HEA

No dedicated romance reader needs an explanation for this acronym. For those of you not so familiar: Happily Ever After. 

The ‘ole HEA. If there’s no HEA, there’s no romance novel. Straightforward really. HEAs are scarce on the ground IRL. Hence our mania for romance. Book statistics account for around 1 billion bucks in romance sales. Second only to Thrillers (this also begs the question why I don’t write in this genre). So clearly the dirty little secret is for every JM Coetzee novel, there’s a Lisa Kleypas, a Grace Burrowes, a Laura Lee Guhrke to thank for his advance. Just sayin’.   

Patrick White and Voss was my thesis topic at university. No trone d’amours or blushing virgins for our Patrick. Although he would have had his peccadilloes just like the rest of us. When someone less au fait (read horrified) with the romance novel wants me to explain their appeal, I say this: it’s Jane Eyre with fucking. What’s not to like?

In my youth, I would ransack the local library for Mills & Boon. I’d take them home and instead of studying for school exams, I’d prop my stash inside a physics text book and get lost in the Karoo in South Africa with a recently widowed doctor and his nanny as they negotiate heavy petting, French kissing and lashings of sexism and condescension (not that I clocked that at the time). For me it was all about the slow build up, the loss of the heroine’s virginity, the roar of the lion—the equivalent of waves crashing on the shore—the gorgeous profile of the hero as he swooped on in to ravish the besotted, quivering maiden. No wonder my actual love life got off to a confused start. I expected my blokes to have thousand yard stares and hard ons. At all times. 

But the books calmed my fevered and randy mind. They offered up a point of view on sex (admittedly highly questionable) that I wasn’t getting at school or from my parents. But here's the thing: sex education to this day does not discuss pleasure. That’s absolutely verboten despite the fact that females are the lucky recipients of an organ that is solely designed for the squee factor. 

The inviolable premise of a bodice ripper is a woman will experience sexual ecstasy. Over and over again. In graphic terms. Yes, it’s both terrifically conventional and completely bonkers because a man is usually the one bringing the woman to this pinnacle (...) but what is transgressive is the pointed focus on a woman’s pleasure. Even in this day and age. Maybe particularly in this day and age. 

So here’s to the HEA. IRL is all good and well but sometimes a girl’s got to lose herself in fantasy.

IRL: (In Real Life. Just in case)