In 2010, I went into a bookshop and my life changed.
That bookshop was Intrigue, the (sadly now defunct) romance bookshop in Canberra. I'd been cultivating a romance-reading habit for some time at this point - like many people, I got my start by pinching my grandma's Mills & Boons - but, dissatisfied with what I could find in mainstream bookstores, I was looking to broaden my horizons.
I wasn't disappointed. The selection in Intrigue was much, much broader than was available anywhere else (while specialist romance bookstores have been popping up all over the world for the past 10 years or so, Australia was an extremely early adopter, mostly because local readers were finding it hard to access US books that had not had a local printing). They had a combination of new and second-hand books, and I perused them eagerly, spending at least 90 minutes standing there and reading blurbs.
It was on this first (of many) trips to Intrigue that I picked up Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie - the book that made me want to be a romance writer.
Welcome to Temptation centres on Sophie Dempsey, the daughter of a conman who's trying to go straight. She and her sister Amy have a small business making wedding videos, and they come to a small town called Temptation because they've been hired to do some more expansive movie-making - for which their client, it seems, might have a vision that's bordering on pornographic.
That's when she meets Phineas "Phin" Tucker - single father, bookstore owner, and mayor of a council which (despite his best efforts) tends towards the conservative, and doesn't look kindly on the two filmmaking sisters who have just blown into town.
I was utterly captivated by this book. The romance between Sophie and Phin is both deeply complicated and deeply compelling; their chemistry is electric, their connection profound, but their compatibility - on paper, anyway - is definitely something that required negotiation. Crusie's depiction of their love story neatly blends passion (the overwhelming feeling of falling in love) with intimacy (the hard work and commitment it takes to actually be with another person).
But beyond this, what really struck me about Welcome to Temptation were the intricacies of the relationships Sophie and Phin have with other people. They're not just lovers: Sophie is a sister and a daughter, Phin is a son and a father, and they're both navigating tricky positions within the town community - him as mayor, her as someone who a lot of the citizens of Temptation would like to chase away.
The reason I say that my life changed when I walked into Intrigue and picked up this book is that it was Welcome to Temptation that really made me realise what a romance novel could be. Even I - who was already reading a fair amount of romance at this point in my life - still fell into the trap of thinking of the genre purely as a guilty pleasure: a form of formulaic fiction, a sort of junk food for the brain.
What this book showed me, though, was the way that romance could also be messy, complex and real. The romance genre's mandatory happy ending is not something that invalidates the quality of everything that has come before, rendering it automatically simple, saccharine and sentimental. Rather, it explores what it means to do something fundamentally human: to love someone, and to build a life with them, often as part of a broader community.
I thought a lot about Welcome to Temptation when I was writing my latest novel, A Study in Sparkling. A few common features aside - both feature a protagonist who's a single parent, for instance - they're not terribly similar romance novels in terms of plot; but those bedrock writing craft lessons I learnt from Crusie's work profoundly inspired my approach.
A Study in Sparkling is the story of Fiona Fisher, a single mother of three kids who is slowly putting her life back together after the devastating discovery that her husband had a secret second family. Luckily, she's had some support - her brothers, from whom she had been quite distant, have showed up to help her in ways she never would have anticipated - but no one has really been as helpful as Satoshi Tsukamoto, the owner of her favourite wine bar, who has somehow become one of her closest friends. And when Satoshi offers to help her put herself back together in a very, ahem, particular way - how can Fiona refuse?
This is, on the surface, quite a high-concept, soap-operatic premise. There are a lot of romance novels which draw on elements of melodrama this way (indeed, it can be a core part of the genre's appeal). However, rather than leaning into the spectacle and sensationalism of it all, what I really wanted to do in this novel was think about what it would really feel like to be betrayed the way Fiona has been, and explore just how hard it would be to come back from something like that. How do you learn to trust someone again, after being so profoundly humiliated?
Love isn't easy. If there's one thing I learnt from Welcome to Temptation, it was that: not just that the course of true love never runs smooth, but that it is in the hurdles and the bumps and the potholes that real romance actually lies. Nothing is more human than mess - and while it's often derided for being simple, no genre better explores that mess than romance fiction does.
Jodi McAlister, PhD, is an author and academic from Kiama, Australia. She is the author of An Academic Affair and the Marry Me Juliet trilogy. She is currently a senior lecturer in writing, literature, and culture at Deakin University in Melbourne and is the president of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.
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