In August of 2021, I couldn’t read. I’d just had a miscarriage—my second within six months—and every time I picked up a novel, my attention would splinter, the words disconnecting from one another, nearly incomprehensible. I complained about this to a friend. “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “It’s like my brain has changed. I can’t even reread books I love.”Article continues after advertisement
She asked what I was reading. I was attempting the new Ishiguro.
“Have you tried…romance?” she asked.
For my entire adult life, I consumed almost exclusively literary fiction. As an English Literature major, my idea of a light read was P.G. Wodehouse. To me, books were (are!) sustenance, so much more than entertainment; many hold the weight of religious texts. Especially as a writer, I read books not just to learn about other lives and worlds, but also to learn how to write. I didn’t think I was being judgmental by excluding other genres, I just read for a very specific purpose—one I assumed romance could not fulfill.
But I was desperate, and so we walked over to one of my favorite Chicago bookstores, Women and Children First, and my friend bought me a starter romance book: Beach Read by Emily Henry. I had been reading the first 20 pages of Klara and the Sun for two weeks, but I finished Henry’s novel within 24 hours.
