Christina Lauren | Shelf Love
Best friends to business partners is the happily ever after Lauren Billings and Christina Hobbs got when they came together to write romance books as Christina Lauren. A neuroscientist and high school counsellor, the duo now write full time and have more than twenty New York Times bestsellers and have been published in over thirty languages. For them, romance is not only about finding joy and hope, but also putting women and marginalized voices front and center.
Today, not all students in public schools across America have access to read such stories and realize their desires and hopes are important. PEN America’s recent reports found that romance novels are increasingly censored for including sexual content. Popular romance fiction can be a great resource for teenagers to learn about love and desire, and these books can spark productive, and often pivotal, conversations about boundaries and consent. With Shelf Love, an interview series with romance authors, PEN America, in collaboration with Authors Against Book Bans is celebrating the love for writing and reading about love.
For the final installment in the series we spoke to Billings and Hobbs, authors of Love and Other Words, Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating, The Unhoneymooners, and most recently, The Paradise Problem, about their first romance books, how a reader changed their perspective on who they can write about, and the everlasting reassurance of hope love brings, especially at a time of increased censorship.
What was the first romance novel you ever read? What is the last romance novel you read?
Lauren: Forever by Judy Blume, while not really a romance, was the first book with romantic elements that sent me looking for more. Hilariously, from there I went straight into Clan of the Cave Bear which, also maybe not strictly a romance, certainly ignited my love for spicy love stories. The first true romance I remember reading and thinking this genre is for me was Palomino by Danielle Steele. After that, I went weekly with my allowance to the used bookstore or library to get another one.
Christina: I remember my mom had a huge collection of Harlequin romances in the garage. She loved the cowboy romances, and I would sneak-read them. I always thought I had a superpower of being able to open the page directly to the sex scene.
Why do you write romance novels? Who do you write them for?
We write romance for ourselves, for each other, and for readers—especially women—who are looking for some joy, hope, humor, and a slip of time for themselves to be transported.
Why do you think YA romance matters? Why do you think romance novels matter?
The romance genre is a space where everyone can achieve their happily ever after, but it is primarily written for women and by women. There is an embedded love language there—by putting the woman or marginalized character as the center of the story, we are saying that their concerns, energies, and desires are valid and important. These books reinforce that stories of hope and joy and pleasure are as important as stories of struggle and pain, that time spent building connections and community is a cornerstone of our society. We are saying that any consenting adult relationship deserves a happily ever after, regardless of the background, identity, or lived experience of the people making the commitment to it.
Why is it important for books to tackle sex and sexual desire?
The importance of prioritizing female pleasure perhaps will change over time as women, globally, become more self-actualized, but given that we still live in a deeply patriarchal society, it remains critical that we put explicit female pleasure on the page. The desires of women don’t always look like the desires of men, and female pleasure is, objectively, not as straightforward. It takes women time to figure out what works for their bodies, and putting a range of sexual experiences and preferences on the page allows women the chance to explore. In addition, sexual intimacy is a vital part of the connection between characters, and a critical component of the happily ever after. Readers want to see that characters are not only compatible emotionally but sexually, too.
Why do you think the romance genre has seen such a resurgence in pop culture?
Romance, like any genre, comes in and out of popularity. But specifically in the past five years we, as a society, have faced a significant amount of stress, anxiety, and hopelessness. Romance is a genre that promises a happily ever after; regardless of what the characters endure throughout the story, readers are assured that they will end up together and thriving. Life doesn’t give us this promise, so at the most basic level, this is what romance offers.
What value does romance bring to literature writ large?
Romance is a fast-moving genre with an incredibly quick publication cycle. In a time where society is debating who deserves love, who deserves federally-recognized partnerships, who deserves to be seen by society, romance can do powerful work and be on the forefront of these conversations.
What is the most valuable lesson you have learned from your readers?
In our very first set of books, the Beautiful series, in the interest of not appropriating stories of people of color, we wrote all white main characters. We thought we were being responsible and staying in our lane. But at one signing, a reader of color came up to us and said that she loved our books but wanted to see herself on the page. It was then that we realized we’d written stories located in Chicago and New York and hadn’t included any diversity out of fear of getting it wrong or taking the space on the shelf that belonged to a writer of color. What we learned from this conversation—and many, many others—is that we need to write the world we live in. It isn’t our place to take the place on the shelf for an identity story of a character of color, but love stories can be universal, and with intent, thoughtfulness, and the help of compensated prereaders, we can make the characters in our books feel more like the one all around us.
What has been the most rewarding part of being a romance writer?
We were readers first; nearly every romance author comes to the genre because they feel a deep love for what it has given them and the stories it has planted inside them. So the most gratifying experience is meeting readers who have been affected by our books in the way we have been affected by others’ books, and knowing that we’ve given them a small or lingering bit of happiness.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Absolutely! The drum we will continue to beat until things change for the better is that with the increase in book bans across the country, it is more important than ever to read widely and diversely. Until books are no longer banned in libraries, schools, and other public spaces, readers must actively push back against creative censorship and politically-driven limitations in access.
Christina Lauren is the combined pen name of longtime writing partners and best friends Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the New York Times, USA TODAY, and #1 internationally bestselling authors of the Beautiful and Wild Seasons series, Autoboyography, Love and Other Words, Roomies, Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating, The Unhoneymooners, The Soulmate Equation, Something Wilder, The True Love Experiment, and The Paradise Problem. You can find them online at ChristinaLaurenBooks.com or @ChristinaLauren on Instagram.
