Author: Emma

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.

Coincidence and the Sentimental Novel

I was recently re-reading one of my favorite books published this year. In order to avoid spoiling it for anyone, I’ll omit the title, but one of the plot lines hinges on a rather large coincidence: two characters who weren’t previously acquainted meet and form a connection in a town where neither is supposed to be, thus setting the rest of the plot in motion.

There’s a time when this would have annoyed me. When I was in high school and first read Dickens, I turned into a rant-y, whiny beast as only a fifteen-year-old can. “What,” I seethed, “are the odds that Darnay and Carton would be doppelgängers! Not to mention that Lucie’s father unknowingly condemned the family of her intended! What are the flipping odds!”

Obviously, A Tale of Two Cities was the source of my initial ire with Dickens. We won’t even acknowledge the time I read Oliver Twist, though certainly the people I complained to loudly and longly have not forgotten it.

It took until graduate school for me to understand that Dickens wasn’t just commenting on the presence of coincidence in real life (the Sacagawea meeting her brother coincidence still astonishes me; talk about long odds) or indulging in some sloppy plotting. No, in placing coincidence at the center of his books, Dickens was using the sentimental to comment on the interrelated state of humanity.

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A Fine Romance Friday: Barefoot in the Park

It’s the longest day of the year, at least if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere. If I were a darker, meaner person, today’s fine romance selection would be one of the film versions of The Great Gatsby, in which Daisy Buchanan opines, “Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!” But since we haven’t missed it, we’ll have to watch something else. Hopefully something happier! My choice is Barefoot in the Park, a delightful romp featuring Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, and late 60s New York.

It starts with a wedding, that of young lawyer Redford and the Bohemian-aspirant Fonda. After the wedding comes their Greenwich Village apartment, which is truly the third character in the film and the marriage. It might be an atypical romance, but it is a rather adorable film.

I won’t discuss whether any of the DC and Boston apartments we lived in when we were first married might make the film biographically appealing, but I will say that it’s fun and surprisingly fresh. I’ll be watching it tonight with something fizzy and cool and suggest you do the same.

Why Should You Read Brave in Heart?

“So, Emma, I see that you wrote a book,” you say.

“Yes indeed. Funny you should mention it. It’ll be out in two weeks.”

“But why should I read it?”

Well…

  • It’s a second-chance-at-love story. As I’ve discussed before, this is one of my favorite tropes. It is almost as close as it’s possible to come to a universal experience. In the back of all our heads is that nagging little question, “What if?” Brave in Heart explores that scenario.
  • After a prologue, a postcard from the past if you will, Brave in Heart starts with a dance. There is almost always a ball in historical romances, but the dresses? The music? The subtext? How can you not love a novel that opens with dancing?
  • One word: angst. “The course of true love never did run smooth,” Lysander says in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And for Margaret and Theo, this statement is practically etched in sky-writing over their heads (if of course there had been planes in the mid-nineteenth century). But their stumbles toward happiness are all the more rewarding for the difficulties along the way.
  • The stakes are high. There’s a war on. A deadly, terrifying war that the characters care deeply about. Every kiss, every conversation could be the last one.
  • Love letters that burn up the page. Or the, um, Kindle. You know that you’ve read Wentworth’s letter over and over again. In the course of Brave in Heart, Theo and Margaret spend a lot of time apart. The letters they exchange are their only contact for months at a time. It’s in the letters that you see them fall in love. Beta readers and earlier reviewers have consistently told me that the letters were some of their favorite parts of the book.
  • The book features an accurate, compelling historical voice. If you’ve ever complained about wallaper historicals, then Brave in Heart is for you. I wanted it to read like it could have been written in 1863 (except now with sexytimes and faster pacing), including the diction and grammatical forms.
  • Also, if you’ve ever complained about how narrow the scope of historical romance has become, give this a try.
  • It’s a little book, meaning it’s short (41,000 words) but also it’s done in watercolor. It’s about quiet moments between adults who want to love each other and just can’t figure out how to given their historical circumstances.

If this sounds interesting, you can pre-order the book on Amazon, add it to your to-read shelf on Goodreads, or find out more about it here.

A Fine Romance Friday: Kissing Jessica Stein

In light of this fascinating NPR story about the disappearance of women from movie screens, I thought this week’s selection should be a romance focused on women, but this was tricky. At first I thought I’d go with a romance that features strong female friendship — Real Women Have Curves or Pitch Perfect — but then I started thinking about the GLBT romances I’ve seen. And in my childhood in the 90s and early 00s, there weren’t many. But I can recommend Kissing Jessica Stein.

Starring Jennifer Westfeldt, Heather Juergensen, and Scott Cohen (plus cameos by what seems like half of indie Hollywood), it’s the story of a (straight) New York woman who’s fed up with the terrible dating scene, so much so that she answers a dating ad placed by another woman. The early dating scenes with Westfeldt and Juergensen are fantastically well-done. The conversations, the early relationship butterflies, the chemistry: it’s all great. I also really liked the film’s portrayal of the hesitancies of coming out.

While I wouldn’t want to spoil it, it’s important to know that the film doesn’t have a typical happy ending. Nor is it unproblematic. But I think it’s a very GLBT-positive film, and one that’s insightful and honest about modern relationships, so for that, Kissing Jessica Stein is this week’s fine romance.

Now go forth and watch movies about women! (And if you have recommendations for lesbian romance, on screen or on the page, I’d love them.)

Margaret Mitchell’s Long Shadow

I didn’t mean to write an American Civil War romance. Indeed, I didn’t mean to write a historical romance at all. My first book was a contemporary and so was my third. If I had sat down and decided to write something historical, surely I would have chosen another period, a more commercially-viable one, than I did. A nice Regency involving a brooding duke perhaps. (And for the record, I love a good Regency with a brooding duke as much as the next girl. In fact, probably more than the next girl.)

But writing Brave in Heart (which will be out in 2.5 weeks, if I hadn’t mentioned it lately) just sort of happened. I wanted to write a novella to experiment with different plotting, but the subject unfurled without consulting me. The first 20,000 words appeared very quickly — honestly, I could really use that sort of inspiration with the two creative writing projects sitting on my harddrive now, not to mention my still-unfinished dissertation — though the second half was more of a march. It was only when I had finished that I realize what I had done, which was to enter a very specific subgenre and one that has an almost inescapable Ur-text.

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A Fine Romance Friday: Four Weddings and a Funeral

It’s raining here. Like epically raining. While part me just wants to re-recommend Monsoon Wedding and call it a day, I can’t ignore that precipitation brings us many good romances, including today’s selection: Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral.

As the title explains, it’s a film about a series of big gatherings and the emotions and complications they bring. At the first wedding, a confirmed British bachelor (Hugh Grant) meets an American girl (Andie MacDowell). After a series of hilarious interactions, they spend the night together…and then she goes back to America. When they meet again, at the second wedding, she’s engaged to somebody else.

The film introduces a host of tropes that would go on to become cliches — the cast of kooky friends, the big event gone bad, the highly structured narrative — but here, they’re fresh. I think it’s the unabashed emotion of Four Weddings, a movie that never fails to make me cry and to read Auden, that makes it work, that makes it seem original even on the twelfth viewing.

Hugh Grant had quite a run there with romantic comedies in the 90s and 00s, but this might very well be my favorite. (Or should I say, favourite?) He’s adorably awkward. And Andie MacDowell is smart and warm — you want to be friends with her, which is what sets the 80s and 90s romantic comedies apart from those of the present. So if somehow, you’ve avoided it, or haven’t seen it in a while, my recommendation for tonight’s fine romance is Four Weddings and a Funeral, perhaps paired with something hot and rum-y.

The Call 2.0

Unlike the first call story, this one ends with an actual phone call. But it started on Twitter.

At the beginning of April, Carina Press held a pitch event. The promise was that you’d hear within two months and if it was rejection, you’d received personalized feedback. I had just signed a contract with Crimson to publish Brave in Heart, but I was working through a contemporary manuscript with my critique partner, The Easy Part.

It’s a book that I love, but one I was convinced I would never be able to sell because it’s set between staffers in Washington, DC. It’s political, and it’s wonky, and there’s an Alzheimer’s subplot. I had already sent it to one publisher (name redacted), from whom I received the dreaded, “I like your writing, but…” rejection. That editor objected to the partisanship implicit in the premise. I was convinced if I wanted The Easy Part to see the light of day, I would have to self-publish it. So I pitched in #carinapitch mostly because I wanted a second opinion — I wanted to know if the book had a shot with a traditional publisher.

Also, among the epublishers, Carina was my first choice. I have loved all the Carina books I’ve read. Plus, I think Carina is just plain smart and savvy about today’s book market. For a manuscript like The Easy Part, which is very youthful and contemporary, it seemed like a good fit. But even with my hopes, I never anticipated that they’d make an offer.

My pitch was: “Millie — a shy labor organizer – is having a bad year; Parker – an arrogant congressional aide — is having an existential crisis. Together they’ll discover that compared to love, politics is easy.” And a few minutes after putting it on Twitter, I had a request for a full manuscript.

But then, the waiting began.

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Land Where Our Fathers Died

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The day was hot; summer announcing itself. There’s a smell in the south — warm earth and wilting verdure — that I forget every fall and rediscover in the late spring: the smell of summer. The breeze stirring my hair didn’t cool me, though it moved the wheat in which I stood. From the top of the hill, looking down over the field, I tried to imagine the scene 150 years earlier when the Battle of Chancellorsville raged.

I stood at the spot where Robert Lee’s Confederate troops flanked Joseph Hooker’s Federal forces. Among the Federal troops at Chancellorsville was the Connecticut Fifth, the unit to which the hero in my forthcoming novel, Brave in Heart, belongs. Without spoiling the book, the battle is significant to the story I’m telling. I’ve looked at engravings. Read survivors’ accounts. But I needed to see it for myself.

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A Fine Romance Friday: Serendipity

I have a weird thing about place, season, and the things I read/watch. Sometimes when it’s Christmas, you just have to watch a holiday movie, sure. But for the bulk of December, I need Lawrence of Arabia. And Top Gun. And other movies involving hot weather and sand. Sure, I read A Moveable Feast on a Parisian vacation, but also le Carre and Hurston. And the right choice for today — when it’s 90 with 90% humidity and loads of golden sunshine — is, I think, a romantic comedy that starts during the holiday shopping rush. I’m speaking of course of one of the only good Hollywood romantic comedies of the past fifteen years, Serendipity.

After the ultimate meet cute, John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale share a lovely New York evening. They’re both involved with other people, but … but nothing. Refusing to give him her number or her name, Beckinsale sends a book out into the cosmic void with her contact info and calls it a night. Years later, they’ve both moved on. Until Cusack finds the book.

Now, I have issues with the film’s misreading of Love in the Time of Cholera (see my Goodreads review here), but it’s impossible to have issues with John Cusack. John Cusack in all the movies, I say. Even Kate Beckinsale manages to be charming, and she gives us access to John Corbett doing a Yanni impression and Molly Shannon being hilarious. It’s all sweet, lovely, and serendipitous. And if you need an anecdote to summer, I commend it to you tonight.

Politics and the Romance Novel

Go ahead and get a cup of tea, this might go on for a while.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the literary marketplace as a fiction writer and literary scholar, pondering questions like, does the buying and selling of art for money detract from aesthetics? What pressures does the marketplace put on writers? What types of fiction (in terms of form and content) will perform well on the market? Are literary gatekeepers (e.g., editors, publishers, marketing people, critics, agents, etc.) correct in their assessments about marketability? And so on.

One of the determinations and often-repeated truisms is that readers don’t like political books. (ETA: it’s two years since I wrote this, but this post at AAR is an excellent example of someone complaining about authors “adding” politics to romance novels.) Many believe readers won’t read about politics and, more broadly, they don’t like books that directly address inequities, social justice, organizations and belief structures (e.g., churches, capitalism), and so on.

This idea may be related to the stagnation in historical romantic fiction that’s been widely explored in the past month (see for example this recent post at Dear Author). A novel about upper-class white people in the Regency period tends to be seen as apolitical and thus preferable to a novel about upper-class white people in Africa in the early 20th century (which reeks of colonialism), for example.

I’d like to offer a response to the truism arguing for a different, more expansive, notion of the political. I’m invested in this question because the books I’ve written outside the mainstream vis-a-vis the political, but also because I think it’s pertinent to how we see the genre.

Continue reading “Politics and the Romance Novel” →