I’ve been painting my house this week, because I have strong masochistic tendencies and evidently didn’t want to, you know, rest between completing my course work and welcoming new dayhome clients. Which means that my promises to catch up on my blog reading and turn out some fiction writing have so far come to naught.
I suck. I know.
But, anyway, here’s the thing: I was out a book club the other night with a couple of foxes, having unbelievably-delicious-but-heart-attack-inducing desserts. And I had a martini. (Because evidently, along with exhaustion comes poor judgement. I fell asleep on the floor in my daughter’s room about ten minutes after arriving home. She was thrilled that she got to read ME to sleep, for once! Next time, I’ll have coffee.) Anyway, we were talking about YA Lit and trashy romance novels and Twilight and 50 Shades and how addictive, for some, they’ve become. All three of us are intelligent, educated, open-minded women. We’ve all got degrees and jobs and kids. And while I celebrate amazing fiction like Life of Pi, and Little Bee, and Memoirs of a Geisha, and so many others, I’ll probably read the Twilight saga for the third time before the end of this month.
It is nice to know I’m not alone :-)
So, at the pool this morning, doing math with one of my extra kids and flipping through my media feeds while my kiddos were in swimming lessons, I saw a Facebook post from one of my friends with a quote from Ray Bradbury:
“Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.”
That’s IT! I know that’s it! That’s why I’m addicted to Twilight and will likely read 50 Shades again. That’s why I like the sweet love stories in politically charged YA lit. Because it happens, sometimes, that you meet someone that you absolutely should not fall in love with, but then you find yourself building a life together over months and decades. It happens that one of you is a little (or a lot) damaged and one of you is very naive, and your families don’t know what to make of your relationship, and your friends think you’ve finally lost your mind for good… Yet you cannot stay apart. It happens that you meet someone around whom you orient your existence like twin planets or stars. It happens, this love that makes it hard to breathe sometimes yet remains the only reason to keep on breathing.
It also happens that we forget. Not the love, of course, but that glorious experience of falling too close to the stars.
So, I think one of the reasons that moms read Twilight, and that the ladies at the office talk behind their hands about 50 Shades and pray that their mothers won’t mention it over breakfast on Sunday, is because we so cherish that reminder, you know? Once upon a time, falling in love was the most terrifying, exhilarating, exultant and defining experience of our lives. And being in love, staying in love, growing in love….
All of those are so much sweeter, when we remember.
I wonder if there has been any peer-reviewed research on this yet…. *snort*
You always take a simple thing and make it interesting and thought-provoking. And I totally relate about sucking. I have so many writing goals these days, plus my day job, plus my kids, and oh yeah, that blog I can’t seem to get going again. And there is my need to fall into bed at 9 o’clock every night. But will that stop me from reading Game of Thrones until I fall asleep, still clutching my Kindle? Nope.
Thanks, Dory! It’s a Kobo for me, and sometimes I fall asleep with it hanging over the edge of the bed because the battery failed at exactly the wrong time, and I’m too tired to go find an extension cord and too short-sighted to keep it near my bed. eReaders need to ship with longer cords, methinks =D I’ve got a working hypothesis that reading fiction is just as restorative as sleeping when the rest of one’s life is madness. Let’s go with that!
I’ve got a USB wall charger, swiped from one of my kids (it was meant as a DS charger), which is plugged in with a charging cable right by my bedside. Kobo conks out in the middle of a book? Fish for cord, click “Keep Reading”, and away we go…
Aaaah. The Force is strong in this one.
You’re once again making me think.
Why do people, even intelligent people, read trash? And here’s what I think: there’s trash, and there’s trash. Note that even though library romance paperback racks are chock-full of trash, nobody is falling over themselves to read it and pass it around their office in a brown paper wrapper. Ditto for the YA shelves being stuffed with lame teen romance stories.
You’re not just reading any old trash, you’re reading specific trash. There’s *something* about those currently-wildly-popular stories that has hit at some Ur-tale, some primal myth – one of the two base narratives that make up human Story. Romance and Battle. And my guess is that those two Stories are so powerful, they come through and capture the reader/viewer/listener even if they’re wrapped in a styrofoam McDonald’s box and smothered in saturated-yet-rancid deep fryer fat (okay, my metaphors are running away with me, but you get the point). The Power of Story. Which, roughly, is just what you were saying – eh?
I think we need another monomyth, the romance equivalent of Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces”. “The Lover with a Thousand Faces”? Break out the peer-reviewed research.
You know, I wonder if that’s part of it, too. I remember Noam Chomsky talking about the dissociative effects of advertising in a competitive Western capitalist economy. Our friendships are closely integrated by what we have, what we earn, and what we buy, and where we buy it, even more than shared experiences, in his opinion. And I don’t think we can dispute that people actually do spend far less time engaging with each other than they have in previous generations. We shop. We do drinks or coffee at an establishment more-or-less reflecting our income. So maybe this attachment to these Stories – each with a similar, if restyled, monomyth – has to do with our need to connect with each other again, you know? Most people read 50 Shades because someone they know said they HAD to read it. Ditto Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight, and now Delirium. Maybe these Stories are becoming legends because, as a society, we need to have something in common beyond those structures we’ve built around money and social acceptability, beyond our immediate network of close, trusted friends. Which I guess is how monomyths arise, right?
Yes!!! Romance and battle and all of the facets of love, for sure! I should’ve brought Hunger Games into this post, but it totally slipped my mind until I read your comment. All of these Stories that seem to be overtaking the Western collective consciousness aren’t just love stories, and they aren’t just epic tales of engaging and embracing the cultural Other (revolution? physical/meta-physical battle?). They’re also about friendship, and family, and rising to protect them out of love, and the conflict that shifting roles produce, all mixed up with the heady, delicious terror of falling in love. That’s the difference between a story and a Story, and the reason trash without it remains just that. Yup, that’s what I was saying ;-)
I think you’re definitely on to something, Desi.
This statement is so true: “It also happens that we forget. Not the love, of course, but that glorious experience of falling too close to the stars.”
I’m a romantic all the way. I love the little love stories in YA, in sitcoms, in romcoms, etc. I think with our busy lives, we don’t have the time to go back to those early days of romance in our relationships, but those moments in tv, books, and movies are tiny pearls reminding us of what it was like at the beginning.
Yeah, now we’re TOO practical, TOO tired, TOO old, TOO …. hehe
Too… (ahem) stiff in the joints? You’re a sweetheart, MJ, and you and your wife are so lucky to have each other. Thank you for chiming in and sharing the smile!
I always feel like (as I glance over who comments and at Link Love List) that I should cross dress before commenting (am not going to nor am I doing to read the prescribed reading list as laid out) but I come here and comment none the less. I didn’t realize four people constitutes as a book club. Wouldn’t know, as I’ve never belong to one -which explains my shabby writing skills, no doubt. I suspect most won’t or cannot explain why they read what they read -but chances are you probably on to something.
LOL!!! Yes, I have been letting my ovaries show quite a lot, lately, haven’t I :-) The book club I belong to, much like my original blogging community, basically evolved as a life-support system for new mothers, and now that we’re all back at work (or at least no longer doing 2am feedings and/or constantly changing diapers) the book club consists of whoever can make it out on a given evening. (I really do need to do away with the Link Love, list. Having nothing to do with the skill of the bloggers listed, and everything to do with my inability/lack of inclination to keep it up to date.)
Anyway, on the matter of why we read what we read? It’s probably far too individual to be generalized in any empirical way, but I think we’ve been operating on a (false?) assumption that if one is of a certain education (often inferred as a certain level of intelligence) then trash fiction (like trash television and romantic comedies) is somehow beneath them. So maybe my question is more along the lines of the premise behind Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion: Is it that we’ve progressed past any societal inclination toward stratifying sterotypes related to popular media consumption and education/intelligence? (Highly doubtful, in my opinion.) Is the popularity of such badly written trash as 50 Shades just another symptom of our society’s descent, echoing the Games in the years before Rome’s fall? Or is it just that we’re so busy in the middle part of our lives that we forget the selfish/selfless recklessness of loving like crazy just because we do, and consequently crave those reminders? I wonder if this is too broad a topic for a doctoral thesis. Media has such a political angle, and popular fiction especially can have resounding (if unintentional) revolutionary consequences…. Thanks for turning on my brain, Hudson :-)