Emma Barry is a teacher, novelist, recovering academic, and former political staffer. She lives with her high school sweetheart and a menagerie of pets and children in Virginia, and she occasionally finds time to read and write.
… or gone from the Internet, at least for a little while.
I’m teaching several classes that start this week and trying to finish writing my dissertation and the second book in my contemporary series for Carina, in addition to maintaining some semblance of a personal life and sanity. Thus my leisurely summer schedule (and the blogging that accompanied it) has come to an end.
I’m still working on a massive post — which will probably turn into a short series — about how we do read and how we should read. Expect that thesis to run by the end of September. I will also continue to post fine romance recommendations, though perhaps not every Friday. In other words, I’ll still be here, just less frequently.
In the meantime, check out the highlights of my blog here, please consider reading/reviewing my novel if you haven’t, and enjoy a song that I’ve been grooving on lately.
For the end of summer, today’s fine romance is the best teen romance ever: Cameron Crowe’s 1989 masterpiece Say Anything. It’s another film I can’t be rational about, perhaps because of its resemblance to my own love story; however, on frequent repeat viewings, it holds up remarkably well. I find it every bit as honest and sweet as it more lauded contemporaries by John Hughes and it features the best teen party scene ever. Plus, there is the beta hero glory of John Cusack — but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Opening on the day of graduation, Cusack (here, the “basic” underachiever Lloyd Dobler) decides that it’s finally time to approach Ione Skye, playing Diane Court, the smart but shy girl he’s been pining after for years. He invites her to the aforementioned party and for reasons that aren’t clear to her she says yes. They start dating, her family issues unwind, he stands by her, they face complications, they overcome them, and that’s pretty much it.
If you love Say Anything, it’s not for the machinations of the plot, which are few. It’s for the hilarious but realistic dialogue, the brilliant secondary characters played by Joan Cusack, Lili Taylor, and Jeremy Piven, and the music, notably Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”
So grab your boombox and revisit the 80s tonight with Say Anything.
In the course of fifteen months, I’ve posted 100 times (!!!), chronicling my journey from being an aspiring novelist, to publishing a historical romance with a small e-press, to selling a contemporary series to a big e-press. It’s been stupefying. To celebrate, here are my top ten posts in no particular order:
Politics and the Romance Novel: by a factor of several hundred page views, this is the most widely-read post I’ve written. It may in fact be the most widely read thing I’ve ever written. In it, I argue genre romance is political and we should stop pretending it’s not.
Margaret Mitchell’s Long Shadow: I consider what it means to write Civil War romance in a post-Gone with the Wind world (with a heavy dose of Lost Cause ideology).
Against Alpha Heroes: I opine against the narrow confines of masculinity for romance novel heroes.
Why Should You Read Brave in Heart?: eight reasons why you should read my debut novel. If you haven’t read Brave in Heart, what’s stopping you? (And if you have, can I say without being completely obnoxious that writers love it when you review their books. Hint hint.)
A Fine Romance Friday: Once: my favorite fine romance Friday post, in which I make a case for the Irish indie (and bittersweet romance) Once.
How Historical?: I ponder what readers mean when they talk about verisimilitude in historical romance.
Land Where Our Fathers Died: pictures and reflections on my visit to the Chancellorsville battlefield (a setting for Brave in Heart).
The Waltz That’s Viennes-y: I love Viennese light opera and relate The Merry Widow to romance novel tropes.
Kern de Sache: thoughts on what we read when we read romance.
First, a short digression. When I was in labor, my husband read to me and what would do for such a moment? Only the most distractingly beautiful words set down in English of course: “The Eve of St. Agnes” by John Keats. In fact I very nearly named my daughter Madeline (though didn’t).
Today’s selection is Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009), which features Ben Whishaw as Keats and Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne, the woman he loved. If you know anything about Keats, it is probably his premature death at age 24, so I think it spoils nothing to say that the film isn’t a romance in the happily ever after sense, but it is deeply romantic and astonishingly lovely.
The film opens in 1818. Keats has left medicine to pursue poetry and it’s going, in a word, badly. The critical response is mixed (ever heard of the Cockney School?) and he’s watched family members die from consumption and senses the disease stalking him. Then he meets Fanny Brawne. They fall in love and enter into a secret engagement lasting until his death in 1821.
Early biographies of Keats often point out that Brawne wasn’t beautiful and harp on their correspondence, arguing that she isn’t brilliant and accusing her of being inconstant. Campion is engaged in a feminist reclamation, arguing that Keats was the jealous, insecure one and that Brawne loved him deeply.
While this is important to know, you could go into the film thinking it entirely fictional and still come away with the same emotional impact. The score, the costumes, the performances, the muted, autumnal tones of the cinematography: every detail contributes to a powerful movie that’s at once elegiac and ravishing.
I’m not sure why it didn’t get more awards consideration, except that it was released in the same year as The Young Victoria, and evidently we can only handle one romance at a time. For me, however, it’ll be Bright Star tonight.
I was thinking about a review that I read for Ruthie Knox’s latest novella, Making It Last — which in the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t read yet — specifically of a line in which the reviewer called it and other ‘marriage in trouble’ romances Important.
I can’t find the exact review now; I don’t mean to establish a strawman. I doubt the reviewer capitalized Important, and yet I sensed the emphasis, the sort of 18th century abstract, personified ideal attached to the pronouncement.
Certainly it is accurate to say happily ever afters do not simply happen. They must be cultivated and protected. Relationships are, as your aunt explained to you at your bridal shower, hard work.
More seriously, not every moment of a long-term relationship is sunshine and flowers and champagne. The trust that you build up in the difficult moments (and years) bears fruit in the balance. You love each other more for the wee small hours when you’re caring together for a sick child, or for the unconditional support he offers you during a professional crisis, etc. I’ve been in my relationship for 14 years (married for 9 of those); this is not simply something I believe, but something I live.
To the extent that romance doesn’t represent past the happy ever after and that ‘marriage in trouble’ romances are corrective, I am behind this designation. And yet…
Today just hasn’t gone the way I thought it was going to, hence the tardiness and brevity of this post. While I go get a tasty adult beverage and attempt to recover, I leave you with today’s fine romance, Paperman, a Disney short film that won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 2012.
When I want to work, when I really need to get things done and words on the page, I put on the soundtrack to the Charlie Brown Christmas special. At the sound of the big fat opening chords of “Christmastime is Here,” the words flow out of my fingers like water from a sponge.
It’s Pavlovian; akin to carefully cultivated muscle memory in an athlete. Now, my faith that it will work plays more than a little into its success. Like Dumbo with his feather, I clutch my Vince Guaraldi trusting that he’ll get me through when nothing else is.
If this seems illogical to you, well, you’d be right. It’s the result of too many years of writing papers like a maniac in late November and early December with Christmas music in the background. It’s also evidence of my feast or famine writing style, where for months at a time the work won’t come, until the flood gates open and a first draft appears.
I’m writing these days. A lot. Fiction and academic essays. So this week’s blog will be short, but a few more of the songs that get me working when everything else fails are below the fold.
Do you have movies (or books or songs or whatnot) which, for whatever weird reason, you’ve seen a numerous times? Not out of a belief that they are superlative, though they might be, not because you’ve sought them out for repeated viewings, but through happenstance?
During my first year of college, I watched the 2000 romantic comedy Keeping the Faith — directed by and starring Edward Norton and featuring Ben Stiller and Jenna Elfman — about twenty-five times. It’s one of those cultural artifacts that immediately evokes a time and place for me. It ceased to be a film; it was instead a wormhole.
Recently, I caught a few minutes of it on television and in a new context, it was defamiliarized. I realized that Keeping the Faith was actually a very charming and successful rom-com, and thus it’s this week’s selection.
Norton and Stiller are childhood best friends who, stop me if you’ve heard this one, grow up to become a priest and a rabbi. They’re leading their congregations and dealing with structural conservatism against the changes they want to implement. In Stiller’s case, he’s also weathering pressure to get married. Enter Elfman — the third member of their trio — who’s grown up, become a high-powered business woman, and turned beautiful. A love triangle ensues.
What makes the film better than the average rom-com of the period is, first, it’s warmth and gentleness and, second, the extent to which it represents its characters inner lives. Elfman’s non-Jewishness is a big deal for Stiller; Norton undergoes a crisis of faith based on his attraction: this is not the stuff of the average Hollywood movie. While I wouldn’t say it’s serious by any stretch of the imagination, the characters are far more three-dimensional than is generally the case.
Now some of the humor comes from cultural and religious stereotypes, which occasionally grate, but any time the film is dealing with the genuine friendship and affection between the trio, it’s on solid ground. While I knew that Norton could be a great actor, the film also proved to me that Stiller and Elfman can give good performances with the right material. I am particularly annoyed on Elfman’s behalf that she never managed much of anything post-Dharma & Greg. (Oh, 90s pop culture.)
For me, it’s New York-style pizza and Keeping the Faith tonight.
What’s the beating heart of romance? What drives the genre? What propels the books off the shelves?
We could say, banally but accurately, that the answer is as varied as the number of romance readers and leave it there. But let’s not, if only because then this post would be so short. (Yes, this tautology fuels much of my life.)
In the anthology Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, a collection of essays about the genre by popular romance writers, we get a number of responses. Penelope Williamson writes that in romance, “The fantasies are uniquely feminine and the story is primarily the heroine’s” (126, emphasis in original). Laura Kinsale disagrees, arguing, “It is the hero who carries the book” (32) and that romance reading “is the experience of ‘what a courtship feels like’” (39). Jayne Ann Krentz says that romance is the un-politically correct fantasies of women readers, including to challenge (and perhaps be dominated by) the alpha hero who is also the villain (107-9).
So the draw of romance is that it puts a woman at the center of the narrative, subverting the Western canon, wherein she must solve (conquer?) the man who is hero and antagonist at once. Got it.
Emma Barry 