I Never Saw Myself in Romance Novels. Then, One Day, I Did.
Enthusiastic readers of romance novels would very much like to see themselves reflected on the page. When will the industry fully catch on?
I was 14 when I first discovered romance novels. I picked up my first on a whim, but by the time I got to the novel’s formulaic and utterly predictable end, I was well and truly hooked. And in that moment everything changed.
Up to that point, I’d been curious about love and sex—but maddeningly shielded from it. Growing up in a traditional Indian family in Singapore, the idea that women could experience pleasure was a foreign concept. I got the feeling that love and romance wasn’t really for “good Indian girls” like me.
Still, I pieced together clues about romance from film and television: early and mid-2000s American teen dramas such as "Roswell" and "Gossip Girl" and Bollywood—although the kids at school made fun of my Bollywood crushes, Shah Rukh and Aamir Khan, calling them “ugly.” Even the look of my romantic heroes was wrong.
Here I was, an enthusiastic brown feminist who dreamed of being swept off my feet on my terms, by a man who was as emotionally available as he was gorgeous. But try as I might, I couldn’t find any semblance of myself in the thin, fair-skinned and demure female leads on TV. I was too tall, too brown, too human.
But it wasn’t until I discovered romance novels, that my imagination really took flight. Even a casual browse at the Singapore National Library in the early 2000s, turned up novels like Nora Roberts’ “Sea Swept” and Jayne Ann Krentz’s “Summer in Eclipse Bay” in abundance. In these books, male characters were “rogues” (read: immature and selfish) in need of “taming” by heroines with waists so small, their paramours could fully encircle them with their large manly hands. Their skin was pale as milk.
I wish I could tell you that a quarter century on, romance publishers have finally grasped the plot and realized that their audience comprises all sorts of people who very much wish to see themselves on the pages. But that would be a wild exaggeration: They have not.
The milky-pale, passive, sweet and thin (goodness, oh so thin!) protagonists are still, largely, the norm—because in romance, white authors are still the norm. Even the recently popular romantasy genre blending fantasy and romance is largely dominated by white authors, centering white characters.
Although print sales of romance books more than doubled between 2020 and 2023, data collected by The Ripped Bodice, a bi-coastal bookstore that only sells romance novels, show that writers of color in the genre declined over the same period. In 2016, just 8% of romance books from major publishers and imprints were written by authors of color. That number rose to around 12% in 2021 (likely owing to 2020’s Black Lives Matter movement and the ensuing corporate hand-wringing over representation), but fell back to 10% in 2023. As for the intersectional representation of characters of color—queer love, characters with disabilities, non-Western stories—well, they hardly exist at all.
Simply put, the romance industry—which is currently valued at over a billion dollars and is a growing industry— is almost as white as it ever was—a lack of representation which can have profound effects on the sorts of relationships people of color think they do, or don’t, deserve.
Re-writing romance
Back in my teens, I became adept at inserting my double into the novels I was reading—which inevitably meant skipping some descriptions and adding my own. In my mind, skinny, white, simpering heroines became assertive, career-driven, larger-bodied and darker-skinned versions of me. The leading men may have been described as “tanned,” but I knew that meant white and sun-tanned, and so I visualized them to look like men of color I was attracted to.
For a while, my imagination served me well; with just enough tweaks, I could conjure an entire story adapted to me, written by writers who didn’t have me in mind when they wrote.
But then, I got a rare look at what it could be like if romance authors did write women of color for women like me. I was 17, and I still remember the moment I discovered, tucked away in the shelves of the library, a copy of “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” by Terry McMillan. A story about Stella Payne, a Black, 42-year-old, divorced mom who discovers romance and mind-blowing sex in Jamaica with a man half her age? Yes, please. Even teenage me knew this was an extraordinary gem among the tired, old narratives that otherwise cluttered the shelves.
But beyond Stella, representation was sparse. Even when romance evolved to “chick lit” to feature more “messy” female characters—single in their 30s like Bridget Jones, or heartbroken like Rebecca Bloomwood in the “Shopaholic” series—the protagonists remained stubbornly white.
Eventually, I gave up.
Most likely, I had simply internalized that non-white people just weren’t having these passionate, wild, all-consuming love affairs. Certainly, none of the brown adults I grew up around were. So I stopped trying to find it.
Women of color are told, in so many subtle and overt ways, that we’re unworthy of romance and love. It's its own cruel, almost invisible, form of racism.
Playing catch-up
Time passed. I found a real-life romance of my own in the form of a man named Paras, now my husband. We settled down, had a beautiful baby boy and the project of raising a tiny human took over, well, everything. Reading became an infrequent endeavor. When I did find time to read, I figured I should choose books that would help me in my life: Books on leadership (my day job) or parenting—or, once in a while, a bestselling book by an author of color. My love affair with romance was easily forgotten in the overwhelm of life.
Until…about five years ago, friends recommended “The Proposal,” by Jasmine Guillory. In this 2018 book, a Black writer, Nikole Paterson, and a Mexican-American pediatrician, Carlos Ibarra, go from a fling to a full-blown romance. There’s plenty of (decidedly non-demure) sex, a feisty leading lady, and a man who can name his feelings. It felt like an escape from the routine and the start of something new. A contemporary romance genre that felt relevant.
I became ravenous for similar reading material. Lockdown helped me to catch up. From Nisha Sharma’s protagonist Bobbi Kaur in “Tastes Like Shakkar,” whose every descriptor emphasizes her larger-bodied beauty, to Tia Williams’ Eva Mercy in “Seven Days in June,” a Black single mom who lives with chronic pain, to Helen Hoang’s Stella Lane in “The Kiss Quotient,” a lead on the autism spectrum who hires a male escort for (steamy) sex, I returned to a genre quite changed from how I left it.
Which is great… but also not great enough.
What’s really changed?
The recent Netflix hit Bridgerton has been celebrated for its diversity, but that’s entirely thanks to the imagination of Shonda Rhimes, who cast a racially diverse slate of actors. The original eight-book series, written by Julia Quinn and published between 2000 and 2006, was most definitely all-white. In fact, it was only in 2023, after the success of the Netflix series, that Quinn published her first romance novel with a non-white protagonist: Queen Charlotte, which she co-wrote with Rhimes. But it’s progress, and I’ll take it.
Still, it’s tiresome that readers (and audiences) of color are still having to fight this fight. Representation matters in the smallest ways that publishers don’t consider.
So when writers or publishers do take us to those places, it makes an impact. In fact, it gives me chills. In 2018, the romance novelist Alisha Rai said: “Many, many years ago, when I first started writing, someone said to me, ‘oh, this is the first book where the heroine had brown nipples.”
That comment gave me goosebumps. When I looked back at my romance reading journey, I’d probably only read about brown nipples once, when I was 17, thanks to McMillan’s Stella Payne. It didn’t happen again until 15 years later. Now I can never go back.
Anne Quito
Josie Cox
Ruchika T. Malhotra
