Justice for the romance novel?

Justice for the romance novel?

And why that feels hard to admit.

Lola

Oct 20, 2026

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Yesterday I finished

Exit Lane

by Erika Veurink for my book club. It’s about Marin and Teddy, two Iowa grads moving to New York after college. They embark on a cross-country drive that turns into an eight-year love story. It took me about two hours to finish.

While reading, I found myself being critical of clichés. When Marin sees Teddy across the bar in Manhattan, she says it’s like “seeing him in Technicolor after years of black and white”. Teddy’s “definition of bliss” is “waking up to Marin’s warm body curled against [his]”. Come on. But I read on, and every few pages or so, I found myself skipping ahead to see if the two ended up together.

After finishing the book, I went back and looked for clichés, little souvenirs to prove that I noticed the lame language and wasn’t fooled. But the truth is I think I liked the book, and I judge myself for it.

When I was in middle school, I read Nicholas Sparks novels religiously. I remember walking up to art class with one of his books in my hand, and reading it through the entire period. I can’t remember if Ms. Podesta, our art teacher, asked me to put the book away, but I imagine that if she did, I simply slid it on my lap and continued reading, one hand flipping through the pages, the other gluing newspaper strips over an inflated balloon.

Sparks’ stories always followed a similar arc. Someone is in love. There is a conflict that keeps the love from happening. Then somehow, against all odds, the love happens. Then someone dies. The end. These books made me cry and I loved that, in part because there is something performative and necessary about crying a lot as a middle school girl. But I also loved that books, words really, could make me cry. It was a weapon I envied and wanted access to.

During my freshman year, I was still reading some Nicholas Sparks and thinking about becoming a writer. By sophomore year, something shifted. I became more serious. At least I thought I was supposed to be more serious. I bought an extremely heavy book about the Third Reich and read medical memoirs like

Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife

because I was going to be a doctor, because that seemed like the hardest and most impressive thing you could do at the time. I did not become a doctor, and I never read the book on the Third Reich. But I became a diligent student, which meant abandoning what I considered more trivial things, like reading romance novels.

When I started my job as a teacher, I took it on with a similar intensity. During my teacher training, I filled entire notebooks with “teacher moves”, as if writing them down would make me a good teacher.

If I study this, I can master it.

I read serious books about education, like

The Teacher Wars

and

The Knowledge Gap

. These books are now in a storage unit, but I’m sure that if I opened them, I would find a serious version of myself having a one-sided conversation in the margins: “research this later” or “how is this possible!!!”. Reading these books was insightful, but it was also a dark reminder of how flawed the education system was. I would get home and lie in bed, the books mocking me from the top shelf. None of them brought relief. I probably needed a romance novel.

In the intro to Nora Ephron’s

Wallflower at an Orgy

, she writes:

“I care that there’s a war in Indochina, and I demonstrate against it; and I care that there’s a women’s liberation movement, and I demonstrate for it. But I also go to the movies incessantly, and have my hair done once a week, and cook dinner every night, and spend hours in front of the mirror trying to make my eyes look symmetrical, and I care about those things too.”

When I read this, it felt like permission.

Last week, on an eight-hour flight back from Lima, I spent thirty minutes scrolling through the movie options on my tiny screen,

settling for

chosing

Valentine’s Day

. I have seen this movie at least ten times. The plot is simple: there are many interconnected love stories that all take place on Valentine’s Day. The characters are in love. There are conflicts that keep the love from happening. Then somehow, like in Sparks’ novels, against all odds, the love happens. It is full of clichés, and I cried several times from my very visible middle seat, while the woman to my right watched

Disclosure Day

.

Maybe I do, sometimes, need a good old cliché. I need “Today Was a Fairytale” playing over a montage of happily ever afters. But l also judge myself for needing it. And I definitely judge myself for writing about it. The line of thinking goes: If I write about something trivial, then it makes me seem trivial. Maybe middle school Lola, with her romance novel on her lap, would judge me less.

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