“Happy-For-Now”
I love a good romance novel. They satisfy my soul in their quirky characters, fun locales (even when it’s just set in a normal neighborhood, it somehow seems like a better place than real life), and the upbeat likelihood of a happy ending, which makes all the inevitable trials worth reading.
While I love this genre, I am not necessarily a believer in a happily-ever-after that just descends on you. I think that you have to create your own happy ending, which largely has to do with your mindset. I’m not talking a Pollyanna attitude here (although I will admit that I loved that movie and never saw why everyone wanted to hate on her so much). I’m talking about finding contentment even in difficult circumstances and the faith to see beyond them, which is part of what lets you recognize the happy moments when they come.
Emily Henry’s new book, Beach Read, demonstrates all of this extremely well, which makes it an instant favorite. January Andrews, a bestselling romance novelist, shows up after her father’s death at his beach house in Michigan, a second home with his mistress she never knew he had. To her surprise and irritation, her new neighbor is Gus Everett, a bestselling literary novelist who shared many of her college classes and with whom she had an intense rivalry. The two strike a bargain--each will write a novel in the other’s genre, aided by weekly lessons in rom-com and the stark nature of literary fiction. Through exploring why each writes what he/she does, they come to a deeper understanding of the beauty and importance of each genre, what it offers to readers, and what it offers each of them.
I could not put this book down, and I finished it in 24 hours. In addition to the budding romance, which was believable and tender, I also loved the realization of what books do for both the people who write them and the people who read them. Happy endings bring hope and happiness, but harder endings can also help bring understanding in the middle of difficulty.
My reading tastes lately tend toward women’s fiction, because I can count on it to end in hope, and to take me out of whatever is going on in my life. I have always loved literary fiction, but I’ve noticed my avoidance of it recently because of how stark it is, now it often looks in great detail at the difficult side of life, showing the parts of characters that they sometimes like least about themselves. I’m a character person, so I struggle to get behind something when I have a hard time liking the characters.
But as January’s father says, “...when you’re going through something hard...it’s nice to know you’re not even close to the only one.” And while it’s rewarding as a reader to find yourself in a book, it’s interesting that sometimes writers are also creating worlds to see themselves in there too. This book helped me internalize why I like to write and to read the books that I do, gave me new empathy for people who read and write differently than I do, and deepened my desire to help other people find their “happy-for-now,” which is my goal for my own writing, in all its many forms.