I was looking for reviews of Mary Jo Putney’s The Rake, when I found a 2004 AAR Interview with her where she makes this interesting comment (emphasis mine):

“[Interviewer:] There’s been a lot of discussion on the message boards about how romances just aren’t what they once were. What’s your take on that?

“[MJP]: I think it’s more that the genre has matured and a lot of the plots and characters have been thoroughly, one might say exhaustively, explored. When I read Georgette Heyer’s The Unknown Ajax, it was the first historical romance I’d ever read with a smuggling subplot. How many smuggling plots have there been since then? Enough so that it’s very hard to do that storyline with a lot of freshness. The same is true of numerous other plots, and the problem is compounded by publishers encouraging authors to write only in the handful of settings that tend to sell the best. This is true in both historical and contemporary romance – the Regency historical and the infamous cowboy/baby/bride books. In the hands of experienced writers, these stories can still sing but it’s hardly surprising that long-term readers are feeling restless. They want the same kind of “hit” that they got from romances when they first fell in love with them, but it’s just not the same after years have passed and hundreds of books have been read. They want books that have the same emotional fulfillment, but are different enough to feel fresh. It’s a difficult challenge.”

MJP used the metaphor of a drug induced high to explain why some readers become dissatisfied with romance. In the romance blogosphere, the language of addiction is pretty prevalent: people join “reading addict challenges”, they grade novels on their potency (considering some romance novels “crack”), they talk about the compulsion to purchase and read.  If you read the NIDA Research Report on heroin addiction, and you have a good sense of humor, you’ll see you can extend the metaphor — and that’s all it is, although it is interesting to wonder why this particular metaphor is dominant –  surprisingly far.

I’m not concerned with whether the “addiction” to romance is harmful, although if you are, you can check out this 2007 op-ed in the online Woman to Woman section of the Atlanta Journal Constitution that suggested that an addiction to romance (actually, even exposure to it) can harm marriages (with a long comment thread in which authors Nora Roberts, Megan Hart, Lauren Dane, and Jacquie d’Alessandro weigh in), and there are certainly plenty of testimonials like this one out there.

Instead, I’m wondering about the phenomenon of reader fatigue, the “slumps” and “dry spells” we are all so familiar with. Has MJP pointed to the cause? Is there a natural cycle where you discover romance, get the initial high, and then get burned out trying to recapture it? Is there a law of diminishing returns on romance reading?

Will I be done with romance in another year?

Related posts:

  1. Stock siblings in romance Have you ever noticed that in romance series featuring male siblings, you can often find the same character types? This...
  2. Win my Copy of Never Romance a Rake Hey, would you like to have my copy of Liz Carlyle’s Never Romance a Rake? I thought it might be...
  3. Review, Never Romance a Rake, Liz Carlyle Cover comment: I love the covers in this series, but recall that I am pretty time period insensitive. Is there...
  4. “Kick Ass” Romance Heroines I stumbled across this comment, with which I totally disagree, from author Lisa Marie Rice in her posting “Five Things...
  5. Some romance review sites I can’t figure out I have a list of bookmarks for romance review sites in which I trust, and I’ve put most of those...
  6. On Male Sluts and Man Whores Lea’s AAR review of Susan Mallery’s Sizzling contains this interesting comment: “I personally found it hard to hand Reid much...