Tradwifery might be making headlines, but book sales tell a very different story about our relationship fantasies.
A consumer research firm found that in 2023, American print sales of LGBTQ fiction had reached an all-time high, increasing 173 percent since before the pandemic, with the biggest growth in one category: adult LGBTQ romance. Trans youth were being denied health care, drag shows criminalized, and more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced in state legislatures last year alone. And quietly, in bookstores and on Kindles, Americans were buying novel after novel about queer people falling in love.
Do these women think they fell out of the lesbian coconut tree?
Renee Gladman, a Black experimental artist, discovered this booming world of queer romance novels early in the Trump administration. She became obsessed with lesbian romances in particular, devouring more than 1,000 of them and becoming, in her words, a kind of scholar of the genre. “I knew all the tropes,” she writes, fluent in the merits of the werewolf shapeshifter romance versus the elven fantasy, the difference between an HEA (“Happily Ever After”) and an HFN (“Happy for Now”). Because most of the books she encountered were about white lesbians, she became an unintentional expert in the gradations of blushes on pale skin. The prose of these lesbian romances often did not satisfy her, but what kept her coming back “is that the people who write these stories understand how beautiful women are.” Even the bad writers, Gladman explains, could narrate a female orgasm “lovingly and with such great texture.”
You’ll guess what happened next: The experimental “prose architect” decided to write her own lesbian romance.
My Lesbian Novel, published this September, is the document of Gladman’s eight-year struggle to produce a viable lesbian romance novel. (In genre terms, that’s “a slow burn.”)
The book, a hybrid experimental text, takes the form of a series of imagined interviews between literary author “Renee Gladman” and an unnamed interviewer, interspersed with passages from the lesbian romance she is struggling to write. Whole years pass between interviews and entries; the gaps have to be explained. What happens if Gladman skips all the dull scene-setting and tries to produce a romance novel stripped to its most essential form? At the same time, Gladman explains, she is also attempting to write her novel in the same way people fall in love — without a tidy outline of what is going to happen, giving up her full control of the narrative.
The result is a sly and tender deconstruction of the stories people tell about women who fall in love with other women.
There’s a demand for these kinds of stories, a lesbian chic for a new era. The belated lesbian glow-up became a bonafide TikTok trend by mid-2020. “I was married to a man for FIVE YEARS,” the video text would read over a photo montage of an anxious, 30-something woman in a series of ill-fitting blouses. Then there would be a beat drop or a hair toss, and BOOM: tight tank, undercut, tattoos, swagger. Many of these women credited the TikTok algorithm for knowing they were gay before they did –– compulsory heterosexuality defeated by an app! This was the high pandemic: Many people were getting sober or getting divorced or reckoning with their identities. The hetero-pessimistic post-Trump years and the pain of #MeToo didn’t seem to result in a widespread recommitment to political lesbianism.
Gladman is attempting to write her novel in the same way people fall in love — without a tidy outline of what is going to happen, giving up her full control of the narrative.
And yet, 2020 started a boom in later-in-life queer memoirs. Untamed, the story of how married Christian mommy blogger Glennon Doyle fell in love with professional women’s soccer star Abby Wambach, became a #1 New York Times bestseller. The next year, Molly Wizenberg, a Seattle-based food writer and memoirist, published The Fixed Stars, the story of how she became obsessed with a butch lawyer she met while on jury duty and ended up leaving her marriage and building a new queer life, ultimately settling down with a nonbinary partner.
“I felt so much shame and bewilderment. Like, how could I have not known this part of myself?” Wizenberg said in an interview with Elle. This not-knowing is a central subject of these memoirs. “I’ve spent years writing about my life in ways that I felt were very honest. I felt I must have somehow been lying to myself all along.”
Wizenberg added that she worried about having someone “think that I had been deceitful. Not towards my husband so much, but that I was deceiving the reader.”
Both Wizenberg and Doyle grappled with what they owed their public readerships, their identity crises becoming narrative crises. In her memoir, Doyle ends up abandoning a traditional structure, presenting her queer feminist awakening as a series of koans and recollections told “without connective tissue.”
Wizenberg makes The Fixed Stars a kind of detective novel, investigating both her own past and the emerging scientific literature on female sexual fluidity to understand whether she misled herself for years about her own sexual orientation or whether it could have genuinely changed. At times, Wizenberg seems as if she is marshaling evidence to prove that she doesn’t fit the stereotype of the deceitful homosexual, though no one has charged her with this crime but herself.
Both books are presented as victory stories: They find love and keep their book deals, their fans, their children, even, with some work, decent relationships with their ex-husbands. Despite these privileged outcomes, both memoirs are haunted by the authors’ palpable fear of what might happen if they cannot rewrite their narratives in a way that maintains their respectability.
One consequence of the anxiety threading through these books is that neither one is particularly funny or sexy. That’s too bad because there is so much that is inherently ridiculous about being a professionally successful middle-aged white woman trying to learn how to be queer.
In both books, the dearth of pages about good queer sex is substituted with great swathes of prose about the authors’ feelings about their ex-husbands. More frustratingly, neither memoir grapples with arguments about “compulsory heterosexuality” or engages in any serious way with feminist history. Do these women think they fell out of the lesbian coconut tree?
For more sexually explicit content, you have to go to France, where Constance Debré, a defense attorney and scion of an aristocratic family, published a series of unsparing, award-winning autobiographical novels about leaving her husband and starting to have sex with women.
Debré, the granddaughter of a French prime minister, is too upper-class to care about respectability. She was not burdened with previous bestseller status (fucking women appears to have helped her find her voice), and the first novel in her trilogy, Playboy, is a sexual coming-of-age, chronicling her infatuation with an aging bourgeois woman who always wears the wrong kind of pants. The novel is distressingly stylish and a little bit mean, perhaps to be expected from a French aristocrat who describes her ideal prose as “fat-free.” In Debré’s second novel, Love Me Tender, her husband tries to use her sexuality — and the publication of Playboy itself — as evidence that she is unfit to have any contact with their young son. The French courts take this revenge tactic seriously, and the second book follows the former attorney through a terrifying custody battle, during which she can only meet with her son while under state supervision.
Gladman is no fretful baby gay, litigating her queerness while simultaneously trying to understand what it is.
Debré’s lauded literary project is to describe life with brute, spare honesty, excising any trace of sentimentality toward others or herself. The unnamed protagonist of her novels gets bored and behaves badly.
The bluntness of Debré’s voice can be bracing, even exhilarating, when Debré takes on the expectations facing mothers in French society or the behaviors of her male relatives. But when it comes to writing about sex, Debré’s cold detachment turns clammy. Her protagonist’s unwillingness to be vulnerable or to reflect on her own messy feelings makes the sex scenes fall flat. Obsessing over which part of her older lover’s body shows her age the most reads more like condescension and contempt than honesty. Starting to fuck women often does provide a crash course in the pleasures and temptations of misogyny. But neither Debré nor her protagonist seems interested in exploring that. It’s not long before she’s bonding with a man in a bar over the craziness of their mutual ex-girlfriend.
You might not expect a lesbian romance novel to be the place to turn for a more politically sophisticated account of a late-in-life lesbian awakening.
Many people may have moved on from the view of romance novels as inherently anti-feminist — a whole genre, as Hillary Clinton once complained, “about women being grabbed and thrown on a horse and ridden off into the distance.” There’s recognition that romance novels can be progressive, a place for readers to question social expectations and their own desires. Some of the books, of course, remain very reactionary in their politics. After 9/11, there was a boom in romances about white women falling in love with Middle Eastern sheiks. Today, there are plenty of books about white virgins capturing the hearts of alpha elves and billionaires.
In My Lesbian Novel, Gladman admits that romance novels’ guarantee of a happy ending makes them both aesthetically and politically suspect. But literary fiction, she argues, “is bad with love,” while romance novels are not; their attention to the experience of emotion is “almost phenomenological.” Gladman asks her literary audience to slow down and begin to think, in very precise terms, about the progression of love and the unfolding of happiness.
As her novel-within-a-novel, she offers readers a comedic premise: “June,” a New Yorker in her late thirties, is starting to have confusing feelings about another woman.
June is a “straight-up girl” whose “milieu is very heterosexual,” the author, “Gladman,” explains to her interviewer, presenting this as one of her challenges in writing the book. June appears wearing skinny jeans — “my skinnies” — with a tweed blazer and “blonde leather boots.” She has a boyfriend. “It’s so strange to write that word — boyfriend,” the author confesses.
Walking along the High Line with her boyfriend, June thinks about the high cost of Manhattan real estate. She orders salmon and microgreens. She thinks about sex: “I’ll take his penis in my mouth. It’ll have a nice flavor.”
Despite this outwardly perfect life, June is growing increasingly unmoored from her own experience. Her dislocation is profound, almost fantastical: “Most of my past acts like it’s covered with fungus, growths that distort details, that change the shape of emotions belonging to certain events.” She is also having intense reactions every time she runs into a particular British woman — a woman whose name she does not even know. (It’s Thena.)
Homophobia — external and internal — does not warp the architecture of her narrative.
There’s much about the existential crisis provoked by June’s attraction to another woman that’s reminiscent of the later-in-life queer memoirs. But the vantage point is radically different: Gladman is no fretful baby gay, litigating her queerness while simultaneously trying to understand what it is. Homophobia — external and internal — does not warp the architecture of her narrative. Gladman’s queerness, she mentions in a casual aside, has been ongoing for 34 years. And she grounds her artistic struggles against a backdrop of real-life happiness — her queer pastoral life with her longtime partner, Danielle Vogel, a “poet-ceremonialist” who teaches at Wesleyan. Gladman’s fretting over writing a novel with a “plot” is interrupted by descriptions of the couple hiking together in a local forest, where they fulfill their respective queer roles: Gladman “experiences duration,” and Danielle stops “every few feet” to “take a video of a fern.” Afterward, they check each other for ticks, like some lesbian country song. Did I mention they live in a barn?
Unlike the American memoirists, who spend a lot of time thinking and worrying about men, Gladman does not belabor June’s departure from heterosexuality. Her boyfriend, with his inexplicable penis, vanishes. A friend tells June, “Love, I just don’t think you want the stick anymore. Not entirely sure you ever did.” No further explanation is offered.
What Gladman does want to explore — what she sees as essential to her lesbian romance — are little details of the woman June keeps encountering: the material of the shirt Thena is wearing, the precise rhythm of her confidently flirty text messages.
As Gladman leads her heroines through the emotional arc of beginning to trust each other, she fills in their expected personal details with a comedic randomness. Thena is…a French horn player, whose family trauma is…the loneliness of being in a youth orchestra? June unexpectedly becomes Thena’s protector by…watching over her while she sleeps in a park? This is a satire of romance novel tropes, though a fond one. The absurdity does not undermine the tenderness of Thena and June’s growing closeness. It is the moves that matter: Each of them admitting what they feel, June finally leaning in to smell Thena’s neck.
My Lesbian Novel is so small, so deceptively simple, that it’s surprising how nourishing it feels. Gladman has mastered the literary pleasures of slowness and withholding, of leaving space for possibility and growth. Experimental form allows her to give up control and yet remain in control.
“I am going to fuck you until we’re both exhausted, even though I don’t yet know how to do that,” June declares in the novel’s all-too-brief final sex scene. “I mean…I know. I can guess, but I probably won’t be as good as I’ll be later.”
The genre of her lesbian novel, Gladman is constantly reminding us, is romance — a love story about mutual discovery and mutual change. Beneath the deadpan humor is a philosophical commitment: The most important thing about falling in love with women is women.
Lois Beckett is a journalist in Los Angeles.
Photo illustrations by Jordi Ng. Art courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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