Watch out! Beware! Danger ahead!
UNCOMFORTABLE FEELINGS MAY HAPPEN!
Warning.
Warning.
Warning.
Code Red.
Do Not Enter or you might get your feelings OFFENDED!
You.
Have.
Been.
WARNED!
When I was a child, I got my books from the library’s traveling bookmobile. Choosing what to read was simple, really, because there wasn’t much to persuade me to choose one title over another. There were no pictures on the books to catch my interest. Stories were hidden under sturdy, nondescript covers in colors ranging from brown to green to maroon, and shelved simply by reading levels. There were no internal illustrations (after age 9 or 10) and only short plot descriptions inside the cover. I choose what to read by the title and a quick scan of the interior pages. I gradually became familiar with authors and genres and occasionally asked the librarian for recommendations based on what I’d read and liked previously. But that sort of inquiry was rare—as a desperately shy kid, I never spoke to strangers, even the kindly old librarians who stocked the titles and drove them out to my country school twice a month. Better to just grab something before the woman threatened me with actual conversation.
Without beautiful covers, enticing blurbs, or reader reviews to set up my expectations in advance, every book lay before me a mysterious treasure-trove of setting, characters, events yet to be experienced. Every book was undiscovered territory. Every book was both a risk and a thrill. Every book held the potential to change the world as I knew it. I had no expectations regarding story or characters or quality. I had only anticipation.
My early experiences checking out library books impacted me in two significant ways. First, this access to community library books rather than privately-owned books made it easy to transition later to digital readers. Though I eventually came to appreciate owning physical books, in part for the way they look shelved together in a room, and for their reassuring heft while gripped in one’s hand, and for the way the pages flutter smoothly at the cut edge as I pull my thumb across them, and finally for the artistry of the glossy covers, those visceral experiences have always been secondary to the more intrinsic value of the letters that lay on the inside of the book, spread across the pages unraveling like a thread winding its way into a strange, magical universe. So I first “owned” books as experience, not as material objects. Library books always have to be returned, so they’re never so much physical possessions as they’re experiential possessions. Still to this day, reading takes place in my head, not in my hands.
Second, on personal reflection, over the years, I must have read a lot of books I didn’t particularly like—books consumed and forgotten like bland vanilla wafers, or stale candy found under the bed ten months after Halloween. I don’t remember abandoning stories midpoint much during those early reading days, when my sole source of new stories was the lending library. I probably read every book available all the way to the last word on the last page, maybe even more than once. It was a long two weeks between bookmobile visits, and the check-out limit was strictly restricted to seven books. I read fast and without judgement. I couldn’t be fussy, too fastidious, too exacting. I remember once, the day after a bookmobile visit, bingeing on five Zane Grey novels in one day when I stayed home alone with cramps during middle school. I had to pace out the remaining two books in my stash for almost two weeks until the bookmobile returned. If the staff didn’t change out the selections on the shelves, sometimes the new pickings grew mighty slim. Consequently, I read two-three grade levels ahead by fourth grade and had exhausted most of the titles long before I moved on to the large city high school and the entire city library.
When someone reads like that—five books in one day—she experiences complete immersion. The reader submits to the words, to the sentences, to the story, to the control of the writer’s skill and art, to the invented world between those utilitarian, musty covers. But she also constructs the story using the words on the page. Whatever happens inside those covers, happens in the reader’s mind. And what happens can stick with surprising resilience. I didn’t just read without judgement, I read without a filter. Characters and events come to life in a way unique to each reader. That’s why readers struggle to see a favorite book made into a movie—the actors cast never match the characters created in the individual mind. And despite always reading ahead of my age level, which meant I had to have encountered “inappropriate for my age” books early on. I don’t ever remember complaining about the content of a book to a friend, a teacher or the librarian, even when it shocked me. Some people need to jump off cliffs and out of planes to feel alive; readers only need to open the cover of an unknown book to feel a thrill.
Memories of what I’ve read blur with memories of what I’ve lived. Decades after I read a single-paragraph description in a 11th grade history textbook, I am still haunted by the cold terror of being shuffled by Nazis into a gas chamber alongside German Jews; I never called out the teacher or the school district for the discomfort of making me suffer that image. Two decades after reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in college, I still recall the awkward unease and sense of violation Offred feels lying underneath the Commander while he attempts to impregnate her (me); I didn’t try to get my professor fired for assigning the book, or demand the university ban the book from the curriculum. The darkest, most shocking contents of books I’ve read just stick, and stay with me forever, and it’s no one’s fault but my own. I understand, even though I’ve never personally, physically experienced the events in the books, I’m well aware, that reading about something violent or strange can be intellectually and emotionally traumatic. Yet, I continue to read without a filter, in part because that’s how I read, and in part, because I read to be transformed from what I was into what I might be. And I don’t blame anyone, even the writer, for my transformation, for stripping away some bit of innocence, for making me know.
Now that I have so much choice in what I read, I try to remain conscious about what it is that first catches my attention on covers, in blurbs and reviews when I select which books to read. My options are a cornucopia to what I had as a child. I have more unread books in my personal library than I had access to check out in all the years I depended on that bookmobile. I access a much larger public library. I buy a lot of books. I continue to add more titles to my to-be-read (TBR) pile daily, despite reading 3-4 books a week. These books are no longer hidden behind plain wrapping. These days, I can’t ignore (nor do I want to) covers, blurbs and reviews, but I do shop for books with a heightened awareness that these shopping tools can be as detrimental as they are helpful in the process of selecting a book to read. Simply, these tools can misdirect me from the path of a great reading experience because they filter out books that I assume I won’t like, books that might change how I see the world. And that concerns me.
The old adage to not judge a book by its cover is more relevant today than ever. Covers are ads created by publishing companies or graphic artists, not writers. And if indie writers do design their own book covers…the result can be cringe-worthy. A poorly or badly designed cover can hide a fantastic book—especially when it comes to choosing inexpensive ebooks. It goes without saying that awful books can have gorgeous covers. Even blurbs prove problematic in choosing a book. Sometimes they tell too much; sometimes they don’t tell much at all; sometimes they are poorly written, even when the book itself has been carefully crafted and edited. I’ve read a lot of convoluted book descriptions in which the writer or an editor or agent tried to pack a 100,000 word story into five lines. And don’t even get me started on reviews. Many of the 5-star ravings gush like a broken water main, while the 1-star rantings usually tell us more about the reviewer’s general state of unhappiness than they do the quality of the book. Still, there’s a resulting, alarming development pertaining to the publishing industry’s response to negative reviews complaining about the content in a book. Books, especially romances, now all seem to come with warnings (like bottles of poison).
Intended for mature audience only. Sensitive material. Sex! M/F Sex! M/M Sex! F/F Sex! M/F/M Sex! F/M/F Sex! Swapping! Orgies! Spankings! Cheating! Floggings! Figging! Pegging! Anal! Oral! Humiliating Insults! Nonconsensual Intercourse! Pretend rape! Real Rape!
In my literature classes, from elementary through graduate school, I read pretty much everything I was assigned. Granted, there wasn’t the explicit sex, language and violence in books of old, as there we see today. But that’s true for all media—film, television, drama, music. My professors and the canon were the quality filter when I was a student, but that didn’t mean they eliminated tough or shocking reads. A lot of classic fiction has disturbing content, including rape, incest, violence, and murder, and it comes in varying degrees of explicitness. I don’t remember hating anything I read (with one exception in grad school in which human excrement was presented as erotic—I mean, that’s just plain unhygienic). I only remember having favorite books. I generally move past the experience of any book that doesn’t resonate for me, that bores me, that irritates me. So despite reading some pretty horrifying (at the time) things over the years, I survived and read on. In fact, reading toughens me up for a real world where all these fictional things happen.
When I was a student, I accepted that every assigned book had some merit and it was my responsibility to recognize and appreciate it. If I disagreed with the professor or another reader about a book, it was due to my critical analysis about what that book was saying overall, not in the book’s inherent value or virtue, or in whatever possibly shocking information it contained. I don’t remember thinking I’d really like Oedipus Rex better if it had turned out that Jocasta wasn’t Oedipus’ real mother. Literature reflects real human experience, and personally, I’d rather experience incest via fiction than through real life. The benefit to me as a reader (and to society as a whole) is that I understand and empathize with victims of incest without actually having to suffer personally the physical, long-lasting damage of having been involved in an incestuous relationship. The benefit to me as a reader is that I understand that incest actually exists, and that it’s damaging, instead of just trying to live out my life in a falsely-constructed Disney-sanitized world that makes me narrow-minded and indifferent to other people’s suffering. The benefit to me as a reader is that I don’t look at victims of incest (or rape, or racism, or sexism) and label them weird and/or different from me. Reading helps humanize them and their situation.
Reading works like Oedipus Rex helped prepare me for more explicitly disturbing work, like Sapphire’s Push. I am still haunted by the scenes in that raw book. They were heartbreakingly potent. I can never—nor would I want to—unread that book. Push is as much a part of my worldview as Pride and Prejudice.
Aristotle called this experience catharsis, the releasing of repressed psychological stress by feeling the emotions of both fear and pity for the characters while watching a play (or reading a book). Fiction about potentially shocking or unpleasant things—whether in a book, a stage play, a film, a television show, or even in music—helps us identify and control underlying, emotional impulses and drives using our mind to imagine and experience something from within the safe boundaries of story—by watching it happen to someone else whom we feel connected to, like the character. It’s hard to fully benefit from reading, if one selectively chooses in advance not to read the books that might have us facing unpleasant scenarios or situations through the experiences of the characters. That’s why warnings on books displease me. Adult romances are not marketed to children, so why the warnings? It suggests that adults are censoring the world for themselves as if they are still children.
Like most people, I read popular fiction to escape from reality. To think though, that reading for pleasure is just a fantasy escape from reality is to ignore how literature, including popular fiction, is created and how it impacts us. Even the crappiest, silliest fiction is written by writers who are raised and shaped by the culture around them. The experiences and beliefs they carry and use as the basis for the stories they tell draw from the culture in which they are raised. As readers of those stories, we either have our own life experiences and perspectives reinforced or challenged. If we only read stories that reinforce what we already think, then what is the point of reading yet more “new” stories that reinforce what we think? Reading should be about the expansion of ideas, not their reduction, even when it’s just “mindless entertainment.” It might be mindless, but it’s also influential. This phenomenon is why we should read books by people unlike ourselves—male, female, white, black, Native American, Hispanic, foreign. Without a broad perspective, our own understanding of what’s true and right is locked behind the rigid limited lines of our own life experience. Only reading things that are pleasant or in agreement with what we already think is like locking one’s mind up in a type of idea jail.
After decades now of perusing pretty covers, and blurbs, and reviews, when shopping for books, I still try to approach my choices with an open mind. But I admit I’ve been lazy lately. With increasing frequency, I have been reading romance for narrower and narrower experiences—candy for my sweet tooth, like a new release in a series by a favorite author (which is good), or a title with a favorite trope (give me a stranded-alone together on a spaceship in some galaxy far far away/in a log cabin during a blizzard/on a boat in the middle of the ocean, enemies-to-lovers story, and I’m blowing off a much-needed night of sleep for that catnip). It’s just entertainment, we say. Doesn’t count for personal development, right? But I’ve acknowledged that whether I’m reading nonfiction, literary fiction or genre fiction, I tend to immerse myself, remember? That means the world inside the book either reinforces my worldview, or modifies it, or shocks it.
If I look over my more recent book shopping habits, I have to face up to the fact that I’ve become increasingly prejudiced. As a heavy reader of romance these past five years, I’ve developed some aversions to certain types of stories. For example, I will read ménages, but I tend to read them as ending in HFNs (happy-for-now) rather than HEAs (happy-for-ever). It’s difficult enough to sustain an intimate relationship with one person; make the relationship a threesome, and I’m imagining all the unmanageable complications.
I’m not keen on romance novels with pregnant heroines either. Nothing wrong with these stories per se (they are, certainly, other readers’ catnip, which is fantastic for some talented writers who serve these tropes), but if I read a blurb telling me the contemporary heroine is pregnant with some unimportant-to-the-story guy’s baby at the start of the book but then she meets Mr. Right on page ten, I’m probably going to pass. I can’t help but obsess about the upcoming 18 years of problems. Why didn’t the heroine just end it (abortion is legal, right)? Is she forcing the biological daddy into being an unwilling daddy? How’s he going to play a role in the story and the eventual kid’s life? Every kid deserves to know their biological parents, if it’s possible, and every guy deserves a chance to know his own child. These issues distract me from enjoying the story. I can’t stop worrying about the kid and his/her biological father’s relationship. I guess that why some writers just kill off the baby daddy before the story even starts (a sort of deus ex machina at the start rather than the conclusion of the story to address these logical questions). Still, if the heroine is pregnant, it means the biological father died recently, and then how ready for a new relationship can she be, really?
Finally, as a pragmatic romantic, I’m pretty skeptical of second chance love stories between the same two characters. I’m going to need a lot of careful world-building and set-up to believe a second run at a relationship is going to end more successfully than a first run. That storyline though is the favorite trope of other readers, and a significant romance fantasy confirmed by the number of old high school sweethearts hooking up on Facebook. Personally, I tend to be relieved I’m not with my exs, rather than nostalgic about the so-called good times. If they had been so perfect for me, and me for them, then why, exactly, did our relationships fail? But that’s fodder for another post.
I tell myself that my “aversions” or reading preferences are predominantly situational. I still read just about everything out there—historical, paranormal, contemporary, western, futuristic, steampunk—if it’s romance, I read it. I read erotic to sweet. I’m open to almost any romance story set anywhere and at any time a writer can imagine. I think a lot of romance readers, who tend to be insatiable in their reading, are more open-minded and therefore more open-hearted readers to start with—after all they’ve had to overcome the “shame” of reading romance in a society that belittles the activity at every opportunity, but they still do it. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed, with the increasing frequency, that problematic trend in book blurbs and reviews of warning readers off with all the potential “triggers” they might encounter in the romance book. I get why these warnings are included in the book’s description. I’ve read 1-star reviews complaining that the reviewer never would have read the book if she’d known it would have adultery in it, or nonconsensual sex, or a ménage scenario. Still, I think it’s unfortunate that readers’ negative reviews have spurred publishers and indie writers to start labeling every book with warning declaimers that sometimes run longer that the blurb.
Hey, you might be thinking, the warnings attract readers too, those who are seeking stories with adultery, nonconsensual sex, and/or ménage scenarios. This is true. But I suspect, based on the wording in the blurb, that the information isn’t provided to attract readers; it’s provided to prevent complaints. It’s provided to protect a reader’s sensibilities or feelings. But wait, you might then exclaim, there are readers who have been traumatized by real experiences of rape and violence and we should do everything we can to protect them from reliving that trauma. Frankly, I’m not so sure about that idea. Maybe I never should have had to read about the atrocities of the Holocaust because I’m German-descent and it might make me feel shame for that part of my Western heritage (over which I had no control)? Maybe I should never have had to read a dystopian novel in which women were turned into personal whores (based on information in the Old Testament) since I’ve experienced male sexual aggression firsthand, or because the book seems to criticize Christianity and I was raised Christian, or because it’s women who become the victims in the story, and I’m a woman? Maybe I should never have read Bel Canto because I’ve been held up—rather traumatically—by gun point, as are the characters in that book?
Or maybe, the ideas, situations and events in these works are exactly why I should read them. When I taught Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to my students at the end of last semester, some of them felt violated to have to read a story that included the idea of incest. Some of my video-playing, HBO-watching circa 2016 teenagers felt violated while reading a 2500-year-old play about two characters who’ve unwittingly committed incest, and who never appear alone together in any kind of intimate scene in the whole text. What my teenage students really felt was shock that such an event happens. Knowing that incest exists and people commit it and they are punished for it? That seems like pretty important knowledge to me. I get their shock—I felt the same shock, even after I was well aware of incest, in reading Push. And I needed to feel that shock.
We need to build walls of knowledge between our fragile psyches and the brutality, the strangeness of the world, and books are the best tools with which to construct it. We’re living in a world in which parents list their children’s happiness over all other hopes, even over integrity, resilience and inventiveness. But they aren’t understanding what it is that truly makes us happy. We’re living in a world in which people seem to expect that nothing bad is ever supposed to happen to them, and when something inevitably does, no matter how minor, they react with shock and the belief that someone else should suffer for it. We’re living in a world in which people who are victims of aggression or crime seem to remain victims forever. PTSD is real, but not everyone who experiences trauma develops it. Clinical depression is real, but surely it’s not suffered by the quarter of the entire adult population who are taking Xanax or its ilk. If 25% of Westerners are clinically depressed, how and when the heck did it happen? We seem to be living in a world in which someone discovering a cruel message on their pizza customer receipt is equally as harmed as someone getting cheated out of their life savings. There doesn’t seem to be a scale of offenses from mild to severe anymore. People seem outraged and offended by even the slightest annoyances. So, why am I surprised when we have readers who are personally offended by words on a page? Probably, because I think readers are more intelligent than the average person and should just know better.
In love and romance stories, especially, feelings and intimacy, by their very nature, present the risk of abuse and offense. Even the best people with the best intentions can hurt us, abandon us, wreck us. Every time a character goes on a date, every time s/he get married, every time s/he trusts someone, s/he risks rejection and the resulting pain. It’s hard to construct a love story that doesn’t have some kind of potential for rejection or shock, including cheating and kinks. These kinds of stories can teach us to see the world through others’ eyes and experiences. It can help us understand why someone might be ready for love, even while she’s pregnant with someone else’s child. It can help us understand why sex between three people might lead to emotional involvement and trust that can endure. It can help us see why two individuals who weren’t ready for a relationship ten years ago, now are, and that we should be open to second chances. Certainly, gay, lesbian, and mixed race romances have helped breakdown cultural barriers and beliefs about who can love whom. Fiction can legitimatize the experience of difference. Romance stories help us see how forgiveness and acceptance—I accept your kink if you accept mine—are key to deep and everlasting love. Seeing love survive, grow in shocking and unexpected places and ways can only be a positive influence on the world.
Okay, so the blinders I’ve let develop regarding what I choose to read over the last five years have started to nag at me, because these blinders are nothing more than personal prejudices about what a great romance should say about love. I’m not reading with an open mind if I’m choosing to not read certain types of stories at all, especially if I guide my reading by warning labels put up to encourage self-censorship over what I read. Book-banning continues to be a serious problem in the world. Let’s not act as our own censors while we shop for that next book. Romance readers are not children. The primary way we learn and understand what happens to other people less fortunate than or different from us is through reading, through stories. If we filter out all the stories that might shock us, might breakdown and restructure the way we see the world, might cause us to experience catharsis, then we might as well stop reading anything new. Sadly, we might not be able to recognize love in all its manifestations in the real world.
I’m committed to read against my slowly developing biases this coming year, with the intent to break them down. I’m going to read some second-chance romances. I’m going to read at least one contemporary pregnant heroine book. I’m going to skim over covers, blurbs and reviews, and especially the warnings posted for the books I choose to read and resist their call for or against a story. I’m going to read without fear. And if I encounter something shocking or “triggering” in the books as I read, I’m going to stay conscious that I’m just reading words on a page, and words cannot hurt me. I simply refuse to censor what I read based on “trigger” warnings. In fact—I may use these warnings to seek out books that will likely make me uncomfortable, but also might transform me from what I am into what I might be. I’m going to read with more anticipation, and less expectation in 2016. I hope you’ll join me.