I never set out to write a romance. And by many people’s estimation, I haven’t.
My debut novel, The Second Chance Store, contains — spoilers! — no lingering looks, no will-they-won’t-they tension, no climactic sex scene (just an anti-climactic one) and only the merest hint of a meet-cute. In fact my protagonist, Gwen, ends the book as she begins it: single and dining alone in a restaurant. Except the second time around she isn’t lonely but perfectly content with her company, a plate of chubby dumplings and a bowl of brothy noodles. “Gwen felt grateful, as she chewed and slurped, that nobody else was here to talk to her, or distract her. Not just now.”
I never set out to write a romance, and yet by many other people’s estimation, I have. Because while The Second Chance Store isn’t a conventional love story, it’s a story steeped in sentiment and affection. ‘A love story about things’ felt like an appropriate tagline for a book about a lost soul volunteering in a British charity shop, her story interwoven with the many stories contained in old objects — from stately antiques to the detritus of modern life; designer handbags and fraying hoodies to fridge magnets and free hotel slippers.
As a lifelong secondhand shopper, I’ve always loved imagining the lives that stuff has lived before I find it, and the meaning that every piece of would-be junk may have once held for someone. If projecting a tortured love affair onto the handwritten inscription in an old, yellowing paperback isn’t true romance then I don’t know what is.
But beyond the unexpected romance of material things, The Second Chance Store is also part of a wider trend in women’s fiction, of celebrating platonic love in a way that feels every bit as special, as swoonsome, as your classic girl-meets-whoever narrative. Some of my favorite books of recent times have looked like romances but quacked like a different beast entirely.
In Dolly Alderton’s Ghosts, protagonist Nina has a year of misadventures in dating, but it’s her friends and family who ultimately make it a love story. Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident perfectly captures the bliss of falling in love with a new best friend, as well as the push-pull tension that arises when your SO isn’t necessarily the person you’re sleeping with. Catherine Newman’s We All Want Impossible Things delivers heart-wrenching romance, but it’s between life-long best friends Ash and Edie, not their husbands or hook-ups.
Even in books that do tick the more conventional genre boxes, increasingly the heroine’s friends are promoted from bit parts to fleshed-out, nuanced love interests in their own right.
And it rings true. Most women I know have had friendship break-ups every bit as painful as a romantic split. There are still songs I can’t listen to without crying because they remind me too much of a former friend (shout out to Bright Eyes and the big bad rift of 2006), and streets I can’t walk down without getting misty-eyed over drunken nights out a decade earlier. Gwen is single and dipping a wary toe into the dating pool, but it’s actually her friends — who have become distant, both emotionally and geographically, drifting off towards marriage and babies and big houses in the suburbs — that she spends most of the book pining for.
While society still tends to assume we should be pouring the most time and energy into finding that one special person to ‘settle down’ with, friendships can easily slip by the wayside, seen as necessary collateral in the pursuit of happily ever after.
In a recent piece for The Atlantic titled ”Live Closer to Your Friends,” Adrienne Matei made the case for the alternative — letting friendships steer a few more of our decisions to end up with happier, healthier and better-balanced lives. I like to think the new wave of alternative romances gives us this permission, to prioritize our social life every once in a while. Or, the line that Sex and the City gifted a generation of girl gangs, to be each other’s soulmates instead.
After all, we need different people to nourish us in different ways. There are old flames, passionate flings and marriage proposals in The Second Chance Store, but to my mind the most romantic scene in the book is Gwen and her best friend Suze, renewing their bond by watching the Food Network together on mute. As anyone who’s ever had a beloved housemate knows, cozy domesticity isn’t the preserve of the monogamous couple.
Then there’s the other missing ingredient: sex. Whether it’s hornily explicit or all the hotter by holding back the details, romance novels traditionally promise at least a few pleasures of the flesh. I kept Gwen’s sexcapades to a minimum, not because I’m a prude (although I wouldn’t be the first author to tone things down because they knew their parents would be reading, hi Mum) but because I wanted to express her sensuality through a different kind of appetite.
Opening and closing the book with scenes of her eating felt instinctive, perhaps because dining well, even when you’re alone, is one of the best acts of self-love I (or Elizabeth Gilbert) could think of. If you don’t believe it’s possible to waltz off into the sunset with a bowl of noodles, I guess you’ve just never had really good ramen.
Ultimately the question of whether The Second Chance Store qualifies as a ‘real’ romance isn’t for me to decide. But I know I want people to finish it feeling satisfied in the way you do after a perfect kiss, a triumphant treasure hunt or a really good meal. And it does — more spoilers! — have a happy ending. Because romance or not, I’m too much of an old softie to deny any reader that.
The Second Chance Store is out now, published by Avon Books.
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