about people changing. And a lot of that has to do with changing the dynamics and your reactions to the strongest relationships in your life, which I think for many people are their families.
Doyle: So, do I have anything to add to that? Because you’ve said it beautifully. I agree with all of that. I’m gonna use the train car metaphor, very good. I guess an aspect of this that is explored deeply in my book is when we’re kind of mirroring these dynamics that we grow up with and kind of can’t escape them, for better or worse. How does that play into our romantic relationships? Like how does the way that your parents love or don’t love, or withhold, or hurt each other, impact the way that you see romance, and attachment, and love, and family?
So in this book, Molly comes from a divorce. Her parents divorced when she was in high school very, very bitterly. Her father left her mom. They were in financial straits. The mother completely imploded emotionally and put a lot of that onto Molly, which she goes to therapy for and apologizes for it later. But it was just very, very, very traumatic for Molly to watch her parents' relationship and then to sort of be the forgotten child when her father moves on. Whereas, Seth comes from a blissful union in which the parents just love each other so much and it’s just one completely enmeshed family. They all just love each other and are supportive. And it’s like, wow, no wonder Seth is the way he is.
Molly’s relationship with her mom is really important in the book because she’s at once trying to model herself as the antithesis of her mother, like she doesn’t wanna get hurt in the way that her mother was hurt. So she feels like she’s outsmarting vulnerability by pushing people away or dating people she knows she won’t fall that deeply for. And at the same time, kind of leaning on her mother for a lot of the love that she’s not getting romantically because she’s putting distance between herself and other people. And there’s a little bit of attention that they navigate in the book, where she’s like, “oh, my mom’s so silly,” but then she also really needs that connection in order to sort of heal the parts of her that are causing her to push away nice things coming her way.
Ligori: One thing that I think is huge in this genre is how many folks are accessing this literature via an e-book or via an audiobook. So, Lily, I think it speaks to the popularity of the genre when you have actors like Phillippa Soo who played Eliza in Hamilton on Broadway, and John Cho doing your audiobooks. I would love to hear how you think about having your work translated into an alternate kind of media?
Chu: Well, when they’re doing it, it’s really great. [Laughter] I feel 100%, very, very, very happy. It was different. You kinda have to separate yourself. You really have to trust your narrator, that they’re going to get it right. I talked to Phillippa before she did it – that sounds so awesome, such a name drop, but I swear it was like one phone call, that’s it. But I really felt like she understood because she’s also biracial. So she understood a lot of the themes of the book without me having to explain the nuance to her, which was fantastic. And I feel she just really captures the voice.
But that being said, it was an amazing opportunity to see how people read who are not me, because when I’m writing, even when I’m editing and everything, I have nuance on certain words. So in my head, a line will read a certain way. I didn’t realize I did that because, I don’t know, I just never … like I’m not in people’s head when they read a physical copy of a book, so I don’t know. But it’s something like, “The black cat sits down.” It could be the black cat sits down, or the black cat sits down, or the black cat sits down, so the emphasis on different words gives a line a different meaning. But in my head, the focus was always the black cat, not sitting or anything like that, right?
Then I would hear Phillippa, the narrator, go through it and read it, like, oh, I actually didn’t even think it could be read that way. And it was so interesting that what, to me, was like a simple descriptive line or a certain line, could be shifted through tone in so many different directions that I had not anticipated. Which made me think like, oh, so when readers reading this, they too are bringing in all of their own how they read and how they perceive words, and even your feelings about certain words and certain things into that text that I had not planned on or could even consider, because I’m only me.
So it was such an interesting look into what readers think. But that being said, I listened to it once and that’s it. Hearing my own book is very hard because you’re like, “oh, why did I say that?” And it’s done, like that thing is done and dusted, and out the window. I can’t make changes and that’s the hardest thing because nothing’s ever perfect, but then as you learn and grow as a writer, you’re like, “Hmm, too much description. Why did they do that?” There’s just changes I wanna make, so it’s just like self-flagellating, whatever. I have to listen to the book, but they do a great job. They do a fantastic job. That’s all … that’s like me.
Ligori: Do you change after, because Phillippa read the very first book you wrote and then has continued in subsequent books. After that first reading, were you’re like, “I should tweak it a little bit for the next time if someone’s gonna be reading this”?
Chu: Yes. So I do an audio read now. I’ve always kind of done it, but now I really focus on it. I would avoid a name that has too many S’s. I would avoid a name that ends in an S. I would avoid a lot of Ps because that popping of a P – I have sound sensitivities. So there’s just some things like, oh God, why? So when I’m going through now, I am looking at the text and I’m thinking of, how is that going to sound? Is that gonna be soothing? Is that going to be a nice sound or is hearing that name 8,000 times over the course of the book just going to drive someone bats?
Ligori: So no Peter Peppers as your next character?
Chu: Oh, my God, never, never.
Ligori: Katelyn, in your book, Molly is a screenwriter who writes rom-coms. So do you see this book being turned into a movie?
Doyle: I think anytime you ask any author ever, “would you see your book being a movie,” you’re like, “uh-huh, yes.” Also, “here’s my agent’s address, please send the check soon.” [Laughter] Yeah, I would love it if it were adapted. Actually, if I had my druthers, I think it would make a good series because it takes place over the course of five years and it follows five couples. So there’s kind of a big ensemble cast and it would be fun to have some space to sort of play with that over time. But heck, I’d take a movie. Well, I guess, if offered.
Ligori: Who would play the two leads in a movie?
Doyle: OK, obviously Adam Brody would be Seth. I’m very mad that … What is that show that just came out on Netflix? “Nobody Wants This.” I’m very sad that he’s already playing a romance hero in that show because I feel like he’ll have less availability to be cast in mine in the future. But no, literally, I took the name Seth from Seth Cohen from “The O.C.” His last name is Rubenstein and there was a boy named Ari Rubenstein I had a crush on in 5th grade, so Seth is the combination of those two people. Yeah, and then I always liked the idea of Molly being played by Aubrey Plaza because she has a very sort of cynical, hard to love but easy to love energy.
Ligori: I have multiple young Gen X or young millennial friends and coworkers who are huge fans of the romance genre. There’s even a brand new bookstore in town that is just dedicated to romance novels, which is incredible. So why do you two think there’s been this resurgence and interest in this genre? A big question.
Chu: I think for me, it goes back to what I said in the very first question of hope. We haven’t been going through the funnest of days and years for half a decade. We saw a huge, huge drive in romance, especially like in the pandemic, because people want that certainty at the end. There’s so many kinds of romance, so you’re gonna have your dark romance, you’re gonna have your paranormal, your romanticy, your rom-coms. Like you said from the Reddit thread, there is romance for everybody under the sun. And it’s so nice to be able to know that you can find that thing that you’re looking for, that’s gonna make you happy for a few hours and you can just put all the problems away. You can be like, “OK, Molly and Seth, here we go.” And you know at the end, you’re going to be happy. It’s just, it’s nice to be happy. It’s really nice to just be like, “oh, I feel good.” It’s a great feeling.
Doyle: I agree with that. I also think that there has been something that the publishing gods actually gave us deliberately, I think, which is rare, for an author to be like, “oh yes, the publishing gods, whom I love.” [Laughter] But I think around – oh gosh, when was it – like 2016, 2017, they began to put books that people had long read in secret, like my grandmother with her Laura Ashley cover, covering Fabio’s delightful chest, books that had always had a large … I think the line is always like romance was always a billion dollar industry, but it was one that people were not proud to say that they read. They weren’t really going to talks at book festivals to discuss romance. It was just sort of like everyone’s dirty little secret. And then publishers started putting different covers, particularly on contemporary romance books. So instead of it being just like a hockey player with his shirt off – which God bless those are still out there [Laughter] – now, it’s like a cute little drawing of him and her, and there’s a pond, and it’s really cute, and we can read it on the subway.
So I think the packaging and positioning of romance, kind of post “50 Shades of Grey,” when it was sort of when people began to realize there was this huge appetite for the genre and it could be more part of the cultural conversation, instead of just this like redheaded stepdaughter of the publishing industry that makes a lot of money but no one really wants to talk about. I think that really allowed people to be like, “Hell yeah, I like romance novels. This is great and I want to tell my friends about it.” And there’s so much of it and it really gave people just more confidence to kind of be like, yes, these are great, smart, awesome, life-affirming books. And I read them and I love them.
[Applause]
Ligori: Well, we’ve officially talked for an hour. Katelyn Doyle and Lily Chu, thank you so much for your time.
[Applause]
Miller: That was Katelyn Doyle and Lily Chu, talking to Crystal Ligori at the 2024 Portland Book Festival from Literary Arts.
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