I was weaned on romance novels. My mother had every book that Danielle Steele ever wrote, and I would spend summers under shady trees gorging on them. One summer, my mother wanted to encourage my reading habits, so we made something of a game of my literary compulsion. Before breakfast each day, I would read the first chapter of a new romance novel and during our meal I would make my predictions for what would happen and who the leading lady would end up in bed with along the way.
By the end of that summer, I had an almost 100% accuracy rate at plot prediction. Unfortunately, being a prodigy at predicting formulaic chick lit isn’t a particularly valuable skill. And as I matured and got in touch with my queerness, the books lost their appeal. The predictability that I once found comforting began to feel stifling and a bit hopeless — there was simply no kind of love in those novels that I wanted for myself or could see myself in.
