'Tropesick' and 'Extracurricular' are romance novels that subvert genre expectations
NPR's Book of the Day
This episode of NPR's Book of the Day explores how two new romance novels, 'Tropesick' and 'Extracurricular', use established genre tropes t
Key takeaways
- Lauren Okie's 'Tropesick' utilizes a metafictional structure to weave together tropes like 'enemies to lovers' with the reality of grief following an opioid overdose.
- The novel 'Tropesick' features a parallel narrative where characters ghostwrite a romance while experiencing their own unfolding drama.
Main topics
- Romance novel tropes
- Metafiction in contemporary literature
Notable quotes
I think that is like a tongue-in-cheek love letter to them.
Conclusion
The episode demonstrates how the romance genre is being revitalized by
Transcript preview
Speaker 5 (0:01) Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Sometimes the best way to push a genre forward is to break it down into component parts and build it back up again. Like how Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl lays out your expectations of what a thriller is supposed to be, how a victim should act in a murder mystery, to, of course, upend your expectations completely. The two books we've got for you today do something similar for romance. Both books are aware of what the audience expects out of a romance, and they try to both meet and subvert those expectations. Up ahead, a teacher-student relationship that tries to even the playing field a bit. But first, Lauren Oki's book Tropesick is about two writers who have to work together to write a love story and take a wild guess what happens. Oki talks to NPR's Juana Summers after the break. Speaker 1 (0:49) This week on the NPR Politics Podcast, Republicans are on their heels and about to spend a lot of money on ads. Speaker 8 (0:57) Some of these ads are going to be ugly and it's going to be a pretty negative campaign. That's the nature of a midterm when you've got an environment like the one that the Republicans are facing. Speaker 1 (1:06) We look at the Republican money machine with less than 40 days until the midterms. This week on the NPR Politics Podcast. Speaker 8 (1:13) Before Bernie Sanders or AOC, a man named Michael Harrington. tried to market socialism to the American public. Speaker 7 (1:21) Tens of millions of Americans are poor, miserable, in body and in spirit. Speaker 8 (1:26) On NPR's ThruLine, how the founder of the DSA created a modern political movement. Listen to ThruLine in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (1:37) If you're a fan of romance novels like I am, you probably have a favorite trope. There's things like enemies to lovers, forced proximity, fake dating. Well, a new book called Tropesick is all about those familiar storytelling techniques. Two childhood neighbors reunite to ghostwrite a love story for a withdrawn author at her Hamptons estate. And as they write and grow closer, some of those familiar tropes from the page begin to play out in their very real lives. Author Lauren Oki joins me now. Welcome to the program. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. Okay. So in the early pages of your book, we find ourselves meeting Katie and Tyler for the first time. And at the point when they re-encounter each other, they haven't seen each other for eight years. Can you just start by telling us briefly about each of them? Speaker 6 (2:22) Sure. So Katie Caruso is a 25-year-old sunshine trope girl, and she is living and working in New York City as a ghostwriter for Meredith Bradford, who is sort of like the Stephen King of romance. She is... kind of the author in the romance space. And she writes about two books a year for Meredith. And she is also, in my opinion, sort of suppressing the grief of the death of her brother, which happened eight years ago. Her brother was an opioid addict. And she is paired up with Tyler McNally, who is her now deceased brother's best friend, to write this next book. And this is a surprise. They have not seen or spoken to each other since. Mikey's overdose death when they were finishing up high school. And so when they reunite, it is sort of this mashup of kind of like a classic rivals to lovers rom-com setup and a very, I think, realistic and grounded kind of moment of intense tension because they've not ever dealt with the things that happened or tore them apart. So Tyler is sort of this literary fiction author. He is failing to sell his manuscripts. He has accepted this job in hopes of gaining favor with a good literary agent. And Katie is just sort of there living her life. And all of a sudden they are back in each other's orbit to ghostwrite this romance novel. Speaker 4 (3:42) I mean. As any romance reader knows, tropes can be incredibly divisive. Some draw readers in, others can repel them. And yet your book weaves together so many different types of tropes. Where did you even start? Speaker 6 (3:57) This is a funny question because when I realized that I was going to be writing a metafiction novel, which this certainly is, One of the things that I didn't want to do was allow the metafiction element to become more powerful than the natural story itself. Like, I didn't want to create a story that was so full of tropes that the story itself was meaningless. And I think, you know, not to break the fourth wall or display how the magic happens behind the art, but I think there's a big element of leaning on all of the tropes, all of the media, all of the pop culture, all of the stories that I've ever consumed, and then going back in and making it look like I knew what I was doing the whole time. And I think one of the things that was so fun about this book is that