I’m in love with love, so what?

Mid sentimental education I had started a few years before reading my first love novel. Without knowing it, he had walked through the great entrance door of the love looking fascinated and ecstatic TV soap operas afternoon, accompanied by my grandmother Élida in the mid-nineties. To say that a book aroused my curiosity about it romance That would be wrong, but what he did was keep fueling the fuel of love with another dynamic. As I write these lines, I smile for the memories and because a literary genre still reviledI have always liked to read.

There is something that was – and I am – clear: when i read my first romance novel i was already in love with love. ‘Cause when I found the honor of silenceof Danielle Steel, on the bedside table of my other grandmother, Clara, the level of fanaticism for bloodthirsty novels was already high. My days were spent in front of the television, with a racing pulse and excited eyes, as I watched the big melodramas He repeated to me: “I want this for myself”. I needed to know how the characters fell in love and showed their feelings, how those hungry kisses that took a long time to arrive were finally consummated, and I had understood early on that obstacles were more frequent than one would like to suppose. . This is what I wanted and the book gave it to me.

I was 14 and just a girl standing in front of a romantic book asking her to love him and keep the beautiful illusion that those perfect loves could happen in real life. What I didn’t know was that I was going to love this book, that I would go back to those scenes that had set my body on fire and that I wanted more. the honor of silence He didn’t kiss me or hug me or say he was in love with me, but My brand

What am I looking for when I read romance novels? Why do I like to read them? Romantic literature supports me in the face of a disenchanted and hostile world. And, also, because within its pages, those of us who read, we seek illusion in discomfort and subversion. No guilty reading or consumption. Heart emoji.

Perhaps it was the cover with this intense red, the golden letters, the image of an oriental landscape, the things that caught my attention. Or, as a good romantic, because I believe in the fate and the legend of the red thread that unites us to the love of our lives – and although this thread stretches or contracts, it never breaks. I think there is also a common thread that connects the reader to his book.

In this case, the red thread linked me to the romantic novel. I read the Spanish edition of 1997. Among its yellowed pages I found a receipt from a Boedo pharmacy from the year 2000 which I used as a bookmark, a blood pressure reading book and keys and notes from my grandmother. -Mother Clara.

When I started the honor of silence I discovered a vibrant, sensitive and addictive story in which a young Japanese girl, Hiroko, decided to study in California in the early 1940s. A woman wanted to study on the other side of the world – what audacity! -, caught between her father’s passion for Western modernity, a teacher in Kyoto, and her mother’s deeply rooted traditionalism. The book introduced me to a woman who lived in the midst of deep contradictions. Don’t they meet us? Of course. The book spoke to me.

Hiroko is confused UNITED STATES and the Pearl Harbor attack makes her, along with the entire Japanese colony, an enemy of the country in which she resides. The protagonist is another victim of the hostility there prejudices. In the midst of one of the most terrifying episodes in recent American history, she finds love thanks to a university professor, Peter Jenkins. Love as hope in a desolate panorama.

“One more chapter and I’m going to bed,” I repeated to myself, but the love was stronger and I kept reading until dawn. “Get excited,” these pages whispered to me, “because even in the worst-case scenario, love is a tangible possibility.” Was I going to stop reading it? Certainly not. These “little novels for women” challenged me, my grandmothers, all of them.

“Before reaching the stables, he stopped and hugged her again. He felt Hiroko’s soft breathing and her narrow hips pressed against him. Lately, they were getting closer and closer to the flame of passion. There was something exciting about their situation and neither of them could resist.I read in my teens. The desire of the characters grew with mine. I retraced these lines today and the feeling was the same.

At a time when the rule is not to show love and to have ephemeral bonds – rather transactional and not sentimental – read romantic novels he is not satisfied with exhibiting and constructing commonplaces; is also a return to a love that many fear to embrace. I wanted the world to be a lovely place, warmly sheltered, despite everything. It still happens to me.

I haven’t stopped reading novels Danielle Steel: The kiss, secrets, Truhan, the price of love, The wedding…an eternal list. I even looked for other books by the author at the supermarket, which she read while standing next to the gondola. This sentimental education which had begun with Marimar, Neighborhood Maria, Celestial always celestial there black Pearl, among other things, had changed in form but not in motivation. “Love makes its way slowly, no matter the lock,” Arjona would say.

I remember when my body was electrified reading Lulu’s agesof Almudena Grandes. It’s not a romance novel, I know. A colleague gave it to me on one of my first days working in a publishing group. He said to me: “Tell me tomorrow.” And I told him. Because if the novel was not “pink” -it was far, very far-, eroticism was king. Can love be thought of far from eroticism and sexuality? I do not believe. The novel recounts Lulu’s sexual journey from her fifteenth to her thirties and it took my breath away.

I think that, as the French philosopher says Roland Barthes In Fragments of love speech “Language is a skin: I rub my tongue against the other, it’s as if I had words like fingers, or fingers in my words. My tongue quivers with desire”. I also trembled with desire, perhaps because language hides the desires of the reader, flourishes on the pages of books and builds the bodies of others who love, touch and exchange as much as one would like.

A romantic novel is a form of protest based on enjoymentI thought during my early years in college. Because if we women like to read love stories, the canon screams that it’s literature that isn’t worth it. But for us, yes. I remembered that the American scholar and researcher Janice Radway analyzes the genre of the romantic novel and its readers in the book Reading the novel. Women, patriarchy and popular literature. In it, he observes that romantic literature allows readers to “channel needs unmet by patriarchal institutions and customs”.

During a job interview, they asked me what I liked to read. “Danielle Steel” was my first response, a bit to see the look of horror on who my boss would be, and a bit of a claim. And it is my work that allowed me to discover other female authors: Florence Bonelli, viviana rivero, Florence Canale, Gabriela Exilart, Magda Tagtachyan, Luz Gabas, Grace Ramos, Andre Milan… and much more. Because that girl standing in front of that romantic book asking her to love him still lives in Bethlehem today.

The romance novel spoke in my ear. Lips full of sin whispered to me that enjoying is unproductive. At a time marked by the self-demandthere anxiety and the pressure of efficiency at work, reading about the sweetness of human relations, passions and feelings – which is useless – is a completely revolutionary act. Those afternoons come back to me with the blinds down and the noisy television next to my grandmother Élida. Or reading in my bed every summer and how my own revolution was brewing.

In my family, rebellion has always had a female face. My grandmothers and my mother told me that they constantly read one of the greatest references in romantic literature: Corin Tellado. She had slipped into houses, into kitchens, when my grandparents or my father were working, to tell women that they had the right to dream of other worlds.

“Love never goes out of style, but neither does heartbreaksaid Tellado, the grande dame of the romantic novel. Those of us who read romance novels know this. We are in love with love, relationships that stay, support and shelter in times of uncertainty. Where some do not see feminism, I find my own “book”, my own illusion, a red thread that unites me to the stories I want to build. The illusion is my revolution. I reopened the honor of silence after more than twenty years and saw this 14 year old girl who wanted to love and read. The red wire has never been cut.