I confess I struggle to find a balance of angst in my romance reading. Though I adore Meredith Duran, I did not enjoy her last published romance, The Sins of Lord Lockwood. My issue is not with Liam’s horrific past but rather the detail and time spent on exploring it and its impact on him. I’m down with leads who overcome a rough past or experience but I don’t want vast swathes of the book to be about that. I don’t want to read about a torture scene or a child who was starved and beaten in a romance. That past can exist–if an author renders it with sensitivity–but I start flipping pages if the abuse is extensively explored on the page.
To be fair, I am also the sort of person who avoids on-screen violence in a TV show or movie. When Dr. Feelgood and I were watching Game of Thrones, I read the synopsis of each episode before watching so I knew, ahead of time, when to close my eyes and plug my ears.
Thinking about this, though, makes me wonder if I’m just not reading the right angsty romances. I mean, I am a lover of Jo Goodman’s and Patricia Gaffney’s work, so obviously, there are some tragic pasts I’ve enjoyed. I dunno.
What about you? Do you like angst and trauma on the page in your love stories? If so, what are your faves? And if you don’t, why not?
Angst and violence or physical suffering are two different things, though. I have a fairly strong stomach and it takes a lot to squick me out. I LOVE angsty stories because they give me the opportunity to experience the more negative emotions (grief, sorrow etc.) while knowing everything will work out in the end.
BUT.
It has to be believable, and the reasons for it have to be credible and well-seeded in the story and characters. Manufactured drama for its own sake is not the same thing, and will turn me off a book in seconds.
I gravitate towards angst, so I could make a long list of favourites, but I just read Lonely Shore by Jenn Burke & Kelly Jensen, book 2 of Chaos Station, which was a real rip-my-heart-into-bits book, and listened to Best Supporting Actor by Joanna Chambers & Sally Malcolm, which had some wonderfully angsty moments. Do I need to mention Gregory Ashe as someone who writes angst really well? 😉 I haven’t yet found a book that’s too angsty for me!
I feel the same way. If a romance doesn’t have some source of angst in the first chapter or two, I tend to lose interest. But as Caz said, it has to be believable, and it can’t be something small that quickly stops being a problem after the hero and heroine meet. If a hero is rich, titled, healthy and beloved by his family, but he throws temper tantrums because of the scar on his face, I’m not interested. If the heroine is a sad panda because she couldn’t have children with her first husband, likewise.
The worst levels of manufactured angst/drama – in my experience – has been in NA romances. I’ve read a few good ones but I mostly avoid NA because the melodramatic navel-gazing drives me nuts!
As I’ve said before, I’m an angst queen in my romance reading reading—probably because I’ve been fortunate enough to have a relatively angst free life with a long, stable, happy marriage and kids who made it to adulthood without too much drama. However, again as I’ve said before, there’s a fine line between angst and melodrama—and the minute a writer crosses over that line, I’m “check, please.” Angst is where character drives plot and the things that happen to the characters emerge organically from their personalities, backgrounds, and experiences. Melodrama is where plot drives character, so characters may act in wildly inconsistent ways simply because of the need to move from plot point A to plot point B. Some of my favorite writers of angst include Caitlin Crews, Masey Yates, Kelly Hunter, Nicky James, Garrett Leigh, and Briar Prescott. Yes, there’s always some emotional pain involved in their story lines, but there’s also emotional growth, self-awareness, and ultimately love.
That’s it exactly. Character – not plot – has to drive the story for angst to work properly. Otherwise, it’s just manufactured drama, which I dislike intensely.
To your list, I’d add Jay Hogan, Fearne Hill and Sally Malcolm (who I mentioned elsewhere) as authors who know how to write angsty contemporary romances without veering into melodrama.
Mary Balogh was great at angst back in the day – some of her older (80s and 90s) historicals are wonderfully angsty without going over the top.
One of Balogh’s later books, ONLY A KISS, did angst well, I thought. The heroine is the only woman in the Survivor’s Club, Balogh’s series about survivors of the Peninsular Wars. Imogen wasn’t a soldier like the others, but she followed her husband to Spain and we find out in the course of the book that the war scarred her just as much as it did the men. I found her trauma believable and heartbreaking.
Balogh does angst well often, I think. It’s because she doesn’t dwell on the causal event but rather on the move towards peace, in my opinion.
Suffering is so integral to the human experience and can help shape character. And I love strong characters who show the incredible strength of the human spirit.
So angst is almost required for me but it has to follow the “laws” of human nature, so to speak. Actions should have realistic consequences and in order for me to be sympathetic, people need to learn from that suffering. So, a guy who sleeps with a million women should have some consequences — either he knocks someone up or he realizes he hurts someone he cares about, or at the least it makes it hard for the heroine to trust he’s serious about her, etc.
That said, I don’t have a lot of patience for self-imposed suffering — even if it’s realistic.
I love so much about Laura Kinsale’s Dream Hunter but the fact that the heroine keeps making variations on the same self-own over and over is infuriating, even if it’s very realistic. The suffering in Kiss an Angel, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, meanwhile, feels a lot more propulsive. I think To Have and to Hold by Patricia Gaffney has the pitch perfect amount of angst for me. Two people, trying to do the right thing — which involves so much suffering. Yet no one (well, at least not the main characters) wallows, everyone is always moving forward.
I don’t mind angst and trauma if it makes the romance more interesting and the HEA more hard-won. But I don’t want to read pages of suffering. I’d rather see how a traumatic past affects the characters through their thoughts and actions in the present day, and I just need enough information to feel that they’re not overreacting or wallowing in self-pity. A skilled writer can make me empathise with a troubled character without making me experience their trauma personally on the page. Too much detail of horrific events can feel kind of exploitative.
That’s how I feel too. Thank you for articulating this so well!
100% I don’t need to see someone’s sexual assault to get that it’s going to really mess with them. When you get the feeling the author enjoys torturing their character, something’s wrong.
Or, torturing their readers!
But that’s half the fun!! 😉
I have read and enjoyed a lot of angsty romances because I have read a lot of Harlequin Presents and certain authors (Lucy Gordon comes to mind) who wrote for a variety of series. I am fine with emotional angst as long as it is clear the marquee couple will end up coupled.
A character’s self-doubt or emotional hangups can carry a plot for me. Traumatic backstories, if too graphic in unpleasant ways, can derail my enjoyment of a book. I suspect there is no universal — and therefore ideal — level of angst. Some romantic suspense just does not work for me, for instance.
As a reader who is often not good at picking up emotions in other people in real life, I am credulous about the emotional lives of characters as the writer presents them. My attention to historical detail and linguistic anomalies are much more critical.
My reading wanders from angst to fluff depending on my mood, and I suspect I am not alone in this. But I don’t want the angst to depend on graphic scenes of violence and pain. Tell me what happened in the past, but don’t make me live through it.
Also, I do not want anyone (and this is more often the “hero” than the “heroine”) to use past suffering as an excuse for present callous cruelty and selfishness.
I think it’s okay that tragic things happened and I don’t care how horrible they are, after all it’s inspiring to see stories where someone finds love and happiness after suffering horribly.
But I need two main things:
1) Neither the hero nor the heroine have to have become bad people because of it, hardened and distrustful it may be but I am not interested in them using their past to justify now harming other people “oh well they murdered her family so she is now a murderer and kills innocent people for money” or “he was raped as a child so now he works in the sex traffic because he only knows that” ehh no, if you suffered for something you know that you are making other people suffer.
2) The author must portray it sensitively, I don’t care if that means telling and not showing or showing only what is necessary. But if the author begins to dwell on physical torture, abuse or worse, detailed sexual abuse… I don’t like it, it seems like the abuse was “part of the morbid fun” and not “the sad past of a character.”
Do you want to describe horrible things in detail? well there are genres for it and an audience for it, maybe it’s just me but when thousands of detailed misfortunes happen to a character I begin to feel that the character is dehumanized, but it seems as if it were the author’s punching bag destined to suffer horrors instead of a complete character.