Lately, I find myself bringing up romance on the dance floor. Do you know Talia Hibbert? A four-bedroom in Bushwick: picture me shouting over the music, my sweaty upper lip, hips swaying to a thumping beat. Trust me, I’m saying. You have to read this book. I make my case to friends and strangers alike. I prescribe romance novels in the group chat, over drinks, outside the party bathroom. I suspect the impulse is partly internal, a sign of some new self-confidence. I’m as enthusiastic as I was at ten, finding a pink paperback in a box of hand-me-downs. A well-worn copy of Can You Keep a Secret? by Sophie Kinsella. You never forget your first.
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I’m not the only one feeling it—romance is zeitgeisting. Over the past few years, authors and booksellers have noticed a change in the genre’s cultural perception. “If you call it a romance, it will never be reviewed by The New York Times or any other respectable literary venue,” said Diana Gabaldon in 2016. Well. The New York Times and The Sunday Times now regularly review romance novels. Major literary events feature romance panels, and festivals seek out romance authors as headliners and keynote speakers. Call it a literary vibe shift: spaces that once excluded romance are opening their doors to the genre.
“We’re in this interesting inflection point with romance,” says Casey McQuiston, author of The Pairing. “Publishing has known for decades that it keeps the lights on. I feel like we’re finally ready to let our golden goose out of the basement and let it come to dinner.”
Not long ago, romance lived quite literally in the basement. McQuiston struggled to find their debut, Red White and Royal Blue, in independent bookstores; if it was available, it was kept in the back or basement shelves. “We used to sell our romance in a cramped back room,” says Katherine Morgan, a bookseller at Powell’s Books since 2017. “We almost have an aisle and a half now, which is insane for Powell’s.”
“It’s kind of gratifying to see these gatekeepers begin to welcome romance into the room,” says McQuiston. “When I walk into a fancy-pants indie now and see a romance section, I’m like, Oh, I get to sit at the grownups’ table.”
Romance is in the room with us now. How do we talk about it? “There are these arbitrary delineations between what qualifies as ‘real’ literature and what doesn’t,” says author Alyssa Cole. “Romance is an easy target.” The challenge, then, is to talk about the genre without casting it as a guilty pleasure or reinforcing literary hierarchies.
“How do we treat romance with due respect?” asks McQuiston. “How do we let the genre be all the wonderful things it has always been—like joy, like pleasure—without asking it to earn its right to stay in the room?”
*
In the group chat, over drinks, outside the party bathroom, I meet genre skeptics. Trust me! Sometimes, my recommendations require a defense. I consider the common approach, the “billion-dollar industry” of it all. “People constantly talk about how much money romance makes publishers,” says Alyssa Cole. “They’ve latched on to that.”
The story goes like this: romance fiction, a leading genre in the U.S. book market, has seen a steady increase in sales over the last three years. At least, that’s according to Circana, a market research firm—reliable publishing data can be hard to come by. But even without the numbers, romance feels increasingly visible. Spaces like BookTok, Bookstagram, r/RomanceBooks, and author-run Facebook groups have grown the genre’s global reader community. Romance-focused bookstores are multiplying. The Ripped Bodice, the first of its kind in North America, added a second location in 2023. In October 2024, Powell’s Katherine Morgan opened a physical site for Portland’s first all-romance bookstore, Grand Gesture Books.
Many attribute romance’s explosion to the pandemic, but McQuiston also credits America’s recent political trajectory. “I think the more we see misery in daily life, the more we [seek out] art that’s effervescent and kind of escapist and comforting. And for many people, romance is their first choice for pleasure reading.” That’s certainly true for me. Here is a genre that runs on hope and human connection, that guarantees a happily-ever-after, or at the very least, a happy-for-now. A genre that thrives on the intimacy between its authors and readers. “I’m going to take care of the reader, and they’re going to take care of me,” says McQuiston. “I am creating an emotional experience, and I’m having that experience with you. I am one of you.”
“How do we treat romance with due respect?” asks McQuiston. “How do we let the genre be all the wonderful things it has always been—like joy, like pleasure—without asking it to earn its right to stay in the room?”
My favorite romance novelists don’t just play by the genre’s rules—they revere them. You feel it in their prose, that sacred commitment to the genre’s tropes and constraints. “Romance is a self-selecting genre,” says Leah Koch, co-owner of The Ripped Bodice. “If your book meets the criteria—a central love story, a happily-ever-after—you still have to opt-in as an author or publisher.” I am one of you. Some books distance themselves through their packaging or marketing. Koch tells me that, over the years, “many authors have deliberately not opted-in, sometimes publicly, sometimes not.” I’m reminded of Ursula Le Guin’s response to Kazuo Ishiguro’s seeming disavowal of the “fantasy” label: “No writer can successfully use the ‘surface elements’ of a literary genre—far less its profound capacities—for a serious purpose, while despising it to the point of fearing identification with it.”
Opting in, for McQuiston, reflects the sense of mutual respect between romance authors and their readers. “We all know what we’re here for, and none of us are embarrassed by it. I think it’s important for authors to remember that as we see the genre gaining mainstream literary acceptance.”
“That’s what appeals to me about romance as an author,” says McQuiston. “I want to be in it with the reader because it’s a safe place to be my full-hearted, corny, earnest self without judgment. It’s hard to find places like that in this world.”
I think back to my first romance and its garish pink cover. How I sat on my bedroom rug and read until dawn, buzzing with a pure, electric joy. Nora Ephron once likened the bliss of losing yourself in a great book to the “rapture of the deep” experienced by divers, who get disoriented from inhaling compressed air at extreme depths. A comparable disorientation occurs, Ephron writes, “when I resurface from a book.”
Romance is the literature of rapture. This is what I tell the skeptics: that a great romance novel pulls you under, strapped to your back like a steel tank. That, in these waters, every word is a descent. Each page, a new breath.
*
In the case I’ve made so far, romance is a balm, a refuge, a promise of pleasure and solace. Yet the very qualities that define the genre—its ease, its indulgence—draw as much scorn as affection. “There’s a stigma attached to romance as not serious,” says author Courtney Milan, who started writing romance as a law professor. At the time, Milan was advised to keep her writing under wraps. “I wasn’t ashamed of it,” she tells me, “but I didn’t want people to know, especially while I was up for tenure.”
The romance genre, for all its success, is often sidelined in literary discussion, dismissed as a guilty pleasure. Even loyal readers call it trashy or fluff—a concession to cultural judgment. “There is undeniably a hierarchy of genres, and romance is undeniably at the bottom,” says author KJ Charles, a former editor at Mills and Boon. Like many I spoke with, Charles feels that criticism of romance carries a misogynistic undertone, adding that few who disparage the genre have actually read it. “It’s just a really easy way to make yourself feel good by putting other people down.”
Anecdotally, I’ve seen this among genre skeptics. They tell me (in group chats, over drinks, outside the party bathroom) that romance is predictable, cringe, and poorly written. (I wonder if you, the reader, share these assumptions.) They reduce romance to an excerpt mocked on Twitter, or a mediocre BookTok sensation. While other genres can absorb weak entries, romance is disproportionately defined by them. A bad novel becomes a metonym for the whole genre.
Carley Fortune understands this intimately. In January 2024, Fortune’s Meet Me at the Lake became the first romance novel to be shortlisted for Canada Reads, an annual literary competition where public figures select one “must-read” Canadian book. But on social media, she noticed comments like, “It’s a great book for the beach maybe, but NOT for Canada Reads.” Some panelists framed Meet Me at the Lake’s inclusion as an opportunity for romance readers to discover other books. “The romance readers,” novelist Heather O’Neill said on the broadcast. “We’ll have that huge audience listening, and they can try new things.”
“There’s inherent condescension there,” says Fortune. “There’s a value judgment about romance, and an assumption that if you read this genre, you don’t read other books. I find that incredibly distressing. Some romance fans read broadly, and some stick to romance. There shouldn’t be judgement on either preference.”
“A novel worth reading is an education of the heart,” said Susan Sontag. “It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.” I find echoes of Sontag’s insight in the way romance authors like Bolu Babalola discuss their craft. “To balance darker themes with lightness, and spine-tingling romantic scenes with moments that make you want to weep,” says Babalola, “you need such an expanse of emotional intelligence.” Though her debut, Love in Color, is “obviously romance,” its anthology format lends the book a more “literary” status than her romance novel, Honey & Spice. “It blows my mind that people think romance is easy,” Babalola tells me. “I truly believe good romance is so hard to write.”
Romance novels prioritize, above all else, the reader’s pleasure and catharsis. “There’s a weird sense of shame we all seem to associate with that—like reading should always be about learning, improving, or challenging yourself,” says Casey McQuiston. “Romance can do all those things, too, but its primary goal is pleasure and satisfaction and enjoyment. I think we struggle, as a culture, to see that as a valuable way to spend your time.”
When artists in the Renaissance first adopted luminescent, reflective oil-based paints, it changed how viewers saw the world around them. For McQuiston, a romance novel holds the same potential: to illuminate a feeling for readers in a way they haven’t yet experienced. An education of the heart. “Art isn’t just here to document or challenge,” they tell me. “It’s also here to give us access to our own hearts, and to each other’s experience of the world.”
“There’s a lot of pressure on romance writers to justify our existence, and to do that by putting something important in our books,” says McQuiston. “But why can’t pleasure be the important thing?”
*
What makes a book important? Romance novels, by most critical accounts, rarely qualify. Major awards and year-end lists—the best-ofs, the must-reads—have long eluded the genre, with the New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books among them. That is, until recently.
At the Book Review, the “notable” books are those the staff finds itself returning to and arguing about, says deputy editor Tina Jordan. But like most mainstream outlets, The Times paid little attention to genre fiction for years—even less to romance. “I got there in 2018, and I looked around and said, ‘Wait a minute. We should be covering the books that people are buying and reading,’” Jordan tells me. That same year, the Book Review’s annual list included its first romance novel: Alyssa Cole’s A Princess in Theory. “Frankly, it all boils down to the question of what ‘literature’ is. I think we are saying, at The Times, ‘these books count. They are not less than.’”
“Romance can do all those things, too, but its primary goal is pleasure and satisfaction and enjoyment. I think we struggle, as a culture, to see that as a valuable way to spend your time.”
Which brings us back to the literary vibe shift. In December, the 100 Notable Books of 2024 included three romance novels: Funny Story by Emily Henry, The Pairing by Casey McQuiston, and You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian. It’s the most romance the list has ever featured.
For many authors, the genre’s increasing visibility in these spaces—on lists and in bookstores, front and center—signals new, if tentative, recognition by the mainstream literary world. “To that extent, there’s a little more inclusion and some lessening of stigma,” says Courtney Milan, whose 2020 novel, The Duke Who Didn’t, was the second romance to make the Notable 100 list. “These are crumbs,” says KJ Charles, “but we’re clawing our way there, bit by bit.”
Cole sees a positive shift in the respect for romance novelists. She traces the change, in part, to a “cross-pollination,” as authors move between genres. KJ Charles writes both romance and mystery; Akwaeke Emezi, known for their literary fiction and poetry, published a romance novel in 2022. “People are realizing that an author’s skill doesn’t diminish simply because they’re writing romance,” says Cole. “There’s more understanding now that it’s not just a formula.”
This cross-pollination extends to cover design. For The Pairing, Casey McQuiston wanted a look that felt “less straightforwardly romance.” Gone are the cartoon-style illustrations and playful typography; in their place, two figures embrace, their outlines filled with maps and monuments. The goal wasn’t to distance the book from the genre but to draw in readers who might otherwise dismiss it. “Sometimes you have to bamboozle people into reading romance because they think they’re [above] it,” says McQuiston. “Then they realize, oh, this is the most fun I’ve ever had.”
“I talk to women all the time in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who spent decades hearing that romance is trashy,” says Leah Koch of The Ripped Bodice. Over time, these women internalized the usual reproaches: the writing is bad, people who read about sex are deviant, the genre lacks intellectual merit—whatever that means—and isn’t worth their attention. “Some of them still read it in secret, but many did not,” says Koch. “Right now, they’re sort of awakened to the idea that hey, maybe that was actually wrong.”
These days, the young readers Koch meets are vocal and unapologetic about their love for romance. Many are unfazed, or even unaware, that the genre still draws criticism. “Every year, it seems to me that people—especially women—care less and less what others think,” Koch tells me. “Maybe it was the pandemic, maybe it was the multiple global disasters. But somewhere along the way, they stopped giving a shit and thought, I’m going to tell everyone about a romance novel I read.”
How do we treat romance fiction with due respect?
The romance novel is both precise and indulgent. It rewards, but does not demand, scrutiny. Respecting the genre, as it gains ground in literary spaces, means engaging with it—neither as a guilty pleasure nor a commercial force, but on its own terms.
“I really hope this continues to shift,” says McQuiston. “Romance writers are some of the smartest people in the industry. I love hearing what they have to say, and I love seeing them on shelves.”
As for the skeptics? “The water’s fine,” says Milan. “Come on in.”
