![]() ![]() My favourite romcom is When Harry Met Sally so I do enjoy a ‘friends to lovers’ scenario, but it’s also witty with snappy dialogue and Billy Crystal making a woman miaow in bed. I like real obstacles: the terrible coincidence in Rosie Walsh’s The Man Who Didn’t Call the limits posed by Will’s attitude to his disability in Me Before You the mad wife in the attic in Jane Eyre the girlish mistake of refusing a proposal in Persuasion. Perhaps my problem isn’t with love, but with romance a much more contrived hearts, flowers and happy endings sort of place. ![]() I actively hate simple love stories with manufactured obstacles and I definitely hated Fifty Shades of Grey (which was in no way a love story, but marketed as one). I understand that, since Shakespeare, there’s been a set formula to the love story, but this can be taken to extremes. It’s just I don’t like it when love stories are packaged as romantic fiction or women’s fiction, given candy pink or baby blue covers, and characters who have little depth or motivation beyond the ‘meet cute’. ![]() I don’t object to a love story, in fact some of my favourite books are love stories. My objection is to categories and putting things in boxes. ![]() However, I’m also that annoying person who writes outside the boxes on forms, resists the Census and ticks ‘rather not say’ if there’s an option to do so. I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of romantic novels on the whole, not as a genre anyway. ![]()
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