Happily Ever After

The Romance Story in Popular Culture

By: Catherine M. Roach

Narrated by: Johanna Oosterwyk

"Find your one true love, and live happily ever after". The trials of love and desire provide perennial story material, from the biblical Song of Songs to Disney's princesses, but perhaps most provocatively in the romance novel, a genre known for tales of fantasy and desire, sex and pleasure. Hailed on the one hand for its women-centered stories that can be sexually liberating and criticized on the other for its emphasis on male-female coupling and mythical happy endings, romance fiction is a multimillion-dollar publishing phenomenon, creating national and international societies of enthusiasts, practitioners, and scholars.

Catherine M. Roach, alongside her romance-writer alter ego, Catherine LaRoche, guides the listener deep into Romancelandia, where the smart and the witty combine with the sexy and seductive to explore why this genre has such a grip on readers and what we can learn from the romance novel about the nature of happiness, love, sex, and desire in American popular culture.

©2016 Catherine M. Roach (P)2016 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"A fascinating account of what is at stake in stories we love about love." (Brenda Weber, author of Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity)

"[I]mpressively smart...a lively and memorable read!" (Eric Murphy Selinger, executive editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies)

"Roach's attempt to do emotional justice to the genre should satisfy academics and fans alike." ( Publishers Weekly)

Overall good

It's overall good, there's a lot in here that's interesting. I also find aspects of it irritatingly worthy. I'm more interested in discussing romance beyond whether it's harmful or helpful to women. I also find it interesting that she repeats the continued misinterpretation of the Bechdel test, which is to treat it as some abstract measure of feminist credibility for a work of fiction, but in reality it's a test designed to show how many works just absolutely have no possibility for romantic/sexual intimacy between two women. It's about queerness. I also find her handwringing over her enjoyment of being at the romance conference and her repeated "but I'm very privileged" comments, to be... honestly, also rather boring. Yes, yes you are, you ivy league educated, well-intentioned creature, your class shows up very well, but that's not what's interesting here. I want to hear more about what the romance narrative *is*