The Pandemic, Escapist Media, and the Plot is Optional Origin Story

Nearly 4 years ago, I got fired from a job, immediately got another, and then the world shut down. I know this is not a unique story. We all have variants of this. We all went into states of shock, stress, and grief. For some of us that grief was worse than others, and I am beyond fortunate to not have lost anyone close, though we do all know someone we lost. All of this caused my brain to go weird, and I know that’s not a very descriptive or scientific term, but it’s the best I can come up with.

I didn’t want to think about anything serious. I didn’t want to go back to reading the weird fiction, high fantasy, dystopic science fiction, horror, or nonfiction about dark topics that I was used to reading, so I turned to my comfort zone: romance.

Okay, I’m going to do a flashback here. Way back in 2010, I was a college student at the University of New Orleans struggling through my classes due to a variety of undiagnosed and untreated mental health problems. I had a small support network of other struggling college students, who, while wonderful to spend time with, did not have the capacity to make sure I got help along with themselves. We did all sorts of whacky bonding activities: swimming in Lake Pontchartrain (a lake many people would tell you not to swim in), movies nights, and eventually a book club. Well, the book club started out as a joke really. One of my roommates declared that we would read the romance novel with the most ridiculous cover and summary she could find. She found On a Wicked Wind by Linda Jones. It has a workaholic business woman, time travel, and pirates! I was in love, but since we were doing this ironically and I was under the sway of peer pressure, I kept that revelation to myself. I don’t think I was very good at hiding my enthusiasm, however, because very soon folks started giving me other romance novels with shirtless men on the covers. I would laugh it off, but then squirrel them away to read when my course work was light and I wasn’t assign the Great Gatsby for the fifth time. (Don’t get me wrong, I love that book, but seriously 5 times. Don’t become an English minor, kiddos.) They were my coziest guilty pleasure, my lifeline for when times were tough.

The pandemic made times tough, but I had time to read. I had too much time to ready really. I read and read and read and all of it romance. I fell into world where people fell in love at balls, on battlefields, in space, and just meeting each other at the store. Books where women fell in love with dukes, fae princes, werewolves, and blue aliens. Everything was shaky and scary, and to some extent still is, but I had books full of softness and love and good triumphing over evil.

It’s hard to get past wondering whether or not these count as “real” books. It’s hard to deal with the self doubt around the fact that I used to read and analyze the classics, but now I’m more concerned about “will they or won’t they?” What does it mean about me that I’d rather read something with a title like “Railed by the Demogorgon Mailman” than War and Peace? Am I getting stupider? Ultimately I don’t think so, and I will defend these works as much as I can.

And from the idea of cheering for these literary underdogs and wanting other people to appreciate this genre, I started to brainstorm about a podcast. I went through various iterations in my head from reading other people’s love letters and then talking about a book to reaching out to authors to try and get them to talk to me. Ultimately, I decided that I would get my friends with varying degrees of familiarity with the genre to talk with me about books that I foist upon them.

So it all ends up where it began: my brain in shambles while I put together a book club.