Steve Thomas: Jessie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Jessie Rosen: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be chatting. Libraries were a very big part of my upbringing so this is special for me.
Steve Thomas: Well, that’s the first thing I was going to ask about. What’s your experience been with libraries as a reader or growing up or as an adult, and then how has that changed now that you’re an author?
Jessie Rosen: Yeah, so I grew up in a very small town in central New Jersey called Freehold, New Jersey. Bruce Springsteen fans will know it as the place of his birth and upbringing, so if there’s any fans out there. And in that small town, walking distance from my house was a Carnegie Library. So this really beautiful brick building, it had these double glass doors, I can smell it right now, and the children’s books were kept downstairs.
So you would come in and you’d see the librarian, and of course we were close, my family visited often, and then you’d get to go down these stairs into the basement, which was the children’s book section. There was a mat to lay on, and we were there at least weekly. And I was always “How many, what’s the most I can take?” you know, and I had a really wonderful experience. That Carnegie library is still there in my town, and I’m really excited to go visit it when I go back for book tour now.
But as I continued on in my journey libraries actually became a place where I could write in quiet moving forward. So when I was living in Manhattan, there were various libraries in Manhattan, including the amazing New York Public Library that I went to, and then when I moved to Los Angeles, there’s a really gorgeous library in West Hollywood, the West Hollywood Public Library. It has this really beautiful view on the second floor. So I would kind of identify the local library, find my perfect table or chair at it, they really became these refuges for me and continue to be. So I use libraries a little bit differently now as a writer, but of course, as a reader, I’m always checking out books and I like to hold that book. I like the smell of it.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, I do like ebooks just for convenience wise, but it’s always the physical book for me is still always just there’s something about it that’s different.
Jessie Rosen: Yeah. Well, I like, apropos of my book, which is about heirlooms, I really like the idea that someone else read this very copy. I think there’s something really cool about that, and some libraries do still have the card inside with the name, but when I was a little girl, I would see my friends’ names on the card, and I would know that Josie Palumbo read this book last week, so there was something really fun about that for me.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, those date due cards were fun because you could see the stamps back. It’s like, “Wow, back to like 1962 this book was checked out! Wow!”
Jessie Rosen: Totally. Especially as I was reading my Judy Blumes and my Madeleine L’Engles, like those are older books. Those had really been through some hands.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. So you were doing your writing in libraries a lot of times. I know you’ve done other types of writing as well, but when did you know you wanted to be a writer and what kind of writing did you do as a younger woman?
Jessie Rosen: Yeah, so, I always knew that writing would be in my life. I was a child constantly writing, writing was one of my favorite courses in school. But I think there’s such a switch that has to go on in your brain between “I’m going to write and I’ll always write fun essays” and “I’m going to aspire to be a career writer.” And that didn’t really happen for me until after college, and it happened a little bit by happenstance.
I was working in the marketing and public relations world, doing a bit of writing in that job, but I started keeping a blog that really only came because I was sending emails to groups of friends about the kind of madcap experience of being in your 20s in Manhattan and struggling. Unbeknownst to me, friends were sending my emails to other friends until someone finally said, “Really, you should just put this in one destination.”
And so that’s how my blog 20-Nothings started. That was actually unknowingly a huge part of becoming a writer in public and having people read my work and getting used to feedback and reaction. Then slowly but surely through the nature of the writing on the blog, what I was uncovering, who I was meeting because I had put that writing out there, other opportunities started to present.
I got an invitation to contribute to a one act play festival. Meanwhile, I had certainly never written a one act play. I met someone who worked in film and television who really felt like there was something in my prose writing that could lend to screenplays and scripts and invited me to take on that challenge, so it really slowly kind of changed, but because of that very first act of deciding I love to write, I’m going to write anyway, and now I’m going to put this somewhere where people can discover it. And I always really credit that as being a helpful part of me, understanding that relationship with audience, I think is secondary to me writing what I love as an artist.
But it’s been a huge part of being able to be a commercial writer. So film and television took me to Los Angeles where I worked in that arena for many years, and then this idea was always very close to me, The Heirloom, as a novel. I held on to it for a pretty long time until I felt like I was ready and had the space and had the know-how to tackle this as a book.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, I was just about to move to The Heirloom, but then you said something I wanted to ask about because it kind of ties into the book as well. Did all that writing in public and all the writing that you’ve done, did that help you get to know yourself as well?
Jessie Rosen: Yeah, especially one piece of that journey. I did live storytelling for a long time, actually, as a guest on other people’s shows, and then I ultimately started hosting my own show, which was women storytellers talking about sex and relationships. It was a really fun show. Performing your work live and the great David Sedaris is someone that I had always looked to as an example of this, there’s nothing like it. That feedback from the audience is huge, especially if you’re writing things that have you aspire to have a bit of humor in them. People laugh. They’re gonna laugh if it’s funny and they’re not gonna laugh if it’s not. So hearing that and finding your voice in that, like, what makes me funny was really interesting.
But when you hear yourself speak a story, you feel when it rambles. You get bored when you’re in a section and it’s going on and on. So that was huge. I think all of the writing I’ve done has been incredible training, but when I talk to anyone that might have an interest in or comfort with that format to test out their work, I always recommend it.
Steve Thomas: You said you’ve carried around the idea for The Heirloom for a long time. What was the initial idea that was in your head and you’re like, “I have to write this someday.”
Jessie Rosen: Yeah. So it was the process of personally getting engaged. And for me, that was 11 years ago, young as I still am, but 11 years ago, as I had a hint that it might be coming and I was asked, “Is there anything I should know about your preference in rings?” and I said, “No heirlooms. No vintage rings. I have the superstition that they pass on the karma from all of the relationships in which they’ve been worn.”
And when that came up and I started sharing it with girlfriends and family friends and other people in my peer group, there was nothing but debate. People thought I was ridiculous. And I love old things, so the idea of not accepting this old thing, which could be such a beautiful item, felt crazy to people. Then I had many people agreeing with me. So I’d be at these dinners or evenings out talking about this personal choice I was making and having tons and tons of debate, and I just thought there’s something here. There’s something really fun here.
And at some point, something clicked where I thought, all right, I mean, if I got a vintage ring and then I found out everyone that ever wore it, I guess I feel okay. And once that little light bulb went off for me about knowing the origin to know that the karma is good, I just thought, “Oh, that’s so fun.” And it went in, in a kind of a big way in my brain, but that was, again, over a decade ago. So it took me a long time to feel comfortable enough approaching a novel, as opposed to the film and TV work I was doing, and it also took me a minute, because, without giving anything away, there is a turn in my character’s feeling around her superstition, and I didn’t have that. I didn’t know how I was going to get to that for a really long time, and I just kind of thought, “Well, once I know that part, then maybe it’ll feel like I can go and I can write this.
And recently, I would say about three years ago, which is when I sat down to start writing it, I had listened to the book Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert- I don’t know if listeners are familiar; it’s a lovely book on creativity and the art of writing- and she talks about how she had an idea for a long time and she didn’t do anything with it, and then it left her and someone else picked it up. And this is like a very mysterious spiritual concept, but I started to get very paranoid that someone else was going to write my idea. I loved this idea so much, and I felt that it was original. I had looked around and not seen anything like it, so I just started because I thought if the universe thinks I’m going to pass on this idea, because here I’m sitting on it, then I’m in trouble. So it was kind of a funny, it was almost a superstition in my decision to start writing, if you will.
Steve Thomas: And you said I think it was in the acknowledgements at the end, I was just skimming through it, your mom was the one that would kind of kept nagging you about it, asking about it.
Jessie Rosen: Constantly. And she loved the idea. She is one of the origins of many of my superstitions, but my parents are so supportive of my career and yet never in a helicopter way. So it was so interesting to me that she kept saying, “What about that heirloom idea? Are you doing anything with that heirloom idea? Don’t forget you have that heirloom idea!” constantly over the years, and this is many years from when I had the idea and share it with people to the time that I writing. So, you know, she is a reader. She is one of the reasons that I’m a reader, and she is a reader of these kind of books. So as she kept poking about it, it really kept me realizing that I had something there.
Steve Thomas: Did you ever think about doing something else with it, like making it a screenplay, “Oh, this would make a great Netflix series,” or “This would make a great movie”, before you came to the novel as the ideal form?
Jessie Rosen: Yeah, I did. I think that I always thought it was too big of an idea for me in its initial form to initially be a TV series or film, but as I wrote it and as I’ve been continuing to dream about what may be for it in the future, especially given my experience in that arena, it would be amazing for that to happen for it, to kind of reverse in, but there was something about it that always felt like I wanted to spend a little bit more time in its initial incarnation with it as a novel.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, because even when they make an adaptation of something that’s a streaming series, there’s always still stuff you cannot fit everything in from a novel. There’s so much you can get into of getting into the head of the characters better and describing things differently. A novel is just a different thing, but the same story can be in several formats.
Jessie Rosen: Yeah. And I also think that frankly, as a writer and as a person that has always been a reader and a lover of books, this idea was so meaningful to me that I wanted to physically hold it, and it’s such a different thing. It’s such an incredible thing to have your work on a screen and to have actors interpret your work. That is wonderful and I’ve loved that part of my career, but there is something about this that I just saw it differently.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, this is you. It’s all you.
Jessie Rosen: Yeah, yeah.
Steve Thomas: That ties into some themes in the book too, but we’ve kind of talked around it a lot, but what would be your pitch for the novel itself besides just the concept that it works around?
Jessie Rosen: Yeah. So The Heirloom is based on a woman with a very strong superstition about vintage engagement rings that, like I believe, they hold the karma from all of the relationships in which they’ve been worn, and so naturally we start the book with her getting proposed to with a vintage ring. We uncover why that happened. But, in order to feel comfortable stepping into her hopeful, happily ever after, she insists on knowing everyone that ever wore the ring. And that takes her on a journey through Italy, Portugal, through Boston, New York, back to Los Angeles where she lives, as she does uncover the love stories of the ring, but more importantly, some of the heirlooms of her own past, both physical and emotional, that are really the reason that this superstition has become more powerful than her feelings about the man she intends to marry.
Steve Thomas: The general tone of the book is fairly light and it’s fun and an adventure, but there’s a lot of family trauma that you deal with in there as well, and that’s a really important part of the book, too.
Jessie Rosen: Yeah. Thank you. I just wanted to, I think, give readers a sense of comfort. A little bit of what I’m always trying to do in my writing is to paint a challenging situation through, in this case, a woman in a very important juncture of her life, and to give voice to some of the things that are often unspoken, especially with women. I’ve been talking a lot about how the concept of cold feet is kind of owned by men, which is a broad generalization, but I think that in the past, we might say that that was kind of like a joke that we said about the groom and never about the bride, but I’m proud of my character for having those cold feet and for questioning this huge decision because I want her to arrive at her answer as strong as she can possibly be, and that’s really, for me, what the journey is about.
Steve Thomas: And she does use the library a couple times too, I noticed while I was reading, although I did notice at one point that they’re, they’re looking at some old, I don’t want to say for sure what it is, but they’re looking at some old stuff in the library and they bring food and drink in there. I’m like, “That library would never let them bring food and drink!”
Jessie Rosen: I love that. You are not the first person that said that. I have a dear friend who works in the world of libraries, and she said the same thing and I was a little bit like, “Oh, shame on me.” Yes, especially in international libraries. There are a couple of libraries that come up. You’re right. One when she is abroad and one, when she is back stateside. So yeah, it was impossible for me to imagine her going throughout this experience without some kind of like head down research moment in a gorgeous library.
Steve Thomas: Have you traveled to Italy and Portugal before?
Jessie Rosen: So I wrote this during the pandemic and really during the first year of the pandemic, and so the destinations I chose were destinations where I had spent the most time. I studied abroad in Italy and was able to travel throughout the country. I went on an amazing vacation with a dear friend in Portugal, this great road trip from Lisbon down the west coast, like my characters do. I was so longing to be traveling at that time that I went for the places that were just the most vibrant in my mind, and felt like, gosh, if I could get out of this situation that we’re all in, where are the first places I would go? And those were the things that came to mind. They just felt rich and my senses felt like they were dull during the pandemic. And those places when I was writing them, it felt like it helped make them come alive again.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, you describe it all really well and you get into the, food is very important there too, of all the tasty treats that they get to have.
Jessie Rosen: Yeah, food is a huge part of it for me. And it’s also, when I am immersed in a story, it’s because of those things, you know, those details where I can just feel it and imagine holding it and tasting it, so I love reading that. So I really wanted to include that in the writing.
Steve Thomas: How did you go about putting together your supporting cast?
Jessie Rosen: So first, many of them are based on amalgamations of my supporting cast members in my own life and the people that if I imagined I was my main character and I had to take on this task, who would I want there for support? Who would I not want there for tension? And then what would be fun to experience along the way?
So I think without giving too much away, there are the supporting people that are part of her world, and then there are people that she meets that are part of the history of the ring. In those people, I wanted to represent all different kinds of cultures and marriages and relationships and love stories and those very different ways that love can unfold for people and what that means and how that can look and the impact that that can have on my character.
And that kind of went for everyone. Everyone was really a way to say something about love or commitment or fear of those things, and trying to do the best I could to represent that across multiple generations. So there are people in this book that are in their 70s that had been through many different iterations of love and came at it at a different time in their life. And then there are people that are in their late 20s, early 30s, who are stepping into some of these decisions for the first time. So I used stories and ideas from people that I knew, but I was also pretty strategic about making sure that enough was said on the topic through the people that I was using to say it.
Steve Thomas: The ring does have quite a history to it. You said you wouldn’t want an heirloom ring, but you like having older items that you know. Is that something that you imagine when you get an older item, an antique item, that you’re thinking about what this has been through its life and the life of the item?
Jessie Rosen: Yeah, especially clothing. I love vintage clothing, and if I find like, let’s say a fabulous party dress at a vintage store, I just like to imagine the places that it got to go. And what kind of, in my case, woman, if I’m wearing a festive, cocktail holiday dress, like, where has this been? And what kind of person chose this and why? Because now I’m a person choosing this for whatever my “why” reasons are. These are items that we wear on the outside, but it does feel very connected to people’s insides and the choices that they make, especially clothing. There’s something about that that feels kind of like an embodiment of your image and what you’re trying to project, and I really love that.
Steve Thomas: And what is it about the superstition about the rings in particular? Why do you think that resonates with you, and then you’re able to obviously put that into the character in the book as well?
Jessie Rosen: I think the rings are so big, the engagement rings to be clear, because marriage is so big, and I think it’s one of those things where we want all of the luck on our side. It’s, like, we know the concept of committing to someone forever is this beautiful thing, this romantic thing, this thing that I think we honor in our families by saying, “Well, I want what my grandparents and my parents had.” So this generational thing.
But I think we also know that it is a terrifying thing. And that there’s no way to know what’s going to unfold in your life, no matter what footing you start on. So this idea that marriage superstitions and wedding superstitions are so strong for people, I think acknowledges the bigness of that moment, and that’s how I felt. My family has dozens of superstitions. I follow almost none of them. So how interesting that this is the one that I’m very attached to.
I think we’re all just looking for that sense of security and safety. Superstitions are like dotting your I and crossing your T and doing anything you can to make sure that you’re giving yourself the best chance you’ve got to step into forever.
Steve Thomas: And you can see how those superstitions took place, especially… nowadays it’s really easy to go get a divorce or whatever. But in the older days, you were getting married and you were staying married for the rest of your life, so you better have the right, all the best luck with you in the first place.
Jessie Rosen: Yeah, and I also think in the olden days we weren’t as vulnerable about what happens perhaps inside the marriage. So this concept of like, “Well, it must have been bad luck, must have been fated,” felt easier to access because the idea of what actually probably happened wasn’t something people were talking about. So you kind of throw your hands up and say, “Well, it had to be the gods of marriage. It had to be bad luck because everything should have worked out.” And I think now we’re more apt to say, “No, that wasn’t something that was the right fit for these two people.”
And I really wanted to be sure that while I was painting a picture of a character that desires to be married and wants to make that choice personally, at least in the start of the book, I wanted to also be very clear that I believe that if a marriage or relationship or commitment dissolves, that can be the best thing for both people. And that was just something that in thinking about every single reader that might encounter this book, I wanted to make sure that I was meeting everybody where they were in their own relationship with love and commitment.
Steve Thomas: And you explore that a lot. I mean, we won’t talk specific examples to not spoil things, but you explored that a lot of reasons why marriages maybe don’t work out or why engagements don’t work out, that everybody has these rumors of what happened, but then you find out the real story and it’s different. That happens a number of times throughout the book.
Jessie Rosen: Yeah. Especially that engagement moment. I’m so happy that you picked up on that, that I wanted to say that period between “I think this person is the one” and “I’m committing to this person as the one” is a really important time, and I think it can be very romantic to dig deep during that time because it honors the bigness of what you’re saying and what you’re doing and what committing to. So yeah, there’s a few of those moments that come up and those were really purposeful to say, “This can happen and it’s okay and it was the right thing.”
Steve Thomas: And some of that ties into some of that family trauma that is around and how keeping those kinds of, I don’t know, I was going to say kind of keeping those secrets, but it’s almost like not even cause when it’s the marriage, it’s sort of between the husband and the wife. It’s not really anybody else’s business, but then when it’s the kids, that makes it so hard, but you explore that a lot there of how decisions that parents make can affect the children. And then you find out what was really behind the parents’ thoughts.
Jessie Rosen: Yeah. My parents are together. The relationships in my family primarily are together, but I’m a child of the eighties and nineties. So 50 percent of my friends’ parents ended up not together, and a lot of that was happening when we were growing up. So seeing that a lot and knowing what they knew, but then kind of hearing what my parents were talking about what’s going on about these other friends down the street, I think it’s really interesting.
I think to a certain degree, you’re right. It’s so hard because you want to protect the children from what is an adult situation. But then you have these little very impressionable kids that are learning something and taking that in at an age where they’re literally building the scaffolding of their understanding about love and relationships entirely.
And I also thought it was important, and I think this is something that I’m curious what people will feel from this, that there isn’t always a cut and dry answer. At the end of the day, I think what I really wanted to say is that my character and all of us come to a point where we have to decide what’s right for us, and these lineages and the lessons we learn and the things that we saw and what we think they’re going to make us do, this idea like inheriting an inability to stay committed, for example, one thing I think you hear people talk about, and I wanted to say that it’s really a certain point you detach from all of that, and you look inside, and then you look forward. And that’s really what I wanted to offer my character the chance to do.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, there’s no genetics to keeping a stable relationship.
Jessie Rosen: Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly right. But, you know, I think there could be a benefit to starting on a shaky ground because I think it makes my character think and feel more deeply about this, which I hope is preparing her better.
Steve Thomas: Yes, and she goes through quite a journey, and I think you’ll be happy to hear that several times I wanted to yell, “No, stop, no!”
Jessie Rosen: Yeah, don’t do that. Yeah, I agree. That was actually very hard for me to make my character do the wrong thing, especially when it came to, I am a sister, I have three younger sisters, when it came to the dynamics with the sister and my character does some things that as a sister would really make me mad, that was hard. It’s hard to put her in the wrong place. It was really hard to put her in situations where she was doing something that I felt was unkind to her existing relationship.
Steve Thomas: But if there’s no conflict in the story, if everybody’s just nice to each other all the time…
It’s very human too, because I mean, the nicest person can have a bad day and snap at somebody else.
Jessie Rosen: Yeah, especially in a pressure filled time. I think the pressure of getting engaged pre-wedding, all that that does, but also the pressure of, you know, when you hit the road and you’re traveling, you’re kind of in a different brain. She’s got this mission to solve. She’s got to get it done quickly. I think it throws you off course and throws you out of yourself, so to speak.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And we won’t say what, but she’s realizing that she’s working through some other things in the back of her subconscious, I think, that she doesn’t realize that she’s working through probably too.
Jessie Rosen: Yeah. Which is interesting. I think a lot about that, this concept that things can be with us for a really long time. So in this case, my main character, and this isn’t giving anything away, my main character’s parents have been divorced for a long period of her life. And yet, there are things that she’s unearthing for the very first time now, and I’m really fascinated by that concept, this idea that we can kind of arrive at a place with a certain degree of blinders on in certain subjects in our life as a way of either self-preservation or just a lack of self-awareness or whatever it may be. I think it’s really interesting when we make those change moments and when we dig a little deeper and figure that stuff out, I’m always really curious about how that happens for people when.
Steve Thomas: Well, just in everyday relationships, I feel like, you know, if you snap at somebody, your husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, and you realize, “Wait, that’s not, I’m not mad at what they just said. I’m mad at something else, and I’m not thinking about it right now.” She obviously has lots of stress when, especially when she’s in the middle of the even just about, ” Should I be doing this?” but then feeling compelled to continue to do this even when she’s like actively thinking “This is harming my relationships,” but I have to know this.
Jessie Rosen: Yeah, “This is bad, but I can’t stop.” Yeah, and I think that I have felt like I’ve been in those situations and I also feel like there’s a little bit of wish fulfillment in that where I always like a character that is going to keep going until it’s done, even if I don’t think I could stomach it myself, I like for someone else to do it and then I can kind of watch and learn.
Steve Thomas: They have to know. I want to know.
Jessie Rosen: That’s exactly right. This is for me.
Steve Thomas: So during the summer reading that we’re doing here on the podcast, I’m doing a couple of questions that I’m asking everybody. And so the first one is what was your first favorite book?
Jessie Rosen: So I’ll give you a… I’m going to say the real one, which is a children’s book, but it was Miss Rumpheus by Barbara Cooney. She is the lupine lady. She goes on a journey. It’s a lovely, lovely children’s book, and I was really obsessed with it. So I’m going to say that even though it’s not a chapter book, it was my first big book.
Steve Thomas: And then we’re putting together a summer reading list. What’s a book or two that you would like to add to our summer reading list? What’s a recommendation you would have?
Jessie Rosen: Well, I think it has to be Summer Romance by Annabelle Monaghan, who is also a member of my Putnam family and a friend. And I mean, it’s Summer Romance. It’s in the title. So I think that’s a really great one. I’m also a huge Rebecca Serle fan. I love the magical realism that she always includes and Expiration Dates is like my next read after I finish all this exciting stuff for The Heirloom, so those would be the two that I would add.
Steve Thomas: It’s so hard being a librarian because there’s all these books around all the time. And it’s like, “Why haven’t you read this one?” ” Because I have 20, 000 other books I want to read!” Like, I want to read them all, but I can’t read them all.
Jessie Rosen: I know. I’m in that situation too. It’s actually one of the hardest parts about writing for me is that I can’t tend to read fiction while I’m deep in writing fiction, and I’m in the middle of writing book two right now, which is very exciting. It’s not a sequel, but we’re calling it kind of a spiritual sister. It has a lot of similar journey components and character development moments. The moment I finished that it will be real summer, true summer, and I’m going to pick up these books.
Steve Thomas: Great. Jessie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and talking about The Heirloom, and I hope listeners got enough out of it, I think we tiptoed around spoilers well enough, but I thought it was a great book, and I’m sure listeners will enjoy it as well. So thank you again for coming on.
Jessie Rosen: Thank you so much. Have a great summer.
Steve Thomas: Okay. You too.
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Rebecca Vnuk: Welcome to The Circ Desk. I’m Rebecca Vnuk from Library Reads.
Yaika Sabat: And I’m Yaika Sabat from NoveList.
Rebecca Vnuk: And on this, episode Steve was talking to Jessie Rosen, the author of The Heirloom. So Yaika and I went in to find some read-alikes for that for you. And in doing so, we started discussing the difference between romances and relationship fiction, which used to be called women’s fiction, which used to be called domestic fiction. I really, I love that we’ve sort of settled on relationship fiction better because women’s fiction. So I have actually, you know, spoiler alert, I’ve written three reference books on women’s fiction, and at that time that’s what we called it, and I have to say I never really liked that. I never had a problem with people calling things “chick lit,” because that appealed to me, but I know a lot of people had a lot of fussing about that, that it was derogatory. I never saw it as a derogatory phrase, but others did and I can see why.
I think the problem with calling something women’s fiction makes it sound like it’s only for women, which is not at all true. They just happen to be about women, but what they’re really about is relationships, right? So we used to kind of call it women’s lives and relationships, and then I love that that just got shortened to relationship fiction because as any library worker worth their salt knows, a romance has to have a happy ending. So what about all those other books that have plenty of romance in them, plenty of love story elements, but maybe they don’t have that happy ending, or maybe the happy ending is not the end goal of the book, right? So those are those things that I love that we have this category of relationship fiction to put those in.
Yaika Sabat: Yeah, I agree. I think when you’re thinking of romance versus relationship fiction, you’d realize romance, that love story is the central plot element, and it’s going to have that happily ever after. Relationship fiction might be about a romantic relationship, but it’s about all relationships. It’s friends, it’s families. It’s so much more than that. And it might have a love story, but that’s usually not going to be the central driving force and the status of that relationship is not always going to be the end goal for that book. So I think that’s really important to remember.
And I agree, I’m so glad it’s not women’s fiction anymore because not only does it make it seem like it’s only about women. It makes it seem like that’s all women read, and that’s not true. That’s not true. So I’m all for moving away from gendered sub genres and genres, and I think that relationship fiction very clearly captures the essence of this genre.
Rebecca Vnuk: Agreed. Agreed. So the read-alike that I found for this one off of Library Reads is The Bookshop of Second Chances by Jackie Frazier, and that’s a May 2021 book. You can find it on the May 2021 list in our archive, and I’ll just read off our quick little annotation for you:
“Nothing like turning a page in an upended life to find a surprising plot twist leading to a satisfying ending. That’s what readers will find in this charming novel. The power of books to soothe will attract bibliophiles, but stay for the lively banter of the romantic leads, the quirky local residents, and the brisk Scottish countryside.” And that’s from Katie Stover, one of our board members. I picked that as a read-alike because I thought, okay, that has all of the elements that we’re looking for here. We do have a romance, we’ve got a love story, but the book is not about that. The book is about this woman who goes to run a bookshop basically and happens to find love secondarily.
And I think what’s interesting is if you are a user of the Library Reads list, you know this already, it should not be a surprise that lots of books that feature bookstores or big readers or libraries, they make it onto our list, and that is because readers like familiar things, right? I know I do. Readers like things that they can connect to and that they can see themselves in, etc. And so every time we get one of these bibliophile-centered books on our list, I am never surprised because I’m like, sure, that’s our user base is. We’re talking to the book people here. So I wanted to pick one that sort of had those bookish elements, but explored the meaning of relationships in relationship fiction.
Yaika Sabat: Now, when I looked at The Heirloom when I was reading the description, one immediately just came to mind for me because it is this woman looking a little bit into family history, into the history of this heirloom ring she gets, it’s linked to things her Nona told her and that investigation into family made me think of With Love From London by Sarah Jio where a woman inherits this flat and bookshop from the mother who abandoned her, and so she starts piecing together her life while saving the bookstore and getting to know staff. So while this doesn’t have the romantic element, discovering more about yourself while investigating the history of something is what made that come to mind for me.
And then I also stumbled upon the Book of Silver Linings by Nancy Richardson Fischer, and this one has some, some, like, very clear connections. It’s a woman planning her wedding, dealing with anxiety about whether or not she’s making the right choice, just sort of like the fear of an heirloom ring being cursed, and she starts investigating the history of an antique engagement ring leading to some supernatural correspondences. It’s moving, it’s romantic, like The Heirloom, and it has that sort of engagement ring at the center of the story. So to me, both of those could be great read-alikes
Rebecca Vnuk: Awesome. So we will send you away with that pithy knowledge of relationship fiction, and that’s The Circ Desk. We will check you out next time!
Circulating Ideas 