The Return of the Romcom
‘Women not being taken seriously is hardly a new phenomenon’
When thinking about the books we yearn for when we want to feel cheered and comforted, the first genre that came to mind was the romcom, with its reputation for warmth, humour, nostalgia, and comforting plotlines. But the more we looked into this humble genre, the clearer it became that these much loved yet often dismissed works of art are perfect examples of the dichotomy of light and dark, both in terms of their content and their place in literary criticism; romcoms are uniquely the most popular and maligned of all genres – at once cherished and overlooked.
With the separation of chick flicks and chick lit from other, more ‘serious’ genres, it’s all too easy to maintain this separation and label books that focus on the heady heights of love as trashy, clichéd, and frothy. And, as it has been pointed out, women not being taken seriously is hardly a new phenomenon. In addition to all attempts to market these narratives to women alone, it could be said that romcoms have managed to hold onto their stubborn reputation of being frivolous and, ultimately, not cool enough.
Well, until now. The genre of the romantic comedy, particularly the books that playfully use the romcom template and lovingly play with it, is thriving. When times are tough, people – all people – yearn for comfort and an element of predictability, and the romantic comedies written today offer so much more than that, with accomplished authors continually reforming, shaping, or even entirely subverting the conventions that people may associate with a ‘traditional’ romantic comedy.
And so, to dismiss the genre as a whole for being formulaic and superficial would ignore the work done by writers of romantic comedies today, including the two incredible authors we were lucky enough to speak to for this feature, Caroline O’Donoghue and Monica Ali, who both dissect love using humour in entirely unique and relatable ways; The Rachel Incident and Love Marriage are disparate in terms of content, but they both beautifully unpick the joy and despair that come with a loving relationship through the most intricate of lenses – love.
‘If love is the thing that trumps all, then what are the things that threaten love?’
In our conversations, both Monica and Caroline talk about love as a way to understand the entirety of the world around us – to uncover both the depths and levity of human feeling. If the romcom can shed its limiting reputation, we could consider the fact that the best and most innovative romantic comedies can simply do both – they can offer hope, escapism, and wish-fulfilment, while also presenting a more authentic and less emulative representation of life that welcomes all forms of love, subverts and questions norms, and explores the highs and lows of desire.
Because when a romcom works, it really works. When done well, tales of desire that pull at our heartstrings and make us laugh out loud become, more than any other genre, embedded in the narrative of our lives. We take these characters into our hearts, we root for their love despite their flaws, and we use them as yardsticks to measure the relationships, both platonic and romantic, that define our lives.
