"Is romance fiction anti-intellectual?" · Beach Reads by Emily Henry · Episode 1, Season 1
Somewhere along the way someone decided that a story about love was less serious than a story about war. Someone decided that joy was cheap and suffering was literary. Someone decided, and we all just kind of agreed. Well, I don't and I bet you don't either...
⋆.˚ ☾ .⭒˚ Join the Margins community on Instagram @eighthhousebooks! Drop your answer to this week's reflection prompt and let's think together.This episode we are diving into Beach Read by Emily Henry. We will cover:
- The literary hierarchy: why romance gets dismissed and who benefits from that dismissal
- Grief, betrayal, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive the people who disappoint us
- Why optimism is harder and braver than cynicism, and why the literary world has it backwards
- How the dismissal of romance fiction connects to a much larger pattern of devaluing what women enjoy at scale
This Episode's Critical Thinking Skill
Identifying inherited assumptions
An inherited assumption is a belief you hold not because you examined it but because the culture handed it to you. This week we learn to spot the difference between a conclusion you reached and one that was handed to you, and why that distinction matters everywhere, not just in how we talk about books.
Reflective Prompt
Pick one opinion you hold about books, art, music, or culture. Ask yourself: did I arrive at this through my own experience, or did someone hand it to me? Drop your answer on Instagram. I want to hear it.
The Book
Beach Read by Emily Henry
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Episode Transcript
This is Margins, where we read deeper, think harder, and question who gets to decide what's worth reading. I'm Tori, and you're exactly where you're supposed to be. Let's dive in. Somewhere along the way, someone decided that a story about war was serious and a story about love was not. Someone decided that suffering was literary and joy was cheap. Someone decided, and we all just kind of agreed. But I don't agree, actually, they were wrong, and today we're gonna dive into a book called Beach Read, a romance novel about two writers stuck next door to each other for a summer, proved it. I'm Tori. This is Margins, where we read deeper, think harder, and we're gonna dive in. Before we do dive in though, since this is the first episode, thanks for being here. I just want to briefly share real quick what you can expect from each episode. Each episode, we're going to be talking about one book, mostly about the themes and critical thinking areas that we can talk about. I don't want to necessarily talk about spoilers. I can't guarantee that that will never happen, just because I have not recorded every episode I will ever do or picked every book I'm gonna read. But, my goal is that you don't have to have read the book to listen to the episodes, but it would be really cool if you did read the book, or if you read after and then come back and listen, or, you know, you listen to this, maybe it entices you to, maybe I can convince you to read the book, maybe that's how we think of it. But, I really want this to be a collaborative experience as much as possible. I know that you are listening to this after I've already, you know, recorded it in real time, but, I hope as the, the podcast and the season progresses, you're able to just show up more. I will also say that although I have tried my best to keep these in an outline format and have time limits, and I'm not just babbling endlessly. These are also very real. I'm, I'm a very busy mom of two. I homeschool, I work, I do all sorts of things. So if these are not the most polished episodes that you've ever listened to, I deeply apologize, but also not sorry because that is better than perfect. And so you get real me, real talk, quite literally, and yeah, so anyway, we're gonna dive in real fast here. So, just briefly overview, you know, book and author context. We're reading Beach Read by Emily Henry, and this was her breakout book. It was, it was not her first book, but it was just kind of like, you know, the first big one. It was published in 2020, and it became a real talked about romance at the time, and I think, well, I mean, today is 2026 and we're still talking about it, so good for her she is one of the clearest thinkers writing in romance right now. And I say that having now read several of her books, I think that she does such a great job of presenting. These real topics and real lived experiences in her fictional works that I don't know, it just. I just think it's really great that she is consistently using her genres conventions to really examine something real about how people work, live, love, you know, all those things, and All right, so getting into the premise of the book here, January Andrews is a romance writer with writer's block after her father's death. Augustus Everett is a dark literary fiction author that lives right next door. They do have a slight past, like they're kind of, I don't wanna say competitors, but yeah, she kind of views them as competitors like January does, and this book, excuse me, this book is structurally a debate about what Fiction is for, and it uses romance to win that debate, which I, I think is perfect because it really sets this up. The whole point of margins, real fast, not to talk about the book, but the whole point of the podcast here was to talk about The things that people have kind of decided in the literary world, like what is, what what's worth reading, what's considered good fiction, what's, you know, what's worth your time? What's what actually counts as a book? I've made a post a few weeks ago, and I was kind of teasing the show, and I remember someone said that, a family member of theirs is like, yeah, but that's not a real book, like when what's the last like real book you read? I'm like, I'm sorry. Is it a figment of my imagination? Are we not holding the thing in our hands? Are we not turning the pages or listening to the audio? Like, how is it not real? And it's, I know, this constant anti-intellectualism debate is really what inspired this podcast, and to, of course, read more marginalized authors. I should note that real fast, sidebar. most of our books that we go into are either written by women or authors from marginalized communities, and that is very intentional. There are a few classics, but even then, just, well. Episode 4 is going to be on Frankenstein, which is written by Mary Shelley, and so that that's what I mean by classics, we're not reading like Huckleberry Finn or anything like that, that's never gonna happen here, so why this book? Why now, right? I'm kind of circling back to the book here. Romance is the best selling fiction genre in the world. Its readers are overwhelmingly women. It has been dismissed, mocked, mocked, and excluded from serious literary conversations for decades. That's not a coincidence, and Beach Read knows it, and I think that that is Why this book in particular, just really had to be the one, it was too perfect. It was too perfect. I had to have this be the one that started this whole series, because it frames this debate perfectly, especially because the authors do that. And in the book, that that's kind of the whole premise, right? Is that She's a romance author, he's not, and he's like they basically make a little deal to like swap genres and to see how. Not only hard is it to, or how hard it is to write romance and to write it well and meaningful or to make it still be, you know, meaningful, impactful, and Have it Be something that doesn't have to be serious, that doesn't have to be painful or like you don't have to suffer as a reader for it to be good, and for you to enjoy and love it, and for it to have an impact on you. And I think that was, like I said, it was just, it was too perfect when I read it. I was like, this is the one, this is the one I have to, I have to kick off this or this podcast with. How we're going to dive into a couple of themes. I have 3 laid out here, and if you have other themes or thoughts, I would love it if you would. At some point, comment, message me. You can find me on Instagram at eighth House Books, all spelled out one, you know, word. And yeah, let me, let me know what you think. If I, if I kind of go over any. Obviously, I can't do an exhaustive list, but I would absolutely love to interact with you. If you have other thoughts on, on these themes or anything that I missed, please let me know. OK, so theme one here is kind of the just the hierarchy of genres, and again, it's, it's just, it's set up too perfectly, right? So Gus, in the book, that's Augustus, he goes by Gus, represents the literary establishment. His work is dark, it's difficult, it's critically praised, he, you know, is that tortured soul, so to speak, and writes about it all the time. And January writes books people actually want to read, and then like gets apologetic about it at at at, you know, interactions and the book club and kind of like, oh, well, you know, it's it's not this, it's not this critically acclaimed thing. The book doesn't let Gus be right about this. It systematically, or it's just, excuse me, it systemically dismantles his position while making him fall in love with the person who proves him wrong. And I think that This is very evident in scenes like where January is kind of defending those happy endings to her readers, or excuse me, about her readers like with Gus. It's, it's not about just escapism, even though we love that in, you know, that's that's kind of the ongoing joke, right, when we're reading, especially, I read a lot of fantasy and I follow a lot of fantasy readers. And that's kind of the thing, right? Like we make the joke, like we don't want our books to be serious. We were trying to escape this. I, I want my books to take me somewhere else. But it's not just about escapism, it's an act of radical hope. And I thought that that was so poignant and really profound for for her to make that. And I think it was especially interesting because Remember during this book, and again, not trying to spoil too much, but during this book, what brings January to this location is her father's death. OK. So she has inherited this house, and she's there basically to just clean it out and sell it. And along the way, she's learning things and finding out things about her parent, and How She's dealing with the grief and also confrontation, I think is the word I'll use, the different layers that her parent was as a human, and again, I'm really trying hard not to spoil things. I think that that was such a mature thing for her to say while she's grappling this with herself, because she's feeling a little hopeless. She's feeling like none of this actually is real or matters. And How she can still, and that's part of the cause for the writer's block, right? She's a romance author who's feeling like this, this might not matter. And then she's confronted with this character who's like, See, it doesn't matter. And then she has to kind of go to bat for herself, even if she's not really feeling it in the moment, to be like, No, love is worth celebrating. Love is worth experiencing. Love gives us hope. And that was I, I don't know, I just, I really loved that scene in particular, and I think that it absolutely highlighted the hierarchy of genres that. We are kind of having to constantly defend, or I say constantly defend, not myself. I read what I read, and I don't really care what anybody says. But I know that that is something that has come up where you see, you know, just on the interwebs and social media, somebody saying, oh, well, I won't read this because they're smut. I won't read this because there's curse words. I won't read this because I don't believe in X, Y, Z, you know, there's just We have seen controversies over and over and over again pop up of authors having different views about something, readers having different views, and it really. asks, why are we having to feel like we have to apologize for what we read? And again, this whole episode or this whole podcast really is just to challenge that and give readers a space to feel safe and also to say, Hey, these little like trivial stories may not be as trivial as they appear, and also on the flip side of that is they don't have to have. A lot of depth built into them, like they don't have to be this literary work of art that is. Critically acclaimed or has so much suffering in it to be good, to be something that makes us feel, and to be something that we enjoy and love, and they get to be worthy of reading just because they are. OK, so that's my little soapbox on that one. the second theme that we're going to dive into is grief and the stories we tell ourselves. Remember, January's grief is over her father and her complicated feelings about who he actually was, and how she's learned a lot of this after his death, and it runs really under under every scene. There's this Very real dichotomy that I think Emily Henry did such a great job of writing in, and kind of having to balance, you know, Or reconcile, I should say, not balance, but reconcile who he was and Who she remembers him to be, and then also what she has learned about him. And so hopefully that in itself has convinced you to read it if you haven't already. But she writes these happy endings because she needs to believe in them. And this is where the book gets genuinely deep and where the romance is shallow argument completely falls apart, in my opinion. This isn't escapism. It's a woman processing betrayal and loss through the only framework that lets her survive it. She Kind of clings to her genre and defending it and wanting to make sure that Gus is understanding it. Because it's what she has, it's what she is grasping onto herself. And so there's this kind of natural tension that happens where she. Becomes the biggest proponent of her genre, not just because she feels the need to defend it, but because she has such a deep and personal connection to wanting to keep hope alive for herself. And I just thought it was really beautiful and the way that Emily Henry incorporated that was But it was just, it was really fantastic and well done. Go, Emily Henry, and I think this is really brought to life in. This, well, there's, I feel like there was a few scenes where this happened, but there was kind of that final realization for January, that her father's secret life doesn't cancel the love that she had for him. And Ultimately, what that cost her to accept it. I think that that was really the depth for me in this book, what it costs her to accept. That she can still love him, despite what she has found out. And I don't know, I think that that's something that we can all relate to. Like what stories do we tell ourselves to make sense of people who have disappointed us? And how do we reconcile that and keep moving on, or keep loving them, or keep interacting with them. Maybe it's not even a death, maybe they're still very much a part of our lives, and how, how do we reconcile? I thought, I, I just thought it was so well done. Third theme, and I'm trying real hard to stay on topic here, not just, not just ramble for you, but the third theme is optimism as an intellectual position, and Again, it's just this book does this perfect. It was just so set up. This, this book was made for this podcast, or this podcast was made for this book, maybe, I guess, is the better way to say it, but this is a theme that I think it's really missed entirely. The literary world treats cynicism and darkness as sophisticated and hope as naive. And Beach Reed argues the opposite, that choosing to believe in love, and happy endings, and the possibility of good things is harder and braver than despair. Despair is easy. Hope takes work, and it kind of reminds me of that. There's like, oh, where's the quote from, where it's like, is it Hamilton, dying is easy, living is harder. I think that I'm like 99% sure that was Hamilton anyway, but even still, it was an idea before Hamilton, if I'm wrong on that one. January's writing isn't less serious than Gus's, it's more demanding because he is writing this, novel that's super dark and deals with Survivors of occult and. She's trying to write this, you know, love story that is really taking readers from. The pits of despair and giving them something to to hold on to. And he's just kind of highlighting all the bad in the world and how depressing that is, and how, for him, it's actually impacting his mental health. And so I think that that is That that's something to like for Gus, you know, his backstory is that he's writing these dark fictions, and that is costing him emotionally. You see that so much when he's interviewing, when she goes with him to the interviews, and the serious writer is the one who can't let himself feel hope. So I think that what we're really doing is asking, well, I guess my question to you, dear listeners, is cynicism smarter than optimism? Or is it just easier to defend and. That is the argument that that January makes continually is that she's like, no, you don't get it. It is, it's hard to be a romantic. It is hard to be. A person who, despite all of the bad things that happen, you find. The things to hope for. You find the things to love, you find the things to hold onto, and you Find it and you latch onto it and. You don't let go, and that takes so much bravery and courage because that thing could go away and you're left holding nothing. And it's easy to find pain. It's easy to find The bad and just be able to say, well, see, look at this is how the world is. And that is absolutely something that I think Gustries, not tries to do, it's just what he does. There's the scene where they're, they go to the campsite and He actually leaves her because he there like in the campsite and goes on to the the site of where a thing happened. Or he's doing research for his book and the thing that happens is it's so bad, like he doesn't even want her to see it. And he doesn't want this to be. Something that Impacts her, even though it's absolutely impacting him. It's almost like he's like, Well, I'll take this. And she's like, No, that's that's not how you, you don't have to shield me from these terrible things for you to just do them alone and you bear the brunt of it yourself. It was a scene that really highlighted, I think this in particular, that you can just find awful things anywhere you look, and they can be terrible and awful. And then you can just Put it in with all of your guests, you can just put it in the book and it's, you know, another thing to say, here's why this is so bad. And January kind of refuses to accept that, and, and I think that was so, I think it was accurate for us romantics in the world. We, the hopeless romantics, we, we want to find the We want to find the hope. We kind of have to find the hope. At least if you're like me, you have to find the hope. Because again, just, it's too easy not to. So anyway, I hope we keep finding the hope. All right, so the next kind of way that I have this structured here, again, you guys are just kind of going on with me on as I kind of experiment with this, the the structure may change a little, but I thought a real life connection situation could be could could be helpful. We might have a few more sections here, but the real life connection, kind of the gatekeeping of taste, the dismissal of romance isn't just about books. It's a pattern of devaluing things that women enjoy at scale. And I know that we have seen this come up. The, the argument is made, you know. between romanticsy and high fantasy or epic fantasy, right? Like people talk about how George RR Martin writes epic fantasy and other women authors who've written just as fantastical worlds, just as much world building, just as much character development, plot. It's labeled as romanticsy because there's romance in it. Romance also in George RR Martin's work. Why is his not labeled romanticy, you know. And it's not just him, it's insert any epic fantasy writer. And that calling something epic fantasy is somehow a Badge of honor or greater feat than in quotes, romanticy and kind of putting that romance into it just devalues the work or attempts to, in my opinion, I think that it does, but what do you think? Do you think it, calling it romanticy devalues anything? The same dynamic shows up in how we talk about pulp pop music, not pulp music, pulp fiction. About pop music, reality TV, fan fiction, social media. When women consume something in large numbers, it gets labeled shallow. But when men consume something in large numbers, it becomes culture. And Beach Read is one data point in a much larger argument worth making explicitly. And again, is Really setting up this podcast, because we're we're going to keep talking about these things. We're going to keep talking about what who who deems what is worthy to read, who deems what is good or worthy of attention, worthy of having those labels as something that is amazing without it having The elements that we typically kind of assign to the classics or to the greats, and then, of course, there is the anti-intellectual situation going on argument, I guess. We're just, you know, we, we're, we're gonna be tackling that in every episode here. People calling romance readers anti-intellectual are often the ones who haven't examined where that opinion came from, which is itself the least intellectual position possible. In my opinion, Critical thinking means interrogating your assumptions and including the assumption that difficulty equals depth. We are only measuring. How hard a character in a book struggles or how much pain they feel as being intellectual. Well, why is that? Why, why is that the benchmark or the gold standard? And hopefully we can continue to just Combat this idea, by talking about these more. There's real, as we've already kind of talked about with Beetrie, there's real depth to this novel. There is real emotion, there is real pain. And again, it doesn't have to have pain to be good, but what I'm saying is the little romances that are kind of pushed off is like, oh, it's trivial cause it's just a romance. It has heartbreak. What is more painful in this world than heartbreak? How many ballads have been written and sung and made top charts because they are about heartbreak. To say that romance is somehow less than, I just, I don't understand that. I truly, as a reader, as a human, I don't understand it. One part about this podcast that I thought could be kind of interesting is also to just look at critical thinking. And what I mean by that is there's, you know, with the anti-intellectual debate going on, there's also the issue of, there's a literary crisis happening, and I think that thinking critically about whatever you read is so important, because it's a skill you're constantly working, you know, it's, you know, it's like muscle you're constantly working out, so it's always growing. And it also just makes it so the things that people have a problem with. If you are thinking critically about romance, you are thinking critically. It doesn't mean just because you're thinking about romance that you're not thinking critically. Each episode, I would like to just identify a skill or a theme or something that we kind of can go deeper on and be a lens in which we read going forward. And so this episode, I thought that we would identify inherited assumptions, and an inherited assumption is a belief you hold, not because you examined it, but because the culture kind of handed it to you and you never questioned it, just like the premise of this podcast. And so for this one, you know, we're seeing literary fiction is serious, romance is not. That's an inherited assumption. We don't have to inherit it. We can think critically about it and say, actually, that's incorrect. Is difficulty equals intelligence and happy endings are naive. Are those assumptions that we just accept and can never move on from, or are those things that we can think about and say that, you know, this is a skill where we can Learn to spot the difference between a conclusion you reached or one that was handed to you. Like I said, it's not super, it's not super deep, it's not meant to be, it's just little bite size things that kind of challenge how we look at things. And if I can have one person read this book who wasn't gonna read it, message me and say, hey, I consider it, then yay, I've I've I've reached my goal, I've done what I came to do. But how we're going to practice it this week. Pick one opinion you hold about books, art, music, culture, whatever it is, and ask yourself, did I arrive to this through my own experience, or did someone hand it to me? You don't have to change your opinion. I'm just asking you to know where it came from. I'm asking you to think about the belief that you hold, and we can go as deep or as broad or as wide or whatever as we want with this, OK? Whatever the thing is, whatever the Opinion is? Did you arrive through it through your own experience? And that can be a really big ask, that can be a really big topic. It could be something, you know, about. Race or gender, body type, able bodiedness, you know, like, do you have an assumption or an opinion that is formed because you actually have experience with whatever that thing is, or is it just that you believe that because that's kind of what you've always been told. And so that is, that is my ask to you ultimately this episode is just to understand where that opinion came from. And if it's your own experience, can you examine it from another lens? And if it's not your own opinion, or it's not from your own experience, Well, in my opinion, that might be worth examining. It might be worth looking into. All right, and that's, that's really it for today. This is just the first episode. I hope you enjoyed it. In closing here, Beach Read isn't a guilty pleasure. It isn't fluff. It's a book that takes seriously the question of what stories are for, and it answers it better than most books is able to answer, and at least to me. It's OK if you disagree. If you disagree, you can message me and be like, no, I don't like it, or I, I, I don't think that it does this well, and that's OK. OK, we can, we can chat about it. This week's question to sit with is, what old opinion about culture did someone else give you that you've never actually examined? Next episode on margins, we're going to go, a little, a little different, and we're going to go a little, well, ironically darker. We're going to go to a vampire court, a human woman who refuses to lose, and a book that started with zero publisher interest and found half a million readers anyway. Can you guess what book it is? If so, message me, or, you know, maybe I'll make a post, and if you guys think you know what the book is, go ahead and drop it in the comments and we'll review the title. That sounds fun. I just made that up. I don't know if it works, but we're gonna go with that. Anyway, I'm Tori, and remember to read deeper, think harder, and I'll see you next time. Margins is produced by Tori Martin, and you can find me on Instagram at 8th House Books, and remember to leave a review if this episode made you think a little today. I'll see you next time in the margins.
