This is a newsletter about feelings. So I’m going to share a passage from a book that threw me into an existential crisis.
First, some context: After 30 years, 26 of them literate, I’ve finally started reading smut. This is partly thanks to Rebecca Yarros and her sexy dragon book and partly due to a new friend walking into my house in early January and handing me a literal bodice-ripper (the cover shows a woman in a white button-up open down the center, a rose’s bloom set against her throat, stem descending against her bare torso). In the same few-week span, I was listening to “Fourth Wing” on audiobook and reading “A Lesson in Thorns” in print. It was a dizzying time. Newly single, newly shut in for the winter, I was astounded to discover an entire genre based almost solely on plot.
Plot is my favorite literary tent pole, far surpassing things like character development, sentence structure, and theme. I think this is because I’m a Pisces (overactive imagination) with an Aries Venus (high-speed romantic drama). I can usually overlook flat characters and mediocre writing if the plot is good — I just need a strong current to carry me along and spit me out at the end.
So, I started reading smut, and I loved it. Became obsessed with it. No thoughts, just action, passion, conflict subsumed by action and passion, etc. Bad things sometimes happened, but they weren’t usually the kind of bad that stopped two characters from getting it on. And if they were, well, that just made the stakes higher and the flings hotter. Smut is a beautiful genre, and there’s an argument to be made that it should be exactly what it is. I like what it is, and so do many, many others. What I am trying to say is that some passages in the smut books I read forced me to look at myself in new, uncomfortable ways — ways other genres hadn’t. That’s because smut is blunt.
This bit is from “A Lesson in Thorns” by Sierra Simone, the first of a four-part series that includes “Harvest of Sighs” and “Door of Bruises.” (For reasons I do not and will never understand, none of the three other titles starts with “A.”) In this scene the heroine, Proserpina, is meeting up with one of her romantic interests, Saint, to hang out on purpose for the first time:
He looks up over his book and gives me a hesitant smile. It doesn’t reach his eyes, which are so dark in the dim light of the pub that they remind me of Dartmoor itself, of its nights so lightless you can’t even see your hand in front of your face.
I have the same feeling looking at him as I do looking at the winter hills and leafless forests. I’m fascinated, I’m drawn, I want to touch all that loneliness with my bare fingertips and take it inside myself.
[…]
Maybe that’s what draws me to Saint — the blush under the composure, the small signs that under his bitter aloofness is a river of dammed-up emotion threatening to break free.
Here is a woman very openly discussing her desire to plumb the unknowable depths of a man she finds attractive. In fact, the idea that just beneath Saint’s surface is a fascinating, vulnerable creature just waiting to be heard, understood, and healed is what draws Proserpina to him. No one else has managed to do this, the book implies, but Proserpina wants to believe she’ll be the one to break through. She alone can fix him.
The thing is, I’ve spent a lot of time and money trying to break out of the thought pattern Proserpina is falling into. Which is why I was shocked to see it written out so plainly. Thanks to the proliferation of therapy speak (which I have separate beef with), most people know that wanting to fix someone is toxic. My dad knows it, and that man is a Gen X-er living in Texas. It’s interesting to me that Sierra Simone, who as far as I can tell has only written romance novels, is going all in on the conceit of the beautiful, aloof man and the eager, questing woman who wants to “touch all that loneliness with my bare fingertips and take it inside myself.”
Because this is smut, Proserpina is also falling for another character — Auden — who has also been (and will be) sexually and romantically involved with Saint. It’s basically a book about a friend orgy. Here is a passage about Auden from when he and Proserpina run into each other in the former’s sprawling mansion in the middle of the night:
He carefully, deliberately squats down so that we’re at eye level, and then he uses his other hand to cup my jaw. […]
“You deserve better than me,” Auden says. We’re now so close that even in the darkness I can see his eyes are rimmed with red. I can see a faint line in his cheek I’ve never seen before — a tiny scar that only reveals itself when the shadows are swirling just right. “You deserve someone who already knows who they are.”
“I know who you are, Auden Guest,” I tell him softly. “I can know for the both of us.”
Oh my god! What??? First of all, no you absolutely cannot. Second of all, the red-rimmed eyes? The tiny scar only visible in “swirling” shadows? Auden is framed as an object of sympathy. And what happened to him is sad (his fiancée broke of their engagement). But if someone is telling you they don’t know who they are, it is not your job to romanticize their pain. It is your job to listen to them and leave them to marinate in their own juices until they do what is required to grow up.
I wanted to shout all this at Proserpina, who of course continues to fawn after both Auden and Saint. And because this is a novel instead of real life, she eventually gets what she wants. After a series of extremely confusing interactions with Saint, who kisses her, tells her they can never be together, and leaves twice, Proserpina propositions him, and he confesses how badly he’s wanted her all along. The reader witnesses his internal monologue, where he berates himself for not being good enough for Proserpina while at the same time vowing to do whatever it takes to win her.
Auden, once his engagement blows up, also resolves to work for Proserpina — to become the hot dominant she deserves, to lay bare his feelings for her, which he’s been secretly wrestling with throughout the novel. Two men who have spent an entire book being pretty shitty to this woman, sending her endless mixed signals, have breakthroughs in the last few chapters and decide to give into the thoughts of tortured devotion they have heretofore kept to themselves. Everyone is happy.
Again, I have spent so many years trying to undo the idea that someone’s surface-level disregard for me is disguising a rich internal monologue in which they’re holding themself back from expressing deep commitment and care. And here’s Sierra Simone showing me the root of my problem in a few hundred pages.
She’s not the only one. I often think of this as the “Twilight” archetype, Stephanie Meyer’s unknowable, secretly devoted hottie vampire being the character that made a permanent impression on me as a teen. My foray into smut has brought me to “Silver Under Nightfall” by Rin Chupeco, a story about a vampire slayer who falls in love with a vamp couple, one of them gracious and open and the other withholding and unreadable, to the point that the slayer constantly doubts his place in the relationship. I’ve read the first two books in Scarlett St. Clair’s Hades and Persephone series, “A Touch of Darkness” and “A Touch of Ruin,” in which Hades and Persephone’s tumultuous relationship is driven by jealousy, insecurity, and miscommunication. The original series is from Persephone’s perspective, so we see her constantly questioning Hades’ affection and motive. Then, St. Clare published the first two books from Hades’ point of view, I assume so the reader could be titillated by his yearning, confusion, and hidden good intentions all over again. Like Edward Cullen, he’s constantly thinking of Persephone, doing little things to protect her or make her life easier — things he never tells her about and that she remains unaware of until enlightened by some third party.
I get why these books are written the way they are. All the evasiveness keeps the characters guessing, which drives the angst, which drives the plot, which drives the sex: the sweet release in the rare moments when everyone is on the same page. I also get that novels aren’t supposed to be a blueprint for anyone’s romantic life. But at some point, I absorbed the idea — from culture, from childhood trauma — that the way people act toward me isn’t an indication of how they really feel. When, in fact, it doesn’t always matter how someone feels if their actions are damaging.
It’s fascinating to see the same dynamic, one that has infected so many people I know and love, reflected plainly in a literary genre, in some cases with seemingly zero self-awareness from an author. (Regular novels are also full of characters who make awful choices. But those choices are usually meant to be puzzled over, chewed on, wrestled with by the reader, whereas in smut they’re mostly a means to a sweaty, slutty end.) It’s even more fascinating to recognize that, even if I can identify a toxic relationship on paper, some animal part of my brain still finds deep satisfaction in the drama, the chase, the coming together, like scratching a bug bite even though you know it will bleed.
I wonder where the authors landed on their own ideas about romance. I wonder, too, if other people are having the same complicated experience I am — the high school friends I see scoring smut books on my Goodreads feed, the people listening to Spotify’s “spicy” audiobook options, newly demarcated for Valentine’s Day, I’m told by an email alert. Should smut be self-aware? Does the genre owe us anything real? How much of the onus is on The Culture to give us good examples, and how much of it is on readers to separate what titillates them from what they should emulate?
I like Yarros’ “Fourth Wing” because its central relationship is not obviously horrible. It goes hard on the enemies-to-lovers trope: The heroine, Violet, immediately falls for Xaden, a gorgeous and talented dragon rider whose father was executed on orders from Violet’s mother. At first, Violet and Xaden’s relationship seems dysfunctional. Xaden is threatening to murder Violet one moment and choosing to train her the next, then saving her life or even kissing her, then giving her the silent treatment for weeks. It’s disorienting, but Violet eventually calls him out in a clear, communicative way that isn’t passive-aggressive. She takes the first step, and he meets her there, showing her how much he cares with tangible action. I’m not saying their relationship is perfect; it turns out Xaden is keeping a massive secret from Violet, and they do sometimes talk past each other. But I found it comparatively less crazy-making, at least in the first book (I haven’t read the second).
I also wouldn’t categorize “Fourth Wing” as pure smut. There aren’t enough sex scenes for that, and the heroes are often preoccupied with unsexy things like war and magic powers. Maybe this is why they’re actually able to talk to each other. Or maybe Yarros just decided that decent communication and reciprocal, visible effort is hot.