A Literate Rant

I have admitted I was a pretty big snob about literature. I either read literary fiction, some kind of nonfiction (usually histories or historical biographies), or YA, where I would indulge my passion for fantasy and love stories. I mocked my mom and grandma for reading romances. Romances were dumb, I sniffed, pointing my little elitist nose up in the air.
And then something changed.
I left my first college because I was suicidal and I realized that if I stayed there, one of my attempts would probably wind up being successful. So I moved home for awhile. When I'm deep in Depression Mode, I tend to stay up all night and sleep all day. One night, I had nothing to read and I was bored, so I went down to our basement where a lot of my mom's books were kept. I dug around for awhile, looking for something that wasn't a "romance." I found Fast Women by Jennifer Crusie, with an innocuous cover with a white teacup and a red lipstick stain. It didn't look like a romance, so I read the back cover and the book sounded pretty interesting. So, I took it upstairs to read.
I devoured it. It was smart, funny, and interesting. I kept going back down to my mom's books in the basement, finding more titles by Jenny Crusie -- all of them without the cheesy bodice-ripper-looking covers that made me cringe. But every one of the stories were smart and funny, I frequently would laugh out loud reading, and they were sexy without being embarassing or corny. There were no throbbing rods, no heaving bosoms. I was hooked, so I started hunting bookstores for more of her books. At some point I realized that her books were considered romances, but I argued that they weren't "real" romances, they were romances for smart women.
One night my depression kind of exploded and I tried to kill myself. My dad took me to the hospital and I was admitted in the psych ward for the night. When I got out, my parents took me to my mom's apartment to stay, and I promptly showered and curled up with one of my favorite Crusie's, Welcome to Temptation. I started to laugh reading some of the funny dialogue, and it was so amazingly comforting to be able to go to this lovely world Crusie had created.
So eventually, I started losing my snobbery. I started reading other romances. Mostly they were paranormals and I went through a phase where I read every romantic suspense Mariah Stewart had written. I have finally dove into the historical pool and I have found some seriously awesome stuff. I started to lose my embarassment of being seen in the romance aisle of the bookstore, I have started to stop stressing if a great book has some completely ridiculous cover.
This process has been hastened by my realization that "literary fiction" is not always better written, or smarter, than romances.
Michael Ondaatje used to be one of my favorite authors. I still love The English Patient and Anil's Ghost, they are excellent stories, written in a fantastic, interesting style. However, I'm kind of over worshipping Ondaatje as a writer. A couple of years ago, I saw that he had a new book out -- Divisadero. It was about these two sisters who lived on a farm or a ranch. One of the sisters had a limp, the other sister had a sexual relationship with the young man who worked for them -- until one night, the father busts in and finds the lovers and all hell breaks loose.
That's the first section of the book. It was great stuff.
The second section started with the young man from the farm/ranch, older now, and he's doing something sketchy involving a poker game. I never really understood if he was cheating cheating or if he was counting cards or what, but he won a game and then he and his group all had to scatter for awhile. Then the sister with the limp runs into him. Then somebody wants him to play poker for them, and he refuses, and they drug him and beat the shit out of him, and the sister with the limp is trying to nurse him back to health. Then the third section starts. It starts off with the story of the other sister, who's living in France, in some guy's house, who she is studying and writing about. This sister is also sleeping with some Gypsy guy. And then the story veers off into the Gypsy guy's past, and then it may go into the story of the guy the sister is writing about. And then it ends.
And I threw the book at the wall.
I mean, seriously, what the hell?! How you end a book and not finish the freaking story? What happened to the ranch-hand guy? Did the sister with the limp ever tell her other sister about seeing the guy again? Did the sister finish her book? What. The. Hell?
Now, not all romances are perfect. Far from it. But I have never read a romance that just ditched the major characters halfway through the book. But, yet, romances get zero respect, and anything considered "literary fiction" is immediately deemed to be better than anything genre fiction -- and romances are considered the bottom of the barrel of genre fiction.
It's such a goddamned crock of shit.
There are a lot of theories about why this has happened to romance: Because romances are made by and for women, they are "less than." Because romances focus on emotions, relationships, and sex that is positive and not degrading to anyone. Because romances focus on the happiness -- the happily ever after of the couple -- when, basically, happiness is not cool, not valued.
I think it is because of these things that romances should be valued and appreciated. In a world that devalues women and in a society that sees women as varying degrees of whore, it's important to see women in healthy relationships, where female sexuality is healthy, important, and natural. It's empowering to hear women's voices. I love that.
For more on how important romances are, check out Beyond Heaving Bosoms : The Smart Bitches Guide to Romance Novels (Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan) and Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Romance Novels (Sarah Wendell), and the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books website: http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/.