I have a new book coming! Impossibly Yours, to be published on September 22nd, is a contemporary romance between personal trainer Laura and machine-learning expert Jack, who start out with absolutely nothing in common save the discovery that his wife and her fiancé are having an affair together. From that extremely unpromising beginning emerges a surprising friendship and then an even more surprising passion. But how can two people so different make a real relationship work? It seems impossible. And yet…

So, yes. This book has a lot of what I love to write: a quiet nerdy hero who usually prefers computers to people, a heroine who learns a few things about herself in the process of falling in love with him, a relatively realistic setting, and sex hot enough to knock both participants off their stride. But it also has a content warning at the front of the book for abortion, because early on Laura chooses to get one.

I am spoiling the story slightly (only up through the first two chapters) but this is the kind of thing I’d rather not surprise a reader with. Also I wanted to discuss the whole idea a bit, because I’ve seen calls for more abortion representation, as it were, in romance, and yet if you look around the contemporary-romance landscape right now, you’ll see not a lot of abortions and a heaping of babies.

I’ll give you three examples, taken from contemporary romances I’ve sampled over the last few months:

• Hero and heroine have a one-night stand. Soon after she discovers she’s pregnant and resolves to keep it. When she tells him, he’s initially angry and hostile; then a few days later he shows up having 100% changed his mind and determined to marry her.
• Hero and heroine have a brief affair (a 48-hour stand, if you were). Then he flies back to his home country, which is not the United States. She discovers she’s pregnant. Even though neither of them were previously thinking of having kids, she decides to keep the baby, and upon finding out he decides to return to the United States to be an involved father.
• Hero and heroine have a one-night stand and then separate without learning much about each other. She finds out she’s pregnant, half-heartedly pursues giving the baby up for adoption, but then coincidentally ends up moving for work to the hero’s hometown; he’s not only eager to see her but delighted at the prospect of starting a family.

A good writer can sell you on the idea that despite the setup, these two people, and the child they created, really are going to sail happily into the sunset. And it’s pretty easy to see the appeal of the fantasy. The heroine gets to have the risky, exciting fun of a one-night stand and the sweetness of long-term commitment—with the same hot dude! Meanwhile in nonfictional spaces we’re getting stories of women who freeze their eggs while their partners string them along or men discouraged by their Tinder experiences to the point of sullen apathy.

(To be fair, nonfiction stories are also stories, selectively told, and not necessarily representative of your experience, or mine.)

So I can understand why readers might enjoy escapes from reailty. And I will happily write a story where a one-night stand leads to real, sustainable feelings (that’s The Hand You’re Dealt, if you’re curious), or the sexual connection sets the stage for the emotional one (Learning to Love You). But to be honest, I didn’t finish any of three books listed above. Once I stopped believing in the characters, I lost interest.

The unbelievability didn’t lie in where the hot one-night-stand turning out to be an eager father-to-be, but before that. Since in all three of those stories, the heroine committed to having the baby before the hero re-entered the picture. The third one was planning to have her baby adopted, but the first two were taking on the task of becoming a single mother. And that’s hard, y’all. Unromantically hard. I have friends who’ve done it, but only  after much consideration and planning, and it was still taxing. For a heroine in a book set in modern America, even in 2023 when abortion access is more limited than it used to be, to barrel right past the possibility of abortion and go straight to impending single motherhood… it just felt less like enjoyable fantasy and more like imposed blindness.

In Impossibly Yours, for what it’s worth, Laura isn’t pregnant because of a one-night stand, but by her (cheating) fiancé. Honestly, as I was starting the book, I found myself thinking, “What if she’s not only engaged but pregnant? …oh, no.” Because I was already getting an idea of who Laura was in my head, and I knew she wasn’t going to get back together with her ex, and I couldn’t see her having the baby in the absence of that possibility. It was going to be rough for her.  Very unfantastic.

Obviously I am not every reader! All three of the books mentioned above have devoted fans. (And if you would prefer books like those to mine, you might enjoy some of the recommendations here.) And sometimes while editing Impossibly Yours I would wonder: am I just too weird a reader, and it means I miss the point as a writer? Is there not enough fantasy in my stories?

Here’s what I think: the realism makes the romance stronger, not weaker. Jack and Laura are both flawed people with vulnerable hearts. They make each other laugh; they misunderstand each other; they talk. When they finally admit they’re in love with each other, they’ve earned it, and so will have you, the reader. The fantasy is that two uncertain, wounded, mistake-making human beings can get past each other’s defenses (and their own insecurities) to find a beautiful love with each other. It’s magic that looks even more magical for being in a recognizable setting. That’s not what everyone’s looking for, but I think a good number of y’all are going end up loving this book as much as I do.