Confessions of a Mills & Boon Junkie

I am a Mills & Boon junkie in the making. It is inside me and I fear it – the urge to retreat into a dreamscape of thighs and kisses and happy endings, and never come back. I am very close to being one of those women who have 408 Mills & Boons under the bed. I am on the brink.

Not that I read them constantly. Sometimes I go for six months without even touching one. But inevitably, when I am loveless or annoyed, I think – yes, I can have a Mills & Boon. I can have virtual sex with a non-existent man who is made of paper. So I retreat to my bed with The Venetian’s Moonlight Mistress and live in a perfectly etched fantasy world where I get everything I want. Passion. Palaces. Punctuation. Then I feel sick and get up, and don’t tell anyone what I have done.

No not me.

The American equivalent is Harlequin, and while I read a few M&B’s and Harlequins in my teens, they were never my thing. Why? I just don’t like corny and two dimensional. I need my media to be edgy and 3 dimensional. If the author can pull off more dimensions that – then I’m all eyes, ears and whateva.

I remember my history teacher Mizz K accusing 15 or 16 year old me of being “the type” who read Mills & Boon.

I looked at her and told her I never read those.

She was surprised at my indignation and asked then what did I read.

Hmmmm – a little bit of a lot that wasn’t mass market romance. Literature from my father’s college days (he kept them in his office), NYT best sellers (when I could get them), gothic mystery romance (I liked this a lot), some historical romance, sci fi, African writers, yadda, yadda. But I didn’t rattle off all this to her.

I just said “library books”.

“Moosamboom” was the slang word for the romance books that floated about campus.

We were just girls but we knew the plots were corny and we chortled about the innocent heroines and masterful heroes.

Still, I had friends who enjoyed them.

My point is I’m not a M&B junkie, and I haven’t read anything along those lines eons, but I think this article is funny. I want to write novels steeped with romance, but I probably couldn’t write a romance. The key, according to this article is to create a heroine who is:

bland enough not to offend millions of readers and interesting enough not to offend millions of readers. Mills & Boon heroines are like madams in brothels. They essentially have to facilitate a sexual encounter between two other people – the reader, and the hero.

I can’t do bland. I don’t even know how to think bland. Do they have classes on that?

Read more about what it takes straight from the folks at Mills & Boon here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/11/mills-boon-books-romance-love

Filed under: Books, Fiction, Mills & Boon, Romance novel

Psychoanalytic critical theory down

Okay psychoanalytic critical theory down, seven to go. Some people think psychoanalysis is bunk and shouldn’t be applied to creative works. Basically this is coz they don’t want to think about themselves imo. I’m not afraid of psychology. I’m no different than e’erbody else. I have my touchy topics and I know there are aspects of myself that make me squirm (with discomfort) if/when confronted with them. But I guess how I differ from the psychology haters is that my mind is not closed to anything. And while I don’t enjoy squirming anymore than the next gal or guy, if I have to squirm to see a truth, I’ll do it.

Next stop – Marxist theory. A lotta people think the words “Marxism” = “Communism” = bad words. In the world where I grew up, Marxism had kool – chic- sophisticated connotations. Actually Marxism is neither bad or chic – it’s dry economic theory (that is unless you are the type who joneses on economic theory). Much of it is contextual and not universally applicable. Atrocities have been committed under the banner of Marxism/communism. But then again capitalists thought it was a good idea to transport kidnapped Africans across the Atlantic under worse conditions than one would treat animals or even produce and force them to work for free for the rest of their lives. So it’s one of those things where the economic theory without sin gets to cast the first stone … in some direction or other … at something.

I’m still working my way through “The Great Gatsby”. What jumps out at me – the overt colloquial racism which was just par de course at the time. I once was on a Thomas Hardy kick and had read through all of his majors and moved into the minors before I found racist comments. Hadn’t gone ten pages into my first Fitzgerald and this unfortunate American reality is already a pervasive overtone. This is quite a commentary on something but I’m not going to pin it on anything yet.

Filed under: Fiction, critical theory, Gatsby, psychoanalysis