The central characters of Frida Slattery As Herself, Ana Kinsella’s debut novel, are the eponymous Frida, 23 when the novel opens, and John Reddan, five years older. Both live in Dublin. Frida loves acting but has never had a significant role, and didn’t even get into drama school. John is a writer-director who has just had a play put on at a “real theatre”. What’s compelling about Frida is not necessarily what she says, thinks or does, but the way she is, and a large part of that lies in the physicality Kinsella writes into her. Frida, we learn, is “addicted” to the theatre. “Every time she came off stage she felt like a prizefighter. The curtain fell in the community theatre and there she was, rolling her neck, bobbing on her feet.”

However, Frida’s acting aspirations are going nowhere. She eventually confides in her friend Catherine, who at university was a much more successful actor in student productions, but now has a proper job (“She owned an espresso machine and Frida lived in a bedsit”). “I just want something to happen,” Frida says. Catherine introduces Frida to John. They meet in Kehoe’s pub, then he asks Frida to accompany him on an errand which turns into a long, mystifying walk through Dublin, during which he interviews her. She asks in return what he is working on: “Are there any roles for women in their early twenties?” To which he responds, “Is that how you think of yourself, Frida? As nothing more than ‘a woman in her early twenties’?”

Something sticks for both. John, we learn slowly, is taken with Frida – with her looks, but also that she’s comfortable telling him what she thinks. Frida is preoccupied with John, perhaps for the possibilities he represents. “Was it possible to have a crush on someone you didn’t want to kiss? What was that called?”

The 12 sections that follow see them working on projects together, as well as living in different cities (London, Los Angeles, New York) between 2005 and 2021. They take a one-woman show to secondary schools around Ireland, driving in John’s car and staying in budget B&Bs. Some work is more glamorous: by the time both are in their 30s, Frida does a stint in a popular US television show, and John is a successful theatre director with a play that goes to Broadway. They date for a while, split up, betray each other in different ways, and orbit each other’s careers from afar.

In a way the engine of the book is romantic – will they end up together? – but while this keeps the plot ticking over, the magic of their connection comes, pleasingly, in their creative collaboration. Frida in particular is a delightful character because her spontaneity and self-doubt make her feel so authentically real; John, a thinker, is perhaps slightly less interesting. Nonetheless, the most enjoyable parts of the book are when they are together, writing, improvising, rehearsing, experimenting. Their symbiosis makes sense: Frida is an actor who can’t quite see her own charisma, John a director who realises his best material comes from the people he works with, and particularly from Frida. Inside the reliable pull of a well-written love story, Frida Slattery As Herself is a skilful, unusual novel – clever, ludic and unexpected in the way of good theatre.

The opening section of I Want You to Be Happy is an excellently droll and surefooted description of a man and a woman meeting in a bar, trying to make conversation over the music and flirting vaguely. They establish that she is 23 and that he is 35. All the specifics – the name or location of the bar, the music, even the names of the couple – are for now redacted: “After a while, the twenty-three-year-old woman raised her voice and, referring to the thirty-five-year-old man, asked her short-haired friend: ‘How old do you think he is?’ The short-haired friend surveyed the thirty-five-year-old man’s face; thought for a moment. ‘Forty?’ The twenty-three-year-old woman snort-laughed. ‘He’s thirty-five.’”

Jem Calder, like his protagonists, is bang on trend. His 2022 short story collection, Reward System, was widely admired; this debut novel employs a factual and affectless prose of the sort you’d find in Sally Rooney or Vincenzo Latronico, with a fastidious attention to the surfaces of the world that suggests Nicholson Baker or Bret Easton Ellis or even early Don DeLillo humming in the background. As that opening suggests, these figures are, or could be, representative.

In some ways, they are. Not much happens. Boy meets girl. Girl has hopes. Boy has drink problem. Boy and girl are happy for a bit, then they aren’t. Tale as old as time. But what’s fresh about it is the book’s precise attention to the environment in which such a story now takes place. It’s all rental ebikes, vapes, meal-replacement protein shakes, Slack channels and push notifications. The characters lightly cyberstalk each other, they agonise over whether they’ve responded to texts too quickly or too slowly, and their difference in age is even calibrated by their texting style (the older Chuck uses capital letters and punctuation; the younger Joey generally doesn’t).

A passage such as the following one, for instance, ostensibly tells the reader nothing very much at all but in fact tells them quite a bit:

Walking home, she put in her earphones and streamed a new album by her favourite singer-songwriter: the album’s release having been brought to her attention via push notification earlier that day. This new album wasn’t as good as the singer-songwriter’s older ones – or else Joey wasn’t in the right mood for it – so she navigated to the singer-songwriter’s artist page and played the songs she already liked. Listening to these familiar songs, she sang along under her breath, alternately joining in with the lead or backup vocal lines wherever they required least effort.

The characters here live both in and out of the physical world, and everything is so mediated that reality itself comes to seem secondary. One of them jokes that cigarettes are a herbal alternative to vapes – they have stolen the gag from a meme they’ve seen. At another point, which seems to me a very nice touch: “In the morning she showered while he slept. For a tired moment, she thought it was funny that his shower gel smelled like him, before it clicked that he obviously just smelled like the shower gel.”

In such a world, who’d want to make art? Actually, both our protagonists. Joey is a would-be poet working as a barista; Chuck is a would-be novelist working as an advertising copywriter. Chuck’s work in progress is called Paradigms and it’s just as terrible as the title suggests. The plot hinges on it.

Calder’s flamboyant flatness of style, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, means that when he does unroll something a bit flashier, you really notice it. He loves a noun turning into a verb (“axised”, “pendulumed”, “elevatored”), or a verb disappearing altogether, and the odd Joycean portmanteau appears as if to underline that the style is a choice rather than the symptom of a limitation: “Outside now, the nightwide sky with nothing in it save for the glittering anti-collision lights of planes in low airspace”; “Old detached farmhouses, their sunrise-facing sides lit alpenglow pink.”

He’s good on rain, too. We meet, for instance, “a low, mizzling rain that appeared to be precipitating spontaneously at person level in mid-air rather than falling from any higher source”. Later, Joey and her friends “waited in the faint, aerosol-like rain for 15 minutes”. And, perhaps best of all: “On her walk home it rained a kind of rain Joey always referred to in her head as ‘wet rain’.”

In some ways, under the surface, this is a warm and quite an old-fashioned sort of thing: a proper novel. Its protagonists have inner lives; their feelings are important to them, and us. The turn-and-turn-about third-person narration allows Calder unobtrusively to make clear the disjunctions between how they see each other and how they see themselves, and to watch their attempts to mediate their personae in the digital spaces in which we now half live. Man, you find yourself thinking: it’s tough out there for singles.

Given that novels are routinely touted as the new version of some previous chartbuster, Almost Life will doubtless be heralded as One Day meets Normal People for a sexually fluid generation. Featuring romantic indecisions spanning many years and an unironic take on the youthful psyche, it already reads as familiar.

The novel opens in Paris in 1978 with a moment of affinity on the steps of Sacré-Coeur when students Laure Boutin and Erica Parker first glimpse each other, and then teases the reader with more than 400 pages of will-they-won’t-they misunderstandings, ecstasies and sorrows. This is a tale of missed chances, of the choices we make, and of queer and bisexual love in different social climates.

With her “slightly terrifying aura”, uncompromising Parisian Laure “hadn’t expected to meet an angel on the basilica’s steps”. Erica, six years younger, gauche and beautiful, presents as the nervous English tourist she is. Supposedly straight, she is spending the summer in France before starting uni, whereas Laure is a queer seducer who treats her conquests with comparatively little emotion. Until Erica swings into view. Coup de foudre.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave is an award-winning children’s and historical novelist, and Paris in the late 1970s is rendered convincingly but at a length which, along with an abundance of drunken philosophical discourse, mars the pace. Erica is soon pulled into the boho-on-a-budget world of Laure and her intellectual friends, with all its art, literature, bar crawls and theorising. The two women are in love, although they manage to taint the ardour with classic youthful paranoia and over-interpretation. Laure is developing a problem with alcohol, and Erica is struggling with sexuality and self-doubt. Now, and ever after, she plays “versions of her life on fast forward, staying, not staying”.

Erica returns to Norfolk, and Laure loses her beloved best friend Michel to a disease that for a long time can’t be diagnosed as the Aids crisis hits. Bisexual Erica knows “she could not live how Laure and her friends lived, at the edges of things … loving Laure would not be simple”. Erica dates men and then a woman at UEA, and one of the novel’s longueurs begins, with inconsequential details and studenty conversations that would have benefited from a severe slash and burn.

The heart of Almost Life is the often thwarted love story between Laure and Erica, and all its joy and brilliant tension lies in the scenes between them rather than in the sections when their separate stories meander along at a maddeningly glacial pace while they write each other occasional letters. However, the obstacles to them being together are real and convincing, avoiding the navel-gazing vacillations of some contemporary sad girl lit.

One of the beauties of this novel is that both women are profoundly real and flawed, Erica with her sometimes egotistical selfishness and Laure with her addictions and inflexibility. Erica, who is “so tangled in her self-indulgent, stupid fantasies, her plots for revenge”, sometimes thinks she is “playing at lesbians with Laure”, and yet she knows in her heart that their love runs much deeper, at a time when homosexual and heterosexual lifestyles were largely incompatible. The path less travelled is not for Erica, and yet her mind never leaves it.

Having made their wavering choices, “this other truth existed, where she and Erica were. Had been, for all these years.” Despite one obvious queer character trope near the end, the novel does become increasingly propulsive: sensitive, sad, multilayered, and a moving examination of true love and passion. Millwood Hargrave’s first adult novel, The Mercies, was an instant bestseller in 2020. This updating of a theme looks all set to become a gen Z hit.

The Ministry of Time opens in the middle of a job interview. The applicant, a nameless British Cambodian civil servant, is in line for a role that involves working with expats of “high-interest status and particular needs”. When she asks where these expats come from, she is told: “History.” The interviewer adds, casually, “We have time travel.”

Listeners concerned about the practicalities of this time-hopping tale will be reassured by our protagonist’s observation that contemplating the physics leads to a “crock of shit”, so it is best not dwelled upon. “All you need to know is that in your near future, the British government developed the means to travel through time but had not yet experimented with doing it.” Her job, then, is to act as minder or “bridge” to individuals removed from their eras and bounced into the present.

Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel straddles sci-fi and romance as it grapples with the climate crisis, colonialism and forced migration, and uncovers the strangeness of our world as seen from the past. It does all this without feeling overly busy or heavy-handed. The narrator is actor Katie Leung, who strikes a smart balance between comedy and seriousness. She is joined by George Weightman, who reads the chapters from the perspective of Commander Graham Gore, a real-life naval officer and polar explorer who went missing during the Franklin expedition of 1845-1848. Here, Gore is catapulted into a brave new world of modern plumbing, online streaming and where the British white male no longer rules the waves.

Available via Sceptre, 10hr 23min

Further listening

Indignity: A Life Reimagined
Lea Ypi, Penguin Audio, 10 hr 28 min
Blending memoir and historical fiction, Indignity begins with the discovery of a photograph of the author’s grandmother sitting on a sun lounger in Italy. Ypi goes on to trace this young woman’s story in an era shaped by war and upheaval. Read by the author and Rachel Bavidge.

Butter
Asako Yuzuki, Fourth Estate, 17 hr 12 min
Hanako Footman reads this hit novel about a gourmet cook who has been convicted of the murders of a succession of lonely businessmen, all of them lured by her home cooking, and who strikes up a friendship with a young journalist.

Opposites attract. He falls first. Coffee shop. Forced proximity. Sports romance. University sports romance. Ivy League university sports romance! Best friend’s brother. Brother’s best friend. Slow burn. Age gap. Amnesia. Wounded hero. Single father. Single mother. Language barrier. The bodyguard. Fake dating. Marriage of convenience.

If this list means nothing to you, you’re not a romance reader. Tropes, as these bullet-point ideas have come to be known, have taken over romance. Those who write, market and read romantic fiction use them to pinpoint exactly what to expect before the first page is turned. On Instagram, Amazon and bookshop posters you’ll find covers annotated with arrows and faux-handwritten labels reading “slow-burn” or “home-town boy/new girl in town”. Turn over any romance title and they’ll be there listed in the blurb.

“They are the easiest way to signpost what a book is,” says Lucy Stewart, commissioning editor for romance at Hodder. “As soon as I say ‘enemies-to-lovers’ in an acquisition meeting, I’ve already communicated so much to a room full of people in just three words: I’ve told them it’s a romcom, what the hook is and where it sits in the market.”

Tropes have always existed in romance, but only in recent years have specific categories developed as a way to categorise, market and even consume romantic fiction, and of course these have accumulated and evolved. A “hot billionaire”, for example, is always popular, though in recent years his style has shifted from Prince Charming to a bit of a beast, kind and generous giving way to reluctant and dangerous. “There’s only one bed” has given rise to “Oh no, now there are two beds”; or if you prefer historical romance, “There’s only one horse”.

Publishers market their authors in this way, and often romance writers will write with particular tropes in mind, but it can be hard to know exactly where to draw the line. “Is love itself a trope? Is motherhood? Is marriage the same as ‘only one bed’?” posted the author Rainbow Rowell on Instagram, in the run-up to her new novel, Cherry Baby.

Or take the new TV show Heated Rivalry, adapted from the novel by Rachel Reid about ice-hockey players on opposing teams who fall in love. It’s fairly obvious that the “enemies-to-lovers” trope is at play here – and “sports romance”, too. But there has been much discussion about the book’s representation of “MLM” (men loving men). Is that really a trope, or simply queerness represented?

You can reduce anything down to tropes – grumpy v sunshine, pride v prejudice – but should we? What does it mean for the way we read – and for the ways we think about art? For tropes are, of course, not unique to romantic fiction. Mystery novels have them; as does science fiction. “The butler did it” is a classic trope.

Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots, now 22 years old, popularised the idea that there are no new stories; and his book drew on a theory of archetypes that Carl Jung developed a century ago. The psychoanalyst believed that some stories were so fundamental to the human experience they were essentially ingrained into the psyche from birth. Tropes exist in all fiction; indeed in all storytelling.

“Anything you read is made of tropes. Shakespeare loved tropes. So did Dickens, Austen – anyone you can think of. It’s all tropes, all the time,” says romance writer Laura Wood. Before Romeo and Juliet’s “star-cross’d lovers” there was Pyramus and Thisbe. Fairytales offered a long line of hot, mean, rich men long before Mr Darcy became shorthand for an arrogant millionaire with a secret heart of gold.

Not everyone is a fan of the way these archetypes have been appropriated for marketing purposes, however. “I completely despair at the way books are reduced to their tropes,” writer and reader of romance Eleanor Vendrell tells me, “as if a menu of characteristics is in any way representative of a story.” But aren’t they simply a way for readers to navigate a busy library or crowded online store? More books are being published than ever before, and they have never been easier to access. We are drowning in content: things to watch, things to hear, things to read. We have to have some way of categorising all these words, and all these ideas. “Tropes might make me pick up a book,” another romance reader tells me, “but I’ll stay or go for the writing.”

“As soon as you start thinking about them, you realise you’re being fed them all the time,” a book publicist says. “If you click on a film on a streaming service, for example, it’ll tell you the tropes in the description so you know what to expect before watching.” There are, apparently, more than 36,000 different codes on Netflix – Small Town Scares, Twisted Christmas, One-Weekend Watches – to ensure the viewer is always presented with just the right content at just the right time.

In literary terms, though, it’s mostly romantic fiction that has come to define itself by tropes – and to be derided for them, too. Of course, romantic fiction has always been at the frontline of a kind of culture war. “Reading romances”, or even just “novel-reading”, has been cause for concern among the cognoscenti for the best part of 300 years: Mr Collins, in Pride and Prejudice, is horrified that the Bennet sisters would rather read something from a travelling library than hear a sturdy sermon.

Are today’s criticisms really so different? These books are derided as un-literary, formulaic. And what has happened to the thrill of stumbling on an indefinably brilliant novel by chance? “I don’t think that anyone needs to apologise right now (or ever) for seeking comfort in the familiar,” counters Wood. The world is full of chaos. There has to be room for reading as pure pleasure, for reading as escape. The genre of romantic fiction acts as a kind of playground for the reader. If the same basic plot point can unfold in a thousand different worlds in a thousand different ways, the reader can try a thousand different lives.

“I rarely seek out tropes,” says Stewart. “[But what] I really love to find is a voice that embraces, celebrates and plays with the structures of a romance plot we already know really well.”

“The – wrong – assumption,” she continues, “is that these tropes make romance books repetitive or boring or predictable. Brilliant writing – which exists in abundance in romance writing – knows how to surprise and trick the reader, even while doing something we think we already know. So, rather than feeling dulled when I see a trope in a romance book, I get a thrill out of seeing them coming. Oh, they’re on a road trip in a storm, are they? We are definitely driving head first into an only-one-bed scenario and I genuinely cannot wait to see how we land there … and what happens to the couple once we do.”

If critics fear that trope-based storytelling is a threat to the delight of discovery and surprise, they might think of it as that stormy roadtrip: familiar landmarks, new detours, foreign snacks and lightning strikes. We fear it in the romantic novel most, perhaps, because only the romantic novel leans in. As in the best love affairs, these books and their readers wear their heart on their sleeve.

Asking someone for their favourite trope is a deeply personal question – I, myself, could not have it waterboarded out of me – but there are dozens of forums and message boards where people share their most specific desires. Mostly, those books already exist. Mostly, there are many people who share those dreams, or at least, can help a reader find what they’re looking for.

A trope is to narrative as form or brushstroke is to a painting. It is possible, even usual, to like one more than others. I will always stop to look at a floral still life with big, deep colours and tiny little bugs. I like them old and Dutch. Dragging my mother round the Fitzwilliam Museum, one rainy day last autumn, we stood in mutual incomprehension before an exceptionally beautiful Rachel Ruysch. In vain I pointed out the beetle; the orange; the reflection of the 17th-century sky in the polished surface of the jug. “I think it’s lovely that you love it,” my mother said, generously. “I’m glad it’s here for you.”

Which is, obviously, the only way to approach all art: it’s all for somebody. It’s all here for all of us, in infinite and glittering variety. The trope is a shortcut to delight. Here it is, the thing you wanted. Here is the thing you like best, the perfect book for you: something, somehow, as familiar as a friend, and as shiny as a jewel.

Ella Risbridger is the author of In Love With Love: The Persistence and Joy of Romantic Fiction (Sceptre).

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True romance

Classics reframed for a modern reader, by Sarah Moss and Sinéad Mooney

Billionaire romance
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Four sisters growing up in 19th-century New England long for artistic fulfilment, exciting love lives, new clothes and good food. We meet them at Christmas, fantasising about brilliant futures while knitting socks for soldiers in the American civil war and preparing to give their Christmas dinner to starving refugees. Unfortunately, dreams of fulfilment and glamour contradict their parents’ Puritanism, so the girls will have to catch husbands without appearing to try. Meanwhile, over the garden fence, teenage Laurie is the heir to his grandfather’s immense fortune, and luxuriates daily in exotic fruit and ice-cream, playing his grand piano and fencing. Meg is too old for Laurie. Beth dies young. Jo can’t repress her queerness enough for anyone but a middle-aged German professor who needs help with his boys’ school, but once pretty blond Amy gives up her dreams of an artistic career, Laurie’s wall-to-wall carpets and opera tickets are all hers.

Fake dating
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

Kate Croy needs money. Her secret fiance Merton Densher needs money. They need a plan to enable them to marry. Solution: fake date a dying American heiress. Enter Milly Theale, who is rich, radiant and not long for this world. Kate encourages Merton to marry Milly so that they can eventually live happily ever after on his inheritance. Unfortunately, Merton catches real feelings, and Milly catches on to the scam. Fake dating becomes moral panic in a Venetian palazzo. Awkward, but everyone remains terribly polite, in extremely long sentences.

Friendzone to lovers
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Bathsheba Everdene inherits a farm. Her most reliable employee, Gabriel Oak, saves dying sheep, gives good agricultural advice, and quietly becomes her emotional support. After she rejects his proposal, he does the mature thing and sticks around, saving her hayricks from lightning and being respectful and competent in the background. Bathsheba, meanwhile, disastrously samples the local dating pool. Sergeant Troy is good at swordplay, bad at farming and in love with someone else: a walking red flag in a uniform. Obviously, Bathsheba marries him anyway, with predictably chaotic results. Troy fake-dies after gambling the farm into near ruin, then really dies when one of Bathsheba’s other ill-advised exes goes mad and shoots him. Throughout, friendzoned Gabriel remains loyal, practical and emotionally literate. Eventually Bathsheba realises that a man who fixes stuff and never causes problems is … really attractive.

Sunny v grumpy
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Mrs Ramsay’s daughters dream of “a wilder life”, perhaps in Paris, “not always taking care of some man or other”, but she herself is literally and figuratively married to the English bourgeoisie, and determined to enjoy it no matter how moody her husband and his tedious friends. She has her best epiphanies while knitting and weeding. Unlike many straight women in literature and perhaps life, she has found a way to love men without eroticising power. Mr Ramsay doesn’t notice the flowers she grows or the meals she cooks. She knows that he often thinks he would have written better books if he hadn’t married her, but even so he has “an eye like an eagle’s”, and somehow admiration for his great thoughts fuels her enduring sunshine.

Holiday romance
A Room With a View by EM Forster

Lucy Honeychurch arrives in Florence with her cousin Charlotte. They are meant to enjoy Italy in a respectable way, which means avoiding excitement, physicality, and anything Italian. Fortunately, the unsuitable George Emerson appears – brooding, impulsive and oblivious to social rules. Italy does what it always does in English novels: it causes inconvenient emotion. Lucy faints at a murder, George catches her mid-swoon, and they later share a kiss in a field of violets – an event so shocking that it nearly destroys the British empire at one fell swoop. Lucy, oscillating between desire and decorum, immediately suppresses the memory and flees back to England, where she becomes engaged to Cecil, a man with all the charm and spontaneity of an income tax form. George inconveniently reappears, reminding Lucy that passion, sunlight and honesty exist, even in the home counties.

Rare is the Wuthering Heights adaptation that fails to ruffle the feathers of the Brontë faithful. Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film was criticised for its grit and gloom while Emerald Fennell’s new version, which arrives in cinemas on Valentine’s Day, was described as “aggressively provocative” after test screenings. Perhaps now is the time to return to the source material. In the audioverse, there have already been readings by Michael Kitchener, Daniel Massey, Juliet Stevenson, Patricia Routledge and Joanne Froggatt, though I favour this 2020 edition narrated by Aimee Lou Wood, of Sex Education and The White Lotus fame.

Set in Yorkshire, Emily Brontë’s tempestuous novel opens with Mr Lockwood, the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, visiting his sullen landlord, Heathcliff, at his remote farmhouse where he gets snowed in. Bedding down for the night, he stumbles upon the diaries of the late Catherine Earnshaw, who writes of her love for Heathcliff, an orphan brought by her father to live with the family. Later Mr Lockwood has a nightmare in which the ghost of Catherine begs to be let in through the window (a scene immortalised in song by Kate Bush). The following day he returns to Thrushcross Grange where he asks the housekeeper, Nellie, to tell him about the Earnshaws. Nellie shares a dark tale of abuse, revenge and doomed love.

Wood breathes fresh life into this tempestuous novel, capturing Nellie’s gossipy tone and the early wildness of Catherine and Heathcliff. As circumstances pull these once inseparable youngsters apart, that wild abandon curdles into desolation and discord that is carried down the generations.

Available via Penguin Audio, 13hr 58min

Further listening

Simply More
Cynthia Erivo, Macmillan, 3hr 43 min
The singer, actor and star of Wicked tells of her path to stardom and shares tips on how to stay focused on your goals in a book that is part memoir, part empowerment manual. Read by the author.

The Fathers
John Niven, Canongate, 11hr 16 min
Two new fathers meet in a maternity ward in this satirical novel from the Kill Your Friends author. Jada, a petty criminal and Dan, a successful TV writer, each resolve to make changes in order to do right by their infant sons. Angus King reads.

For decades, the Romance Writers of America (RWA) served as a champion for the mostly female authors of one of the country’s most popular – and denigrated – genres of fiction.

But even as sales of romance novels have boomed in recent years, RWA has struggled, reporting that its membership has declined 80% amid bitter internal battles over racism within publishing, and within the group itself.

On Wednesday, the RWA filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing millions of dollars it owes in contracts with conference centers for hotel rooms its shrinking membership can no longer fill. Since 2019, the RWA’s membership has decreased from 10,000 people to roughly 2,000, according to court records.

In bankruptcy filings, RWA president Mary Ann Jock attributed the loss of the first 7,000 members to “disputes concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues between some members of a prior RWA board and others in the larger romance writing community”, and said the group lost additional members as its annual conferences were cancelled during the pandemic.

Some former RWA members said they disagreed with the idea that “DEI” was to blame for the group’s membership drop, with one prominent romance blogger calling the claim “utter horseshit”.

“It was a retreat from a commitment to equality that caused membership to leave RWA,” Courtney Milan, a romance author and former RWA board member who had been a prominent advocate for making the group more inclusive, told the Guardian.

One of the RWA’s original founders, in 1980, was Vivian Stephens, a pathbreaking Black romance editor at Harlequin. But Stephens was eventually pushed out of her job, and as the romance authors’ trade association grew over the years, its membership became disproportionately white. In 2018, an estimated 80% of the RWA’s 10,000 members were white, compared with only 61% of the US population.

In the early years of the Trump administration, RWA leadership had focused on diversity efforts, reckoning with the association’s failures to serve as an advocate and networking space for romance authors from all backgrounds.

Black authors and other authors of color spoke out about the racism they had faced within the group, which did not give one of its many internal “Rita” awards to a Black author until 2019. A Christian inspirational romance about a Jewish woman falling in love with a Nazi officer at a concentration camp was nominated for a Rita award in 2015.

But some white authors were unhappy with the new focus and pushed back, accusing authors of color of bullying and unprofessional behavior over their public discussions of racism.

In 2019, Kathryn Lynn Davis, a white romance author, and Suzan Tisdale, another white author who worked with Davis, filed an ethics complain against Milan, accusing her of “cyberbullying” and damaging their careers for a tweet thread in which Milan, writing as “as a half-Chinese person”, criticized the depictions of Chinese women in Davis’s Somewhere Lies the Moon. Milan called the book a “fucking racist mess”.

In late December 2019, the group’s board of directors announced it was formally censuring Milan “for conduct injurious to the organization”, and said she would be suspended from the group for a year, and barred for life from holding any further leadership positions. This set off a social media firestorm among authors and an eventual leadership meltdown.

Despite efforts by new leadership to address concerns over racism and rename its awards to honor Stephens’ role in founding the organization, RWA controversies continued. In 2021, the RWA gave an award to a historical romance novel with a protagonist who took part in the 1890 massacre of more than 300 Lakota men, women and children at the Battle of Wounded Knee. It later rescinded that award.

As membership dropped, so did the group’s membership revenue, and, after struggling to win members back and gradually laying off all of its employees to save money, RWA was forced to file for bankruptcy, it said in its court filings.

RWA estimated that it owes roughly $3m to the hotels that host its once-popular annual writers’ conference and about $74,500 in cash to other creditors. It plans to use its bankruptcy to eliminate the debt to the hotels, and instead institute a three-year payment plan that directs all of the organization’s disposable income to the hotels and other creditors.

Carollynn HG Callari, an attorney for the nonprofit, wrote in an email on Wednesday that the RWA expects a “swift resolution” to its bankruptcy restructuring, which “will not impact its day-to-day operations” of providing training and other resources to its members. The group “is not going out of business, as some others have made it sound,” she wrote.

Callari wrote that some hotels were willing to renegotiate their deals with the RWA in response to “the financial realities of this women-run nonprofit organization”, but that others were not, forcing the group to have to file for bankruptcy relief.

As the RWA has struggled, other romance organizations that explicitly prioritize diversity have grown. The Steamy Lit conference, first held in 2023, focuses on creating a welcoming environment for romance readers and writers of color, founder Melissa Saavedra said. An estimated 1,900 people are expected to attend its August conference this year.

Reuters contributed reporting

A few weeks after Emily Henry’s second romance novel, You and Me on Vacation, was published in May 2021, she noticed a “giant” spike in sales. Her editor and agent had noticed it too. They were all emailing and texting, trying to figure out what was happening, when someone finally cracked it: “It’s BookTok”.

Henry had already made it on to the New York Times bestseller list twice, first with her romance debut, Beach Read, then with You and Me on Vacation. But TikTok videos made by impassioned fans vaulted the American author to a new level of fame. Since then, videos tagged #EmilyHenry have been viewed more than 300m times, and her books have sold more than 4m copies. Three of her five romances are being adapted for film.

Henry’s romcoms feature many hallmarks of the genre – blossoming romances, idyllic settings, happy endings. Yet her characters also work through grief, betrayal, loneliness. “I find it really hard to write a compelling love story where you don’t pick at the emotional scabs of the hero and heroine,” she says from her home in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she lives with her husband. The early days of falling in love involve “emotional excavation”; a “long-form game of show and tell” in which partners “trot out everything” from their past to get to know each other. Problematic exes, hang-ups, family dramas – Henry’s characters have all their baggage laid bare.

In her latest novel, Funny Story, librarian Daphne is dumped by her soon-to-be husband and moves in with her ex-fiance’s new girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend, Miles. Henry knows “more people than you would expect” who have found themselves in a similar situation. While the partner swap is the marketable storyline, Daphne’s struggle to belong, her longing for friendship and her fraught relationship with her father anchor the plot, making her a more complex, believable heroine.

Henry, 33, believes the huge success of her books is down to this blend of escapism and reality. She says she was drawn to the genre because while characters do face the messy complications of real life, the focus remains on “the hope of the world”. Readers need this – during Covid, the time when Henry’s novels took off, people “wanted to believe that we’d get through that, and that life would be beautiful again”.

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Growing up in Cincinnati, Henry was a “huge reader”, and began writing what was essentially fanfiction, though she didn’t know it had a name. “As a kid, I would get up to date on whatever series I was reading, and I would just want more and there wouldn’t be more.” Later, she studied creative writing at Hope College, graduating in 2012. Her first job was a technical writing role for a phone, internet and TV provider – a “very corporate, boring job”. On the side, she edited novels she had written in college, and began sending them to agents.

Henry didn’t start off as a romance writer: she began her career writing young adult novels, a genre that appealed because it featured “girl- or woman-centred” stories, with emphasis placed on emotions and sentimentality – something that “more literary” fiction had struck her as “allergic to”. Her first YA novel, The Love That Split the World, was published in 2016, and three more would follow.

There was a moment, however, when Henry began to feel she had said everything she wanted to say about teenage life. She was also feeling “very overwhelmed [by] the world at large” and wanted to write something “warm, inviting, cosy” – and so began what would become Beach Read. She did not tell anyone that she was writing it, and she had “no intention, really” of publishing it.

The pivot from YA to romance was also partly down to her newly becoming a romance reader, arriving at the genre late having internalised the social snobbery towards it. Reading romance was considered a shameful hobby, she says, of silly or lonely women – “such an offensive kind of stereotyping”.

Beach Read pokes at this snobbery. The heroine, January, is a romance writer who spends the summer living next door to her college rival, an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January laments: “If you swapped out all my Jessicas for Johns, do you know what you’d get? Fiction. Just fiction. Ready and willing to be read by anyone, but somehow by being a woman who writes about women, I’ve eliminated half the Earth’s population from my potential readers.” The two characters making cases for why their genre is more worthy felt like the “two sides of my brain arguing with each other”, she says.

The book was partly inspired by her experience on the creative writing programme at Hope, where she’d tried to write her “version” of literary fiction, but ended up largely mimicking other writers – she hadn’t found her voice yet. “I have not lived Ernest Hemingway’s life, it makes no sense for me to try to write The Old Man and the Sea.”

Henry thinks the recent boom in romance is partly due to our particular “moment in history” leading people to reach for stories with hope at the centre, and partly because of younger generations embracing the genre, and raving about it online. She does not have a TikTok account, but she admires its grassroots, reader-driven nature.

BookTok users often recommend romances based on plot “tropes”, such as friends-to-lovers, opposites attract, or childhood sweethearts. Funny Story features several tropes, including “fake relationship”: Daphne and Miles pretend to be a couple to attract the envy of their exes. The “tropification” of the genre has been criticised for narrowing reader tastes and for encouraging writers to build stories around tropes. Yet, for Henry, “tropes don’t matter if you don’t buy into the story, and I think that’s always character-based”.

One popular trope – which appears in her first romance, Beach Read, and her third, Book Lovers – is enemies-to-lovers. The device is tried and tested: think Pride and Prejudice. “If you write an enemies-to-lovers dynamic,” says Henry, “there is instantly tension and conflict, so there is an opportunity for more playful dialogue.” That tension is “a lot harder to create, in my experience, if you’re writing a friends-to-lovers”.

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The friends-to-lovers trope features in Henry’s You and Me on Vacation; other examples include Austen’s Emma and David Nicholls’ One Day. That the conversation about tropes is so focused on romance is not “totally fair”, she adds. “There are not that many ways to break a story down. So I don’t think romance is any more formulaic than any other kind of story out there. There’s a natural beat and rhythm to a love story that is just kind of innate.”

Though Henry says that none of her characters are based on her, she always incorporates aspects of herself. In her fourth romance novel, Happy Place, protagonist Harriet is a “huge people pleaser”. “That’s something that I see causes problems in my life, so it made sense to take this piece of myself that I find very frustrating and try to work it out and understand why I am that way and why I’m actually so afraid of confrontation at all costs.” The personal elements that Henry incorporates are what make her “very protective of the characters and worried that everyone will hate them”.

Henry met her own husband “very young, right out of high school”. Her male characters are never based solely on him. However, Miles from Funny Story has “shades of my three favourite men in the world” – her grandfather, her father and her husband, who are all “very kind, steady” people.

Travel features prominently in several of Henry’s novels – Book Lovers takes place in fictional Sunshine Falls, North Carolina; Happy Place is set at a Maine holiday cottage with pine floorboards and white linen drapes. To Henry, travelling allows an escape from the mundanity of everyday life: “you’re seeing who you are”, she says, your “triggers get triggered”, and you find out whether you can “enjoy things going wrong together, or if this person you’re with just becomes your perfect nightmare”.

For a long time, Henry was a morning writer, waking up to do Wordle and Spelling Bee before writing until she had 2,000 words – “whether that took two hours or nine hours” – but she now prefers to write at night. She starts with an “incoherent, way too long, pretty boring” first draft, then takes stock of where “nothing’s happening, or the tension drops out, or there’s too many arguments in a row”, before rewriting. Henry is now working on another romance, which will feature parenting as a theme; though she isn’t a parent, she’s “fascinated”. While she is open to writing other genres – she has written horror that “hasn’t been shown to anyone”, as well as thrillers – she believes she will always gravitate towards love stories.

Despite becoming a romance reader relatively late, Henry now sees the genre’s hopeful endings as hugely valuable – after “a lifetime of being led to believe that these books were just no good, and finding out how completely untrue that was. Almost all of my favourite stories are love stories of some kind.”