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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Why Men Should Read Romance Novels
00:26:40
The New Yorker’s Josh Rothman explains why men are missing out on romance novels, and Sherman Alexie reads a new story about a motel maid confronting the ugly sides of human nature.
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- [00:04]
Josh Rothman
Floor 38. I basically just think it would be interesting to look at the emergence of a criminal economy.
- [00:09]
Curtis Sittenfeld
And also I'm always amazed that there aren't more profiles of her out there, this really subversive, strange thing in rap especially, and see what their lives are like on both sides of the border.
- [00:20]
Narrator
From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
- [00:30]
David Remnick
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Josh Rothman is a man of wide interests. He's written for the New Yorker about philosophy, about fashion, about science. But among those many interests, one really stands out. Josh says he's never met another man who's into romance novels or who will admit reading them. He recently talked with Curtis Sittenfeld, who has five novels under her belt, books that involve romance, but they're not exactly romance novels either. Last year, Sittenfeld published Eligible a modern retelling of what we might consider the prototype, the great grandmother of all novels about romance, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Curtis Sittenfeld asked the first question.
- [01:10]
Curtis Sittenfeld
Can I ask you what your definition of like a romantic novel is?
- [01:16]
Josh Rothman
Well, certainly there's lots of classic novels that are essentially romance based, but I also read like a reasonable quantity of like, Nora Roberts, and that's what I was curious.
- [01:31]
Curtis Sittenfeld
So essentially, would you say bodice rippers? Like, is that a fair or is that a derogatory term?
- [01:36]
Josh Rothman
I don't know if that's a de. I've never read Fifty Shades of Grey and I don't think of Nora Roberts as a bodice ripper type writer. I think it's still pretty romantic in the sense that it's mostly about unresolved sexual tension, so to speak, between the protagonists. And it's not quite about sex, basically.
- [01:54]
Curtis Sittenfeld
Yeah, Yeah.
- [01:55]
Josh Rothman
I don't know. I started reading these books when I was, I don't know, probably 10.
- [02:00]
Curtis Sittenfeld
Me too.
- [02:01]
Josh Rothman
Yeah, like a pre adolescent or early adolescent kind of experience. And I think I've read actually probably a zillion romantic novels over the course of my life. I mean, how did this start for you? What was your introduction?
- [02:16]
Curtis Sittenfeld
My gateway was Danielle Steele in fourth grade. I read Harlequin Romances around sixth grade, and then I read the ones where it's sort of like, you know, the woman has like a blouse that's falling off her shoulders and her cleavage is showing. And the man, which I think Fabio, was the model for a lot of these in the 80s or 90s, and they're sort of, like, intertwined, like, whatever you want to give the name to those. I amassed a pretty large. I don't know if I'd say a zillion. And I actually do not read those anymore, but I read them for a long time, and they were a big part of my life.
- [02:55]
Josh Rothman
And then there was. Was there a point where you started writing stories that were about love?
- [03:01]
Curtis Sittenfeld
Yeah, I think that I sort of became a person who. I would almost say I wrote more about, like, awkward hookups more than romance or, like, unrequited love and yearning, but. So it's almost like the flip side of romance, but it's, you know, it's kind of in reaction to romance or, like, in the neighborhood of romance.
- [03:23]
Josh Rothman
So Ineligible. So a few years ago, you wrote this book, Eligible, which is a sort of reimagining of Pride and Prejudice that takes place in the modern world. And in Pride and Prejudice, the original. The Austen novel, the Moment, I guess you could say, where Lizzie Bennet and Darcy notice each other. What happens is Jane, Lizzie's sister, is sick, and Lizzie has to. She has no way to get from her house to the house where Jane is staying. So she runs there, basically. And when she gets there, she's breathing hard and maybe a little sweaty, and her hair is a little messed up, and she runs into Darcy, and that's when he notices her, I guess. And in Eligible, you came up with the cleverest way to do this in the contemporary context. And I wonder, maybe you could just tell that.
- [04:09]
Curtis Sittenfeld
Yeah. Yeah. So Eligible Takes place in 2013 in Cincinnati, Ohio, as all the best novels do. And it's summertime. Jane has fainted at lunch and has been taken to the er. And it's midday in summer in Cincinnati, So it's like 100 degrees. There are no cars at home. And so she thinks, okay, I'm just gonna put on my running clothes and run, like, five miles to the hospital. And then my Darcy is a neurosurgeon. And so, conveniently, they run into each other outside the entrance to the hospital, where she's, like, sweating everywhere and is totally disheveled.
- [04:49]
Josh Rothman
And as I recall, in Eligible, I mean, it's a pretty. It's pretty sexy. Like, she's in her running gear. I think she's just in, like, a sports bra and shorts. And she, like, runs her hands through her hair, and a drop of her sweat flies from her hand and lands on Darcy's white coat. And they both see it happen, but nobody says anything. It's just a little moment of Contact, you know, that's like a little.
- [05:13]
Curtis Sittenfeld
It's funny, I don't know if that's everyone's definition of sexy. I'm glad to hear it's yours.
- [05:20]
Josh Rothman
So I was at dinner with my wife's family, and I was telling them, oh, you know, I'm going to do this radio interview where I talk about romance novels. And everyone was shocked that this was a thing that I was into. And I discovered, you know, of course, none of the other men at the table had ever read, so they claimed, a romance novel, but they all read detective novels or thriller novels. And it occurred to me at that moment that maybe part of the way it works is that it's about familiarity. So unlike you and me, who started reading romance novels when we were small, plenty of guys never did that. And so to them, the pleasure of a new story is relatively small. You actually have to have read a lot of them in order to get a lot of joy out of these stories. You have to be in the habit. And then something about romance comes alive. But anyway, that's my pet theory that I've been mulling over.
- [06:10]
Curtis Sittenfeld
I think. I also do think that it could have to do with packaging, where I think that, like. And again, these are sweeping generalizations about gender, which are very easy to disprove. But I mean, even, like, the covers of my books, there's a preppy ribbon belt on one cover. On the COVID of eligible, it's a diamond ring. And so I think that that telegraphs to men. Unfortunately, like, this is probably not for you. I think that plenty of men have the capacity to take the same pleasure in a romantic story or to be moved by it. I don't know, like Braveheart or the Wire or something. I feel like my readership has been 90%, at least female, ever since I first started having books published. And I had my first story published in the New Yorker in August 2016. It's about two people who don't really know each other who end up a shuttle driver and a woman on a business trip who essentially end up having, like, spoiler alert, like, a hookup in a hotel room. And the photo is sort of like the bottom two thirds of a woman lying in a bed with her legs cross. So it's like a pretty sexy photo, but it's not feminine. Anyway, I heard from a very disproportionate number of male readers where they were like, I loved your story in the New Yorker, Curtis. And I thought, okay, is it that it was in the New Yorker and the New Yorker is neither male nor female. Is it that the illustration was sexy, but also, you know, not overtly feminine or masculine? Is it that the story itself was kind of sexually graphic that made me have this spike in male readership? But I think, above all, I think it was the fact that there's nothing about this that's saying men don't read it. Like, if anything, it's saying, like, men give us a read. And it was very. So it's like, I do. I think that what we're talking about could really be, like, aesthetic or visual or have to do with marketing.
- [08:25]
Josh Rothman
Hmm. That's really fascinating. One sort of, like, criticism one could make of romantic fiction is that it just ends. There's always a happy ending, first of all, and it always ends with the end of the courtship. What do you think about this thing about romance sort of having a circumscribed temporal dimension where it just sort of ends with the wedding? Did you resist that, or do you. What's your feeling about that?
- [08:50]
Curtis Sittenfeld
I didn't resist it. Ineligible. I almost feel that a romance is one of the few inherent or natural narratives in human existence. You know, being born and dying has a kind of shape, but it's too elongated or, like, slack or something. But romance is this thing where, like, it has the structure of a story. You don't have to impose it from the outside.
- [09:23]
Josh Rothman
I guess on some level, we're approaching the question of whether romance is real.
- [09:27]
Curtis Sittenfeld
Oh.
- [09:28]
Josh Rothman
Like, is it a script that people follow? Because I think maybe one way, one thing that's emerging is, for you and me, romance novels are really fascinating because they're true. I mean, like, they're about the most interesting part of real life. But if you're not a romance reader, then I think your conception of a romance novel is the opposite. That it's, like, completely false.
- [09:49]
Curtis Sittenfeld
Well, I feel like. I mean, I think anyone who's ever had a crush on someone else would have to say, yes, they are realistic. I mean, you know, not all of the. The details, but it's like, it's not. I don't. There is a line that I read relatively recently, and I wish I could remember where I read it. It's something like, would people fall in love if there weren't stories about love or songs about love? You know, like, have we all been sort of primed to want this thing? And there's almost like this feedback loop or something.
- [10:23]
Josh Rothman
Another way of saying this is when I was in college, I was a creative writing major, and my teacher was Edmund White. And at one point I had handed in a bunch of stories and they were all pretty romantic. Basically they were about couples and things. And he asked me, we were having like a one on one meeting and he asked me, are your parents divorced? And I said, yeah. Why? And he said, well, because I find that often my students with divorced parents write the most romantic stories. And that's always interesting to me. Like, why is it so fun to read and think about these things? Even if, like, I'm married, I happily so and have a wonderful romantic marriage and things. But I don't have a. But my appetite for reading these stories about anguished lovers that can't get together is basically undiminished. And I wonder, like, in your case, why do you think you love these stories so much?
- [11:21]
Curtis Sittenfeld
So I guess, I mean, I think the short answer, by the way, I feel like saying I have a wonderful romantic marriage is a very unusual sentence to be uttered aloud. I feel like that should be its own podcast and it should be like three hours long. So I think that the romantic story kind of contains everything. Like, I think that essentially so much fiction is about people acting against their own best interest. And there's this sort of pretense that we're all like, you know, very responsible and almost like trying to be our best selves and wearing Fitbits and like making healthy choices. And like there's something about, you know, romance that can be so self destructive or like you run the risk of like humiliating yourself or you're so vulnerable. And the fact that it's worth it to people must mean, like, it's really great like that you get to feel really deep feeling, you know, physical and emotional feelings. Like it's like, it's almost like you can tell how exciting it is or how gripping it is because of how much people risk for it.
- [12:40]
Josh Rothman
Yeah. If radio listeners out there driving down the road listening to this and they're passing Barnes and Noble and they can pull into the parking lot right now and buy a romance novel. What should they buy?
- [12:54]
Curtis Sittenfeld
Well, okay, can I say two?
- [12:57]
Josh Rothman
Yeah.
- [12:58]
Curtis Sittenfeld
My heart. My heart is torn between two romance novels. Okay, so in boarding school I accumulated like essentially a trunk full of bodice rippers. And the only one that I saved was Savage Thunder by, I don't know if you say Joanna or Johanna Lindsay. There's essentially a sex scene that takes place on horseback. Okay, so that's one. But then the other thing I would say is read an Alice Munro book, which, I mean, I'm sure plenty of people have, but there's a particular story called Trix in the collection Run Away. It's like devastating and, and I feel like, like it's taken me almost years to to get over it. So it's sort of, I mean, it's, I think it's very romantic and it's very upsetting. Like, it kind of like crushes your heart in the best possible way.
- [14:00]
Josh Rothman
That's totally awesome. Well, thank you so much.
- [14:03]
Curtis Sittenfeld
This is so fun. I feel, I feel like I almost have like, heart palpitations because I'm so, I'm so excited to be talking about romance.
- [14:15]
David Remnick
Curtis Sittenfeld is the author, most recently of Eligible. You can find her writing for the new yorker@newyorkerradio.org she spoke with Josh Rothman. Now we're going to wrap up today with a story. Sherman Alexie published his first piece of fiction in the New Yorker in 1999, and this summer we published the new story by Alexie called Clean Cleaner Cleanest. It's about a woman named Marie who works in housekeeping at a motel. We don't know where. Maybe she's in the Northwest, where Alexei has said a lot of his fiction. Marie has stayed at her job for decades, watching as other maids have come and gone. Sherman Alexie's sister has worked as a maid, and he said that he drew on some of the things she told him about the work. Here's Alexei reading an excerpt from Clean Cleaner, Cleanest.
- [15:13]
Sherman Alexie
Housekeeping, marie said for the fourth time. No response, so she knew there was nobody in the room. The guest was gone. He was a clean one. Almost all the garbage was in the wastebaskets. The toilet was flushed. The sink had been wiped down. The used wet towels were piled in the shower instead of tossed onto the floor. A $1 bill folded into an origami crane had been left on top of the tv. A small gratuity. There were no human or animal body fluids splashed on the floors, walls, or ceiling. None that were obvious, anyway. But the guest had left takeout food in a Styrofoam container on the wooden table, a mostly eaten hamburger and fries. More than anything, Marie hated to clean up food. That's why she had never worked at a restaurant. It's why she rarely ate at restaurants. A table full of greasy dishes and half empty water glasses and coffee cups made her nauseated. In particular, she hated the smell of old cooked onions. Dear Big Bang, she'd thought more than once, if I am going to hell, then I hope hell doesn't smell like old onions. In her Bible study group. She'd referred to Satan as old onions so much that some of her fellow parishioners had started doing the same. She'd even heard Father James say it once or twice. Old onions. She hated old onions. But she needed her job. She believed in her job. So she picked up the Styrofoam container, held her breath against the smell of the onions, and tossed it into the garbage bag hanging off the side of her cart, then sprayed disinfectant into the bag to kill some of the odor. And then she cleaned the room. First she picked up the dirty towels and shoved them into the laundry bag hanging from her cart. She draped clean towels over the thin metal rod. The towels had been washed, yes, but they were so old and threadbare that they'd forgotten how to be towels. Those towels had dementia. And that thin metal rod had been pulled out of the wall so often by clumsy guests that it barely supported the weight of the towels. But no matter. She still draped the towels with an eye pleasing symmetry. Then she sprayed minty soap into the sink and the shower, did a quick wipe with her hand towel, and ran hot water to wash the soap down the drain. She sprayed the toilet bowl, flushed, and repeated the process. She didn't have to scrub any obvious stains because of the departed guest's good manners. She knew she'd only clean the surface of things, but the soap's strong minty smell would make it seem as if she'd cleaned more thoroughly. The illusion of clean. She'd once used that phrase when she'd been talking to Father James about her job and he'd said that the phrase accurately described humans as well. After she was done with the bathroom, she quickly dusted the small chest of drawers, tv, two nightstands, two lamps and chairs and table, plus the chandelier hanging over the table. That chandelier was only a paper covered light bulb hanging on an electrical cord, but saying chandelier was almost like saying feces and urine. Then she dragged in the vacuum and quickly ran it over the carpet. It took her only 15 minutes to clean that room. That was good, because a mother and father with four kids had checked out of room 144. The youngest kid, a toddler in a polo shirt, had taken off. His paint pants and underwear had gone full. Porky Pig then squatted and pushed out a public feces on the sidewalk in front of the soda machine. So Marie was deathly afraid of what that family might have done in the privacy of their room. She dreaded the marathon of cleaning that likely awaited her. In the beginning. There was Marie, Agnes, Rosa and the other Rosa. Agnes was a drunk. She got fired for stealing from the guests. Rosa number one married her high school sweetheart and moved away. Rosa number two was undocumented and quit after she heard rumors about an immigration sweep of local businesses. The sweep didn't happen, not that time. Then there was Olga, who'd come from Russia to marry an American. He'd claimed to be a millionaire, but it turned out he'd only had enough money to pay for Olga's visa and her plane tickets. She'd married him anyway because she believed that American lies were a little better than Russian lies. But she had to take a job, any job, to help with expenses. She got pregnant. They couldn't afford to pay rent and take care of a baby, so they moved to Oregon to live with his parents. Then there was Evie, who worked hard, was Marie's friend for many years, and vanished over the horizon. There was a black woman and a white woman, their names lost to time, who started on the same day and both quit immediately after walking into a room and finding a dead bull snake sliced into thick pieces and arranged in weird patterns on the carpet. There had been five animal sacrifices in the motel over the years. Seven people had died at the motel. Four from heart attacks, two from overdoses, and one when a woman drunkenly fell over the second floor railing and landed headfirst on somebody else's minivan. Marie had been slapped, punched, kicked and bitten by former maids. Her purse had been stolen three times and her car stolen once. One of the crazier maids had robbed Nassim at gunpoint. She went to prison for three years. One of the saddest maids had been assaulted and strangled by a serial killer. He was caught after 30 years of killing poor women and led police to undiscovered bodies so they wouldn't lethally inject him. There were drug addicts and alcoholics and women who doused their cleaning rags with disinfectant and huffed those poisonous and intoxicating fumes into their lungs. There were illegal and legal immigrants, though Marie didn't care about their status. Every refugee is a precious child, she thought. There were maids of every race, of every color, of every religion. At least a dozen women Muslims had worn headscarves while they worked. Marie suspected that one maid, an Italian woman who had to be taught how to use a vacuum, was in the federal witness protection program. There were women who cried often but would never explain their tears. There were women who never stopped talking about their aches and pains. Over the decades, Marie had worked with two or three hundred women. She'd liked half of them, had hated at least 50 of them, and had truly loved maybe a dozen. And then there was Evie, the most beloved, who had transubstantiated into a postcard from Reno. How does a friend, maybe your best friend, leave you like that? Father James, marie had once confessed. God is mysterious, sure, but sometimes I feel like people are even more mysterious. One slow day, as she filled in for the new owner at the front desk, Marie used a motel computer to search for Evie. She typed in Evie's full name in Reno, Nevada, and found nothing. She added the words missing and obituary and death and found nothing. Then she typed in Evie's name and housekeeper and Arizona. And there she was, smiling in an employee photo. She worked at a retirement home in Flagstaff. It had been quite a few years, but Evie still looked exactly like Evie. You're alive, marie said to Evie's photo. Below Evie's photo was an email address and a phone number. I could call you right now, marie said to the photo. Marie thought about distance and time. She remembered reading once that Cleopatra had lived closer in time to the building of the first Pizza Hut than to the building of the great pyramids of Giza. Everything is temporary, Marie thought. Then she wiped tears from her eyes, closed the browser window containing Evie's photo, and turned to greet the new guests who'd walked into the motel office.
- [25:41]
David Remnick
Sherman Alexie reading from his story Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest. That was an excerpt, but you can hear him read the whole story on our Writer's Voice podcast. We share a story from one of today's best fiction writers just about every week. And that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the show, and I hope you've got time to read a decent book before the summer is finally over. I'm David Remnick. See you next week.
- [26:09]
Narrator
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced with help from Deborah Treisman, Sarah Sandbach, and Jessica Henderson. Audio from the Mixed up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was read by Jill Kleberg and is used with the permission of Simon and Schuster Audio. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Tsurina Endowment Fund.