On a first date in 2017, a Brooklyn-based Argentinian designer read a very personal Medium essay I had just written about my family history and motivating beliefs while sitting across from me.  When he finished, he looked up and said “ugh, I hate how everything is about identity and being marginalized these days.”  I replied that I would be heading back to my friend’s now.  He asked what words would bring back the “positive vibe” we were having and at that moment I became a transparent eyeball,* unaware if my mouth was agape. (*regrets to Emerson)

Thinking about romance as a genre, there are interesting, now semi-ancient, moments from my personal life that I could explore—themselves uniquely fascinating because of their reality. Or—thematically useful playdough[] for moulding fictional images of how loving kindness can be given and received (and the conflicts that may arise from impediments thereto).  Perhaps it is a misogynistic impulse that inhibits me from doing so.  As bell hooks put it in All About Love, she once judged her own writings on love as “mushy,” “sentimental” and “silly.”  Then she noticed that “[m]ale fantasy is seen as something that can create reality, whereas female fantasy is regarded as pure escape.” “[S]exist thinking may lead a woman to feel she already knows what another woman will say.  Such a reader may feel that she has more to gain by reading what men have to say.” I love how bell hooks wrote herself this fanfare lead-in that trumpeted her absolute banger of a book.