For Christmas, I received a Politics & Prose gift card for an amount so exorbitant that, when the bookseller scanned my receipt for the remaining balance at the register, he said, “You have…a lot left on here.” The point: your girl had money to blow on books. I was also diving into my last big round of revisions for my novel and there were books I felt I should read, books that would propel me to push my prose further (that would wrestle away the crutch of on the nose alliteration. Or overused maxims like “on the nose.” Or reveal the definition of “maxim.”)

So: on December 26th, I barged into P&P bundled in my finest winter wear, armed with hundreds of dollars I could only use at that one place—not, for instance, to fix my toilet or my dripping A.C unit or get my radiator bled…

I moved around the displays, eyeing books I’d contemplated purchasing before but had failed to for one reason or another. One of those books was James by Percival Everett.

You’ve seen it: as a #1 New York Times bestseller, as reviewed in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, as shortlisted for the Booker Prize, winner of the National Book Award, soon-to-be feature film produced by Steven Spielberg, sitting pretty with 4.5 stars on Goodreads—a charmed life for any work of literary fiction.

This novel, no doubt, could teach me Something.

I picked up a copy and read the flap as if I didn’t already know the hook—a retelling of Huckleberry Finn but from the perspective of the escaped slave, Jim. I tucked it under my armpit to purchase. But fuck! I didn’t feel like reading a retelling of a classic novel I didn’t care about. There was a time when I didn’t have a choice but to read Huck Finn but now I could read about people getting railed for ten pages straight instead and no one could stop me.

I agonized before that silly display, torn between obligation and desire. (Huck Finn retelling/people getting railed. Huck Finn retelling/people getting railed.) I compromised and bought Everett’s The Trees which was a supernatural detective story (also shortlisted for the Booker—I was still on track to learn Something).

But fuck! I got home and didn’t care about learning anything anymore. I wanted to read about love, sex, desire, longing, people pretending they’re not horny then tossing the performance out the window. All I cared about was tracking down that tall dark-haired guy with glasses on the red line who looked like a Daddy Long Legs spider. I wanted to read a Percival Everett-written fan fiction about me and Daddy Long Legs, not Huck Finn’s friend!

I closed the novel about twenty pages in, which I’d done a bunch that year, realizing I had a bigger problem on my hands.

I was a fucking traitor.

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It’s a bit too late for coal in my stocking but y’all, I’ve been bad this year. Well, technically I was bad last year, though I imagine my insurgent reading habits will carry me well into 2025 on a gilded throne resting on the thick shoulders of two 6’3 men—sorry.

The problem isn’t that I’ve been reading more romance. I am pro-romance, pro-genre. It’s that I’m a literary fiction writer and I should be reading literary fiction—it’s my job. Many writers have the books they read in service of their writing and those they read for entertainment and sometimes (hopefully) there’s healthy overlap. But something has been happening to me for months: my writer self and my reader self are becoming increasingly estranged. It’s like the ground’s ripped open beneath me and I’m the cartoon character standing wide-legged over the gap as the two ledges move apart, Litfic on one side, romance on the other.

Before you clobber the assertion that romance and Litfic must inhabit opposite sides of the literary spectrum, hear me out: I’ve made amany random ass appearances on this platform—in comment sections, notes, posts—arguing that literary fiction and romance aren’t inherently at odds. In fact, my whole creative mission is to revise this notion. Litfic (like commercial or upmarket fiction) isn’t, to my mind, an actual genre. Horror is a genre. Mystery, Sci Fi, Fantasy. In the market, though, literary fiction operates as a genre.

But Litfic as a genre has looser parameters. It’s more a style of writing, an approach to storytelling. There are expectations but they’re less sharply defined. These expectations can be paired with other genres without friction, the same way romance and fantasy don’t undermine each other when combined. We see literary speculative fiction all the time! Kelly Link, George Saunders, Carmen Maria Machado, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. But who, really, is writing literary contemporary romance? The challenge is romance as a genre is often positioned as commercial while literary fiction, by definition, is not commercial (though it can of course attain commercial success: see Mz. Rooney).

Because of this, I’m constantly feeling caught between the two genres. Not even upmarket romances can soothe this existential ache.

This year, romance beat literary fiction by a wide margin—a wholly new development in my reading life. I want to know why.

Earlier this month, I came across a post called, “The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction.” The title is self-explanatory. It was…interesting. I don’t think literary fiction is dead—and even so things are resurrected all the time, like paranormal romance, remember that?

I thought agent Danielle Bukowski wrote a great piece on the current state of Litfic and agent Anna Sproul-Latimer wrote an important response piece too. I agree with Courtney Maum’s contextualization of the first article:

“I’ve been thinking about this article [“The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction.”] for a while and it feels important to me to offer up another angle in to this debate.

Publishing, like any industry, creates, sells, and pushes what people are buying. If we are seeing the Big Fives pushing out more romance, thrillers, romantsy, crime and easily digestible “happy ending” fiction, that’s not because that’s the Big Five’s current jam, it’s what readers are buying…

I have witnessed, personally, deep care and commitment to many of my peers’ work from their Big Five publishers and I’ve experienced care and professional nurturing there, myself. But if readers continue to only buy downgrade commercial fiction, publishers will continue to seek it out and acquire it. That’s the law of supply and demand. So change the demand! You have the power to do that. Slowly. Purchase by purchase.

Want more literary fiction from Big Five publishers? BUY MORE LITERARY FICTION FROM BIG FIVE PUBLISHERS.”

I am part of the gang of readers jumping literary fiction in the lunchroom even though literary fiction and I made each other friendship bracelets the year before!

Yes, I’ve bought a lot of literary fiction in the last year. So much!! More than I could afford pre-gift card, like, wtf, I live up the street from the library, why not go there some time? But I haven’t read much of it.

And oh, the shame! Of course I want Litfic to do well!! In the gaudy indulgent plays of my mind in which I’m a successful author, I always cast myself as a Literary Writer.

So why am I struggling so much to read a genre I’ve always championed?

Here are some reasons I think I read less literary fiction last year (Imagine me pulling out a disgusting, crumpled piece of paper from my coat pocket):

I’M BURNT OUT LIKE EVERYONE ELSE:

Articles abound about why readers turned to romance and romantasy in droves during the pandemic, a trend that’s persisted. As a journalist, I’ve covered the Charleston church shooting, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, several elections, including the last one, hurricanes and other climate disasters, a spate of school shootings, the war in Gaza. Things did not become hard in 2024, but maybe I finally felt the burden of it then. Romance is the genre of hope, love, connection—why not gravitate towards those things when they feel most absent?

I KNOW TOO MUCH:

No, I’m not an evil robot from the future. What I mean is, I know too much about how the sausage is made. I’ve spent the last few years heavily revising my novel and so I’ve been thinking about craft—and the publishing business—with an intensity atypical of the average reader. I’m aware of literary tricks (I see what you did there, fellow writer), I don’t simply dislike a story, I can pin down why, which is worse because then I drum up solutions (the pacing problems in the first half could be fixed by combining chapters 3 and 4…). I have even—oh God—on occasion whipped out a pen like a little prick and physically edited a novel I’m supposed to be enjoying. In other words, I’ve won at creating a miserable reading experience for myself.

And to this point…

ROMANCE AND LITFIC HAVE DIFFERENT EXPECTATIONS:

It’s not that the bar is necessarily higher for literary fiction than for romance, it’s that the bars sit in entirely different places. When I pick up a romance, I’m not expecting to be blown apart by its sharp philosophical observation or moved to underline paragraph after paragraph of stunning prose. I would love that, but that’s not why I read romance. I read it to feel my heart hammering with delight, to invest unhealthily in the fictional relationship, to read about people getting railed. I know how it ends and therefore the question is not that but what will the characters do to reach that inevitable end. In some ways, the bar for Litfic is higher because I’m a litfic writer—I don’t have a neutral relationship to it, but a charged one. Because it has loose conventions, literary fiction has the tall task of having to surprise you without alienating you. Surprises, after all, are risks.

PERSONAL TASTE: I JUST WANT A MUFFIN, HONESTLY

As a reader and consumer, I tend to reach for humor and heart, avoiding darker realist1 dramas: think T.V shows like New Girl and Bob’s Burgers. I was also this way as a kid reading books like Captain Underpants and A Series of Unfortunate Events. You will probably never see me reading A Little Life. I am not readers on TikTok crying into their cameras. I don’t seek stories that evoke sadness or that inflict emotional pain, I can just go to work for that. Sometimes literary fiction gets shoved into this bucket called ‘serious’ fiction which I think is a bit wrong-footed. There are certainly lighter literary works. But we often deem what delights us as unserious while things that makes us miserab—I mean make us confront difficult issues—get crowned as ‘serious.’

I’M A HORNY HUMAN BEING:

Huck Finn retelling<people railing.

I know deep down in my horny little heart that I don’t have to choose (I mean I’m literally poly so I know all about failing to choose between loves).

When I think of litfic novels that scratch that itch only romance seems to reach in me, I think of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, a hilarious almost-not-quite love story unfolding over bizarre emails on Harvard’s campus circa 1995. I think of Danielle Evans’ and Carmen Maria Machado’s stories. I think of Mona Awad’s Bunny—one of the few litfic novels I read this year. It was so decadent and strange and…now that I think about what binds all these literary works, I mean it seems so silly that I missed what I’ve been missing, what swallows the distance between the feeling these works give me and that offered by romance: they’re all fun.

One story in Evan’s The Office of Historical Corrections ends at a waterpark. The titular novella is a historical mystery. Her forthcoming book, according to publisher’s marketplace, is a pop star novel called Look Back At It. Carmen Maria Machado with that fever-dreamy Law & Order: SVU fan fiction in the middle of Her Body and Other Parties. And Bunny: a different kind of fever-dream featuring a stag that turns into a hot guy:

“I really don’t know what my face is conveying as I stare at him. Leaning against the doorframe like he is not at all the spawn of my wildly wavering emotions and one furred little fist. But a human man, always was. And not just any human man, a cool one. Sexy. Scary-sexy. Whose name apparently is Max. A cool, sexy man named Max2 who, with his smoky eyes and his tall, slouching grace and his ripped-up black clothes full of pins, makes leaning against a doorframe his own.”3

literary fiction is so vast, which is why to call it a genre somewhat fails it. It’s too difficult to contain. We don’t always actually know what we’re talking about when we say something is literary fiction. There are few hard and fast conventions, if any. What is it really beyond “elevated” prose that “sing,” a narrative that “says something” we haven’t heard or at least not in that way. A “masterpiece,” a “rare, thrilling confidence,” “subversive,” or “marvelously, unexpectedly, endearingly funny.” These are all blurbs describing different literary novels by the way.

Literary fiction is a pop star looking back at it, it’s Benson and Stabler in a haunted Manhattan, it’s bunnies being turned into exploding boys, it’s the enslaved Jim telling his side of the story.

And maybe that’s the gag, what I’ve been choking on all year: romance always centers fun, it must. Romance: a big man biting his fist, a woman who tastes impossibly like cinnamon. It’s camp, it’s exaggeration, it’s fantasy, it’s fiction, it’s giving us what we came for.

It’s harder to know what we came for when we pick up literary fiction—or the job in part is to give us something different, to satisfy some hidden appetite, to birth new ones in us.

Literary fiction doesn’t have to be fun because it can be whatever it wants. That freedom is something we should defend, love. But—just like happy-endings—maybe we should also be a bit suspicious of it.