You know those success stories where romance novel readers convince their skeptical friends and family to try a romance, and they love it? This is not one of those.
Grandma's Fridge
To my delight, my mother, who is a voracious reader of nonfiction and literary fiction, picked up a copy of Outlander a couple of months ago. She lives down the street, and whenever I visited, I would surreptitiously glance at the placement of the bookmark to see what progress she was making. At first, she seemed genuinely enthused and the bookmark moved steadily forward. After a few weeks, as the bookmark stalled, I started to doubt her protestations to the effect that “I’m reading it, really”.
Finally, I confronted her with the evidence: the bookmark had been at p. 233 for a month. She looked at me, took a deep breath, glanced at my husband (my husband! the traitor!) for moral support, and said “It’s awful honey. I can’t finish it.”
After I removed the dagger from my heart, I asked her to at least explain herself on this blog.
J: What motivated you to pick up Outlander?
GR: My younger daughter was very interested in the genre. I saw the Gabaldon books, and they looked interesting.
Mr. Racy: Cuz she was feeling a bit randy.
GR: Aye lad.
*Ten minute digression into faux Gabaldon speak.*
J: What do you usually read?
GR: I read everything. My area of abiding interest is Russian and English literature, but I am equally interested in exploration and maritime history. And I like poetry.
J: What are a few of your favorites?
GR: My favorite novel of all time is Anna Karenina. I also loved The Grapes of Wrath, which I first read about 25 years ago. It had a profound impact on me and opened my eyes to poverty.
J: What did you expect Outlander to be like when you started reading it.
GR: I thought it would be a good, fun read. I’m very interested in the Scots heritage and was looking forward to that.
J: And after the first few pages, what did you think?
GR: I was bothered by the constant stream of dialogue between Claire and Jamie, and the dialect that I thought was overused. It is a good tale, but there were elements in the way the book was constructed that prevented me from giving over to the story and the fantasy.
Mr. Racy: “Git yer haggis, right here… chopped heart and lungs… boiled in a real sheep’s stomach… tastes as good as it sounds! Good fer what ails ye, eh?”
GR: [gales of laughter]
J: [fuming] What else?
GR: Because I know something about that period in time, the fact that nothing really horrible happened to Claire after she went back in time, was too unbelievable. I also thought Clare’s assimilation was also unbelievable. No one would have had anything to lose by taking advantage of her sexually or otherwise. So why didn’t they? Surprisingly, I had no problem with the time travel. I thought the author handled that really well.
J: But how about that Jamie? Isn’t he-?
Mr. Racy: “Ah, ya silk-wearin’ buttercup…”
GR: Fegs!!
J: You guys, cut it OUT!
GR: He was a very typical hero. I thought, “Oh, here he is. Here’s the guy. He’s going to sweep her off her feet, save the day. The Scottish superman.” I mean, any normal guy would have been dead many times over.
J: So is it the fantasy elements that you didn’t enjoy?
GR: The number one reason I did not enjoy the book was the dialogue. I just don’t think Claire would have been able to understand most of what was said, for one thing. All the Scottish-ese just got in the way.
Mr. Racy: Aye woman, get me my haggis!!!
GR: Aye, me laddie!
Mr. Racy: Yer a bonnie lass. (shouting towards the living room) Where are me wee bairns??!!
J: (Growling) But back to Jamie. So is there something problematic about the fact that you have a hero and heroine and you know they are getting together problematic?
GR: I was hoping for a heroine who was going to get through the book without a Jamie. I don’t read anything with fantasy usually. I’m reading the Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) right now, which was written for a popular audience, and it’s predictable, but I like it. It’s not the predictability I don’t like, which the Wilkie has. I’m against predictability that isn’t well done.
I loved Exodus, for example. Ben is a hero. He leaves America and goes to Israel, and does superhuman things and gets the girl. But to me, he was believable.
And I loved Chewbacca, and Incredible Hulk. So I don’t have a problem with fantasy.
J: (changing tacks) Did you know you bought me my first romance novel when I had mono in 7th grade?
GR: (horrified) I didn’t.
J: (triumphant) Yes, you did. It featured a woman doing it against a tree with the hero. I had a dread fear of splinters after reading it.
GR: [hangs head, rubs eyes.] What was wrong with me? [Silence. Looks up.] You must have asked me for it. I never read them.
J: Didn’t you have friends who read romances?
GR: Yes, but not me. When I think back on it now, the woman was the heroine in the books I loved as a teen. Nancy Drew, the nurse novels [can’t remember titles], Wonder Woman was one of my favorite characters.
J: Why do you think you have never read romance novels?
GR: Cause I never had to fantasize about having a man.
Mr. Racy: [loud guffawing, followed by silence and a puzzled look.]
J: (Splutters in outrage) What? I’m happily married!!!!!!
GR: Well (backtracking), I think I’m just rooted in concrete reality. The romance novels around back in the day didn’t have the female heroines I would have liked to read about. You have to remember that I went all though Catholic schools. The strong women in that literature were always punished severely for stepping outside the role prescribed for women. I didn’t want more of the same as an adult.
J: You haven’t mentioned anything written by women among your favorites so far.
GR: Oh! Edith Wharton, Eudora Welty, Mary McCarthy, Zelda Fitzgerald are some of my favorites.
J: Was there anything you liked about Outlander?
GR: Yes, I liked the part when Claire was figuring out medicinal techniques, and how to mix herbs. I liked Claire in general, and how she translated her talent from the 20th century to the past.
J: Will you ever finish Outlander?
GR: No.
J: Will you ever read another romance novel recommended by your youngest daughter?
GR: No.
J: Why not? You don’t like love stories?
GR: [The woman is not giving in. Sooooooo typical. Can you win an argument with your mother? I can’t.] I do enjoy love stories. I loved The Age of Innocence, Anna Karenina, the BBC Cranford series.
J: But things don’t end up well in those books for the lovers.
GR: They just seem to struggle more realistically.
J: Have you ever read a love story that you liked which ended happily?
GR: Geez, I read so much, Jess, I can’t remember. I guess if it ended happily it wouldn’t be worth writing.
J: Why not?
GR: I think human beings are naturally attracted to tragedy and are always sort of looking out at how people go through tragedy and how they solve it. It’s resolution that the reader wants, one way of the other. I think Anna Karenina would have been a successful novel if Anna had gone on with Vronsky and her husband looked the other way, which he was willing to do, but that’s not resolution.
J: Why do you read?
GR: Reading is my hobby. I love books. I love books all around me. I hate giving them away, although I do. It’s like parting with friends, but there are people who love to read and can’t afford their own books. It’s therapeutic, it’s educational, it leads me to new places.
J: What do you make of your youngest daughter’s reading habits.
GR: I find them amusing. That’s all I’m going to say.
[Just wait dear reader. This is a woman who always has something to say.]
[five seconds, 4, 3, 2, 1--]
Ok… I’m not judging it. I think it’s a very, very interesting activity, that whole genre. The romance novels served important functions for women who were at home 50 years ago when I began parenting. Most of my friends devoured them and exchanged them. You’d have a cigarette and sit down and read your story. You took it everywhere. But I never read them even then.
J: What did you read, then?
GR: I first got serious about reading in 1956-7 when I began to read Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Dreiser. I began my journey with the American novelists.
J; Who did you talk to about those books?
GR: Women I knew didn’t really talk to each other in those days. And they didn’t acknowledge reading them to each other. It was not considered appropriate. There was a bias against meeting other women during the workday, when you were supposed to be taking care of your kids. Our roles were very clear. Remember when JFK ran for President, and people started having coffee klatches to talk about politics. So we began to have coffee hours, and that was the beginning. Invariably, the discussion would turn to other things.
J: When did you read a feminist book? Was it Betty Friedan? Late 1960s?
GR: Yes, but I had had very strong role models. All she did for me was legitimize what I was already feeling. In my own family, my mother and my aunts were very strong. The prescribed role for me in the 50s and 60s felt like being in a strait jacket.
J: Was there any connection between your fiction and nonfiction reading?
GR: I don’t think I realized the impact of my reading on me, until the late 1960s. Then I was able to put everything I knew and read and experienced into a context. That’s what Friedan did for us.
Sooo cool that she’s so well read. But not cool that she looks down on the genre and believes people have to suffer greatly in order to feel real. And Outlander isn’t even a romance by true romance novel standards!
Will anybody ever understand us? *cries*
Your mom sounds wonderful though. Such a hoot!
I bet a literary discussion with her would be amazing. Or…terrifying. Either way, awesome!
The “nurse books” are the Sue Barton books, by Helen Dore Boylston. I read them and loved them as a girl, too. I especially loved the overall ROMANCE plot arc — she meets the handsome doctor in book one, marries him in book 5 (numerous things keep them apart, including her desire to have a real nursing career before “settling down” to be a doctor’s wife), and spends books 6 & 7 married with children. I loved how the heroine learned to be both strong in herself and a good partner in a relationship. But then that’s one of the things I love about the Outlander series, too — watching two very strong characters work out how to be themselves AND be a couple AND deal with what life throws at them.
My mom doesn’t read romance, either. She almost exclusively reads mysteries. I like many of the ones she has recommended, but I know better than to try to get her to cross genres. Definitely different strokes for different folks, and overall that’s a good thing.
In my own reading, I’m all about happy endings and tidy resolutions. Just how I roll.
Your mother reminds me a bit of my mother, who read all of Dickens, Austen, Trollope, etc. and had a great fondness for English authors of “women’s fiction” from a certain period: Charlotte M. Yonge, Barbara Pym — that sort of thing.
I asked my mother to read the Wyckerley trilogy by Gaffney; she got through To Love and To Cherish, but didn’t approve (or didn’t enjoy) To Have and To Hold. (I recall she found it too “unpleasant,” which is exactly the sort of equivocal word she would use.) But then she read something truly mass market (not Danielle Steele, but the romance equivalent: Nora Roberts, perhaps? my memory’s failing me, which I really hate) and she actually liked that better because it wasn’t pretending to be something else. (More equivocation, of course. That was my mother…)
This interests me, because it suggests that your mother is extrapolating what she enjoys (and many others, to be sure) as being the result of human nature. I would disagree that her tastes are universal. I don’t like tragedy; I don’t want to read about unhappy people, except for the brief penultimate section of a romance before the HEA. I don’t want my characters to suffer anything worse than doubt that there will be a HEA for them. Fictional characters’ suffering doesn’t teach me anything and all it does is remind me that bad stuff happens for no particularly good reason.
I prefer the message of romances: Good stuff happens for good reasons!
I’m feeling like the interview was cut short. Where’s the link to the extended version?
Oh, and maybe we can have another Mr. Racy post. I enjoyed the one where you discussed the history in one of Sherry Thomas’ books.
Umm, I read a lot of romance….. but Outlander was a DNF for me. I think I chucked it before the end of the second chapter. Maybe it’s the historian in me, but it was just too much of a fantasy, and too unrealistic, for my taste.
Perhaps you might slip your Grandmother a contemporary sometime? Pass it off as women’s fiction, rather than romance, if necessary. Maybe one of La Nora’s non-paranormal ones. Or perhaps a gritty romantic suspense….
lol, this was great. It’s really hard to convince a literary fiction/classic literature person over to romance, but that was a valiant effort! Frankly, I can’t understand people who don’t appreciate a happy ending. And who wouldn’t like Jamie?
@JenB: Well, I haven’t started working on her seriously yet. But she’s 75 years old, and pretty set in her literary ways…
@SonomaLass: Oh, thanks for the names of the nurse books. I know Harlequin published a bunch of nurse/doctor books early on, but I knew it couldn’t be those she was referring to.
@Magdalen: I agree that she is putting forward a view that is not universal as if it is. On the other hand, part of how I defend romance is to say that it deals with love, and love is a very serious important thing, often presented pretty tragically, at least for a time, in romance, and also to say that romance deals with other tragic things, such as war, abuse, gender roles, addiction, etc..
@Bronwyn Parry: My mother has enjoyed historical fiction, and her parents came over from England, so I figured she had some investment in the general history. Also, it’s not solely romance focused, so I thought it would be a good starter book. Maybe I should have gone with straight romance after all.
@AQ: Laughing. Well, it was cut short, by the fact that my kids were begging me to go home so they could try out their Christmas toys. There is no longer version. As for Mr. Racy, unless I read one of his non-romance books, I doubt he’ll be making another appearance. But I will tell him he is in demand!
@Roni @ FictionGroupie: Thanks. She did read over 200 pages, and I really can’t ask for more than that.
My mom is also a second wave feminist activist who has been single by choice almost from my birth 40 years ago. So, I don’t think romantic love has as much of a hold on her personally as it might for many women. She’s also a very deeply spiritual Christian — she goes on retreats and hangs out with Buddhist nuns, etc. So I think romance is just not where she’s at, YKWIM?
You know what, your Racy Mommy has a good point about Claire probably not understanding Jamie because of his accent. But I love this book to pieces and can put aside some things that don’t make any sense.
Major swoonage or Jamie, that redhead virgin Scottish hero of my reading heart.
Oh, oh, oh, how I want you to make her read Eva Ibbotson’s The Countess Below the Stairs/The Secret Countess! It, being my favourite Ibbotson, popped into my head the second I saw Russian and English literature together in the same sentence. It’s not strictly a romance. I feel that the romance is what forms the book, but it’s very show-and-not-tell, and focuses on a lovely, large cast of characters. Also, the writing… *siiiiiiiiigh* Also, also! It’s classified as YA so it wouldn’t actually be asking her to read another romance!
And now I’m all fired up, so tomorrow morning I’m going to call the friend who borrowed my copy in March and pester her until she agrees to give it back!
Hmm. Could you tempt him with Georgette Heyer’s The Spanish Bride? It’s set during the Peninsular war and contains plentiful extracts from the autobiography of Harry Smith (who much later ended up in South Africa) and his colleagues. I checked some of the anecdotes, and some of them have been lifted almost verbatim from Harry Smith’s autobiography or from John Kincaid’s Adventures in the Rifle Brigade. Heyer’s novel is mostly about the progress of the campaign in the Peninsula (beginning at the siege of Badajoz), but it does include the love story between Harry and Juana Smith (who gave her name to Ladysmith in South Africa).
I think that many readers who love literary books and non-fiction are turned off by the huge amount of dialogue in genre fiction, romance or otherwise. I remember, when I came out of the 6 year stupor that was Englist Lit and Philosophy majors and picked up my first romance since forever, how the running dialogue between the couple and lack of description bothered me for…oh, half an hour
. I cut my teeth reading categories as a 10 yr-old, though, so it was no problem finding my inner happy girl again 
.
I didn’t like Outlander either, though I read it a second time because so many people whose opinions on books I trust loved it. Thought I must have missed something. I did like Gabaldon’s ‘Lord John’ book though.
My mum doesn’t read fantasy: struggled through to the fourth Harry Potter to be able to communicate with the grandchildren, then gave it up murmuring about the woman needing an editor.
But despite being a similar generation to your mum – she’s 77 in January – she would have read Heyer and Stewart – so she’s not averse to a HEA. (I’ve never thought about it before, but I’m wondering if the feminist movement just passed us by here. People’s ideas and behaviours changed, but I don’t know any women of that generation who felt political about it. I suppose politics here was dominated by other issues – maybe we just adopted different attitudes by default.)
Mr. Racy cracks me up! My mom has always read romance, but we have different tastes. She likes sweet categories. My husband has never tried one, not even mine. And I dedicated the last book to him! I’ve had better luck with my friends and sister in law. My bff loves Lisa Kleypas now.
You know, and I’ve said this before re people to whom romance does not appeal: fair enough. In the same way that I *know* that I’ll never be into crime fiction or horror, some people will just never be into romance. Because the thing that makes romance readers like romance (and upon which I cannot quite put my finger on – though I swear I am this close) just does not appeal to them.
Also, when someone asks you to articulate why you don’t like a particular type of book, you inevitably to search around in your own personal make-up for those reasons. If someone asked me why I don’t like crime fiction, although I’m not really sure why, I’d probably say something about being non-plussed by mysteries and disliking reading about murders, particularly grpahic and prurient descriptions of murders. And then someone who liked crime fiction might feel that I was inferring that anyone who likes crime fiction is reading it for prurient details and feel justly put-out. I don’t really see any way round this since I don’t think people who are emphatically uninterested in romance can be converted. They might enjoy particular individual romances for particular reasons but that won’t convert them to romance reading if the appeal simply isn’t there.
Perhaps though, if you wanted to try again with your mother, you should try something like Fingersmith or Tipping the Velvet, both by Sarah Waters. These are literary fiction but they do have a core romantic storyline (particularly Fingersmith) and each case a HEA. They are complex, rich, and since the H/H are both female, there is no sense at the end of the protagonists being absorbed by mainstream society.
Ooo, good suggestion for Sarah Waters.
What a great interview. I love your family. I sent a link to my husband, because it reminded me of some of our silly conversations when I was first reading Outlander.
Love the conversation *g* – and Mr. Racy’s interjections – lol My mother was a great reader but romance wasn’t her thing – of course they didn’t have it in it’s present form then – but I don’t think I could have got her to read it anyway. She would have been horrified by all the sex. I think I might have had better luck with my dad, who was also a big reader – but then that would have been somewhat embarrassing for me with all the sex and it being my dad ;-0
“They just seem to struggle more realistically.”
That’s just it for me. I don’t realistic struggle – I get that in real life, witness it in the lives of my friends and family, read about it in the paper, mourn its asynchronous distribution throughout the world. That’s it. I do not want it in my (leisure) reading. I’d much rather read about a trek through the barren dessert of the demonarchy or a duke’s trembling affection for (he thinks!) an actress for the precise reason that they are NOT real.
That said, I skipped about 150 pages in Outlander (had to read the ending) but have no plans to read the rest of the series. The whole affair was too much like work for me. Maybe one of Jo Goodman’s would be more to her liking – perhaps If His Kiss is Wicked? Or maybe Victoria Dahl’s second historical, A Rake’s Guide to Pleasure? I know, I know, but maybe if you took the cover and title page off? True, she said she wouldn’t take a romance rec from you, but she said nothing about refusing the suggestion of a Random Lady from the Internet now, did she?
Momma Racy sounds like a very cool lady.
Your mom rocks. Tell her they’re re-running Cranford on PBS right now, and starting January 10 they’ll be running new episodes, first time broadcast in the US.