When I began writing Two Wrongs Make a Right, a modern rom-com reimagining of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, I knew exactly what quote from the play I would use to preface it: “For which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?” Not only does the line perfectly capture the irony of a romance discovered between two people who fall in love with the very qualities in each other that they once swore they despised, but because this sentiment is the heartbeat of my belief as a romance writer: that everyone deserves a love story, that it’s the parts of ourselves that our pasts and our culture have taught us are “bad” and thus make us unlovable that we need most to see foregrounded as anything but bad but instead simply human realities that make us no less lovable or worthy.
Romance is the genre which more than any other celebrates relationships and the many valid, beautiful forms of love and intimacy—with oneself, platonic, familial, and of course, romantic. Romance that portrays people who don’t perceive their complex human realities as “imperfections” or so-called “bad parts” and people who love them not despite those complexities and struggles but love them for them, powerfully confronts the prevalent cultural message that we have to be “perfect”, that we have to hide our struggles or be without them to be worthy of a happily ever after.
“Life,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “imitates art far more than art imitates life.” A brilliantly irreverent satirist who both amused and outraged prim, proper Victorian society, he had very good evidence that art impacted those who encountered it. And from my own experience, I do to—first as a reader who recognized herself as neurodivergent from devouring a romance novel that compassionately, tenderly portrayed a neurodivergent heroine (Helen Hoang’s, The Kiss Quotient), and now as a writer who pens romances affirming my belief that everyone deserves a love story (in my self-published Bergman Brothers and my traditional publishing debut with Berkley Romance, Two Wrongs Make a Right). It is all too rare that our culture’s art and entertainment represents the breadth and beauty of human experience, and as a culture, as individuals, we are shaped by that. From television and film, to fiction, advertising, and visual art, when we only encounter portrayals and thus affirmations of the importance, admirability, and validity of a very narrow identity and experience, we are reinforced to see only that identity and experience as desirable and worthy. This is why my work as a romance novelist matters so deeply to me, and why the work of expansive, authentic, inclusive representation is both a conviction and responsibility that I take very seriously.
When readers get their hands on romances that reach beyond the “normative” idea of who gets a happily ever after, they’re given the experience of a healing truth: that the most beautiful love stories don’t blossom in that nonexistent land of “perfection,” rather they flourish in the rich, varied soil of “imperfect” human reality. Thanks to a culture that fears and erases so many prevalent human experiences, many people would say that chronic pain, disability, mental health struggles, bodies of all shapes and functions and sizes, scars and dimpled and stretch marks, bruised hearts, neurodivergent brains, are far from the romantic subject matter the expect in swoony love stories. And this is exactly why we need art, in my case, romantic fiction, that pushes back on the status quo, affirming the truth that people of all sorts of brains and bodies and backgrounds live richly fulfilling, happy, sensual, satisfying lives, and deserve to be loved for all of who they are.
As a neurodivergent woman who lives with often invisible chronic conditions, I know personally from my own experience and the moving response of readers who for the first time ever have seen their chronic conditions and disabilities and fears and traumas represented positively and compassionately in characters who are loved and desired and empowered, how imperative it is for there to be stories out there portraying these realities in romance. Because the wildly romantic, beautiful fact is that it’s in sharing with a worthy someone the truth of our so-called “imperfections,” the corners of our pasts and presents and futures that we’ve been told are “bad”, that the most profoundly romantic intimacies are born—in the vulnerable gift of entrusting your full self, your needs, fears, and struggles, to another and receiving the gift of another treating them gently, learning them, loving them, simply because they’re a part of who you are and of loving you.
Romances that are inclusive, that foreground complex human realities, debunk the damaging implication that we are unworthy of love and intimacy if we don’t fit a very narrow paradigm of desirability. If Oscar Wilde was right—and I truly believe he was—this is why we need love stories that shape us, change us, into people who see every person, including ourselves, for who they truly are: a worthy, irreplaceable gift deserving of the love they long both to give and to receive.
In the books I’ve written both on my own as an indie author (the Bergman Brothers series) and now with Berkley (Two Wrongs Make a Right) I’ve aspired to walk the tightrope of realism that foregrounds everything I’ve been talking about, while also creating a richly escapist journey. My hope is to whisk my reader away to a place that, while pleasurably distant from the minutiae of their own life, is also a place where they can recognize in an affirming, uplifting perspective some difficult and vulnerable parts of themselves that the world might not treat gently but where, in these fictional stories, the characters do—as friends, lovers, partners, family members, where love interests with mobility aids and scarred bodies, neurodivergent brains, chronic pain, and PTSD, are desirable, empowered, beautiful, fulfilled, and receive the dignity, inclusion, and respect that they and we in this real, though often ableist world, deserve.
In Two Wrongs Make a Right, I wrote two neurodivergent leads, Jamie and Bea, who’ve learned to hide those parts of themselves that the world hasn’t often treated gently, and who, when their friends decide to matchmake them despite their mutual dislike of each other, decide to have their revenge by fake dating, acting wildly in love, then breaking up spectacularly to teach the meddlers a lesson. I was inspired to write an inclusive, contemporary take on Shakespeare’s beloved comedy not only because I love retellings and as someone passionate about inclusivity, I believe it’s important to cram retellings with diverse and nuanced human experience, but because I saw in Jamie and Bea the chance to write characters who’ve been misunderstood and fundamentally hurt by the damaging norms and manipulations of the world yet fight back for themselves, whose quest for revenge, which begins as an act of self-defense, becomes a deeply vulnerable exercise of revealing the very last parts of themselves they’d ever be willing to show a lover, let alone a foe turned fake partner. The trope of fake dating was the perfect space for two wounded people to heal safely—while pretending, they could be deeply sincere without risking real rejection; while lying to everyone else, they created a safe haven where only the two of them share truth. And so two people who thought they couldn’t be more wrong for each other, who would have sworn the other person could never actually love them for all their “bad parts,” end up realizing just how right they are together, as they fall in love with each other’s places of greatest insecurity.
Many of my readers are not neurodivergent like Jamie and Bea. They don’t live, like my other novels’ love interests, with invisible illness or chronic conditions or daily pain or complex mental health. But my hope is this: that in seeing intimate love unfold between two fictional people who I hope seem deeply, realistically human, with fears and needs and wounds and hopes, who are brave enough to entrust that to each other, my readers will be shaped a little by this art, emboldened to imitate that art and be braver in their own lives, to see in others and themselves what is inside all of us: the ache to be seen and known for who we truly are, to love another for all of who they are and be loved just as fully in return.
Two Wrongs Make a Right is available from Amazon and Bookshop.