Escapism and Vision

It’s been a hard week to write love stories.

I am a fervent believer in the inherent worth of romance as topic and genre, and I have a fine line in raised eyebrow and cutting commentary for anyone who attempts to undervalue it. But I also know that literature of any genre is significantly further up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs than food, water, shelter and physical safety, which have been violently ripped away from people in the past week1.

Which are ripped away from people every week, every day, every hour.

It’s very easy to wonder what the point is. Why bother making art, or sewing, or reading, or walking by a river in the bright light of a warm afternoon, when there is so much brutality in the world? When people hurt each other, so much, and so often?

Reading doesn’t inherently make you a better person, although I do think that reading outside your own experience can make it easier to empathise in real life. But for those for whom reading is a pleasurable activity, the pleasure is its own argument. Sometimes, I need reading to challenge me, inspire me, shake me up. Sometimes, I need comfort reading because I need to be comforted.

The truth is, figuring out how to be an imperfectly good person in a wildly imperfect world is a difficult task, but I think—once we meet those basic needs—it’s the most important one we’ve got. And it’s true that you can be kind to others without being kind to yourself, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to give from abundance than ration out from scarce resources.

I am not arguing for indifference or callousness. I don’t have a high opinion of selfish, self-obsessed “self-care”2. I think that if you have abundance, in financial resources, time, energy, privilege, or emotional reserves, you have a moral and societal obligation to give.

But you do not have to give until there is nothing left. You do not help the world by harming yourself. You merely add to the tally of suffering.

Escapism

One thing romance reading can offer is an escape. People sneer about “escapism”, or escapist literature, and I have never understood that. It feels a bit like pointing at the lifeboats on the Titanic and going “ugh, what do you need those for?”. If you’ve never wanted to get out of yourself for a while, well, gee, good for you, maybe leave some smugness for the rest of us?

Sometimes, you need an escape from. Maybe from yourself or your environment, physical, emotional, or intellectual. As a bullied kid, reading was my refuge and the library my safest space. Even now, when I am a confident adult, when I walk into a library, I am setting something down. My breathing deepens and my pace slows. 3

When I read deeply—not the snatched reading of a few pages over dinner, or before my alarm goes off—it feels like sliding into cool water. It feels as if I am both submerged and buoyed up4.

Another image: When Macbeth murders his sleeping king, who is also his kinsman and his guest, he despairs that the deed is so horrific that he “shall sleep no more”, that sleep, which “knits up the ravel’d sleave of care” will never come to him again5. I think about this image all the time. Shakespeare meant “sleave” — a skein of thread or yarn, which in this case has come undone and needs to be wound up again — but like many people, on first reading I mistook it for “sleeve” and that’s what I see - worn-out clothing, stressed by wear, but mended by a loving hand and restored to good order and good use.

Reading can do that for me. In escaping, I am restored to myself.

Vision

And sometimes, reading is an escape to.

Pleasure is good, but radical pleasure is even better. I have spoken (publicly!) about writing queer joy as an act of resistance and the value of showing especially young queer folk the joyful possibilities of queer life.

I am writing a romance series set in a glamorous magazine publishing house where HR actually cares about the staff and no one is blatantly fatphobic. It’s not because I think Conde Nast is paradise, but because it so obviously isn’t. I am writing a series where the mythological Hera’s reputation as a shrewish, jealous wife who punishes her husband’s mistresses is a misogynistic lie, because I am so sick of men blaming women for their own bad choices.

This isn’t world-changing stuff! I’m writing fun, light romantic fiction, with a lot of banter and some steamy sex scenes. But it’s also political, because all art is political. Because every time you imagine a world for others, you’re making choices.

I want a better world, for queer folk, for fat people, for people of colour, for women and youth and refugees and indigenous peoples and the terrorised and enslaved and unhoused. So in my own, imperfect way, I write a better world. And in my own imperfect understanding, I read it, and imagine the joyful possibilities.

Imagining a better world is not the sole step to realising it. Imagination does not replace action. But it is a necessary precursor, and sometimes, when I am exhausted and depleted, imagination is what I escape to.

I hope you are safe. I hope you are well. I hope you have abundance in your life and that you can share it with those who have less.

I wish you comfort and joy and escape and that bright vision of a better world.

Breathe. Float.

Now. What’s next?