A Romance With Romance

When I first heard that our long-standing family friend Mary McNear had written a book, I assumed it would be a comedy, memoir, or some combination of the two.She was always telling hilarious and colorful stories that left my whole family in stitches-like that time she spent $250 on medicine for the family hamster to improve his "quality of life," or once when she walked in on her sister and her sister's then-boyfriend, future president "Barry" Obama.If the book wasn't a comedic memoir, my next guess would have been literary fiction-Mary's mother was a published fiction author herself, and Mary had majored in English and history in college.I was therefore quite surprised to hear that the book she had penned was, in fact, a romance novel.Romance-the literary genre that is perhaps viewed with more skepticism and criticism than any other-is actually the most popular genre in North America.A romance novel must satisfy two requirements: a love story must be the main focus of the plot, and the ending must be positive and satisfying.Though the basic structure of the romance novel is somewhat standardized, the form it takes can vary wildly.It can take place in any era; be set in any location, real or fictional, even science-fictional; and can fall anywhere from sweet and innocent to shockingly steamy.In 2012, romance fiction was an impressive $1.438 billion industry ("Romance Industry").Despite the size of the industry, growing up in Mary's family, being a romance writer "was not considered an acceptable occupation… My parents, my mother, I should say, wanted me to be a college professor."Her family-especially her literary author mother-instilled in her the values of intellectual pursuits and hard work, so after majoring in English and history in college, she continued on the path that was expected of her and started a PhD in history.However, Mary had actually known since adolescence that she wanted to write romance novels."It was hard," she told me."I kind of had to give up that dream, without ever admitting that that was my dream."When she talks about her time in college and grad school, it's clear she knew on some level that she was headed down the wrong path."My heart wasn't really in it," she confessed."It wasn't really what I wanted to be doing, but it was what I was doing, you know?"