I am a purveyor of intimacy, a hawker of happily ever after. So the only heartache I dig in genre fiction is the short-lived, angsty kind that crops up in romance long after "boy meets girl," somewhere between "boy loses girl" and "boy drops to his knees begging for girl's forgiveness, after which girl raises him up to become the equal partner in love boy was destined to be."
Or something like that.
It's true that most folks
don't understand how closely romance fiction has to follow real-life relational
intricacies for readers to buy into a novel's premise. Yet romance clearly is not in toto about
relational authenticity, that life-long journey through little hurts, small
joys, big desires and, often, really sucky interactions with folks we choose to
love and commit to for the long haul.
Long haul, of course, being subjective, since so many real-life love matches
never make it through the short lug. So
who'd want to dwell on that in their escapist leisure time? Not me, for sure...except for recently when I
picked up an off-beat and enticing little tome by Kathleen Horan called
"Relationship Obits : The Final Resting Place for Love Gone Wrong."
"Relationship Obits" is a compilation of selected entries from Horan's Website,
RelationshipObit.com. She started the
site after the demise of a three-year love connection - and the untimely death
of her father just two weeks later.
While writing her father's obituary, the WNYC and internationally aired radio
journalist wondered whether writing the story of the "life and death" of one's
romantic relationship might be as cathartic and closure inducing. Soon after, RelationshipObit.com was born and
took off, offering a cyberspot for folks to work out digitally
the stages of their love affairs and grief in ways humorous, touching,
bittersweet and sometimes just a smidge
bitter.
And mostly entertaining, because these folks seem to want to share in fairly
creative submissions some of the absurdities they couldn't see and maybe
couldn't let go of until they laid them all out - and to rest - in their online
obits.
I won't lie; when I saw the publisher touting this book as " a voyeuristic romp through the unexplored underbelly of love and life," I expected another craptastic exploitation of other folks' misfortune ‘cause, gee, online and off, that just never gets old. Yet I stood corrected when I learned from Horan's introduction the reasons behind her developing her site - and the empathy with which Horan approaches the project.
Why isn't "Obits" a wonking-great, misery lovers'
train wreck? First, Horan's got creds and chops; it doesn't seem her style. More important, the folks who experience the
pain control the information. So the
entertainment isn't at their expense, rather it's fun to read because we've
been there/done that and feel kindred with the obit writers.
And while one may
read "Obits" with wry amusement, one also may feel a sense of hope, understanding
most of us have walked through similar fires; ya' live/learn/get over it
and, maybe, laugh about it with friends sometime in the future.
As a romance reader, what would make you want to read a book like "Relationship Obits?" Would it be fun -- or horrid! -- to make up obits for the way great romance novel couples' relationships -- horrors! -- ended? Lay some on us...
I'll start:
Darcy and Elizabeth
Cause of Death: Excessive brooding
Survived by: Garrulous mil, silly sils and myriad sequels.
Check this out: Lorraine Heath's Scoundrels twist Dickens in ways they never taught us in school!
Are you reading H2H at a
Barnes&Noble store? Tell me which one,
and what romances you're reading!
