This is going to be a long rant:
Every year I like to eyeball the Goodreads Awards finalists to see if I missed something good. This year I spotted Seven Days in June by Tia Williams in the romance category. The cover was eye-catching and the premise (“Seven days to fall in love, fifteen years to forget and seven days to get it all back again…”) attracted me.
However, within one chapter the book incensed me and I quit. Why? Two reasons:
To begin with, Eva, the heroine, is an author of a long-running erotic romance vampire series she is now sick of writing. She does not think well of her own books. When she has brunch with some of her most dedicated fans, they are described as “The book club, composed of rowdy, upper middle-class white women on the business end of their fifties, had traveled all the way from Manhattan to celebrate Eva with a brunch.” The brunch is held in a private room at a “deliciously cheesy S&M-themed restaurant, A Place of Yes.”
“Deliciously” and “A Place of Yes” were about the only things I liked about this scene because Eva, and I suspect the author, are coming from a place of no. Eva refers to her own books as “supermarket-checkout porn.” She is paralyzed when she tries to write a new book in the series. Her fans are described in her POV with disdain, using terms like “They were bombed,” “the tables erupted in squeals” and “a faux redhead.” Their gushing is satirized. Eva thinks that she is “so much more than her silly, raunchy romance (at least she hoped she was).”
There’s also this:
Case in point: what would the Orgasmic Ohioans think if they knew she wanted to strangle Sebastian and Gia? To banish them to wherever those Twilight fuckers went?
One of Eva’s fans is racist and confides that she gets horny at her son’s basketball games because “To me, all those beautiful Black players are Sebastian,” (Sebastian is the hero of the vamp erotica series). Eva’s reaction:
This’ll be my legacy, she thought. I have friends organizing protest rallies and writing Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker essays on race in America. My own daughter’s so militant that she begged a cop to arrest her at the Middle School March on Midtown. But my contribution to these troubled times will be inciting white women of a certain age to sexually profile Black student athletes who’d really just like to make it to the NBA in peace.
Social justice activism is important. 100%. But I don’t think that’s an excuse to judge her other fans on the basis of this one’s racist objectifying of young Black men. The way she thinks of most of her fans is ungenerous at best, especially considering that they traveled roughly 470 miles to have brunch with her.
Onto the second reason I quit. Eva has an invisible disability (unnamed at this point in the book) that gets really bad and her thoughts about her fans turn in this direction:
They were normal. They could do things.
Regular-ass things. Like diving headfirst into a pool. Holding up their end of a conversation for more than twenty minutes. Burning scented candles. Getting tipsy. Surviving an F-train ride while a subway saxophonist blared “Ain’t Nobody” for nine stops. Enjoying sex in ambitious positions. Laughing too heartily. Crying too mightily. Breathing too deeply. Walking too swiftly.
Living, period. She’d bet these women could do most of these things without shredding agony smiting them like punishment from an angry god. What was it like, the luxury of not hurting?
Why??? How can she make this bet? The whole point of the term “invisible disability” is that the disability is invisible. There’s nothing outward to indicate that the person is disabled. So what gives her the confidence to say that her fans don’t have them? The fact that they are upper middle-class? That they are white? That they are from Ohio? That they are on “the business end of fifty” yet have the guts to celebrate their love of erotic books?
I am fifty-two, white, middle-class, and am not ashamed of the fact that I enjoy sexy books. I even talk about that with my friends and with authors. And I have not one but three invisible disabilities. Grrr.
The book probably gets better–it did get that Goodreads Awards nomination, after all–but I couldn’t keep reading after that.
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