The best job I’ve ever worked was one where I talked about sex from the opening to the end of my shift. Walking through the fluorescent shelves and orderly storage room at The Ripped Bodice in Park Slope, Brooklyn, no conversation was considered NSFW.
Trust me, if you like all things enemies-to-lovers and sexy banter, “Beautiful Bastard” by Christina Lauren will make you DIE!
Seriously, I would let Emerson from the Sara Cate series swing me from a chandelier.
If your partner isn’t making the mountains shake during sex, like Rhysand from “A Court of Mist and Fury,” then they’re doing something wrong.
I’d worked in corporate offices and taken jobs in event planning, but none of those roles gave me the sense of purpose I felt at The Ripped Bodice. The Ripped Bodice opened in Culver City, California, in 2016 as the first romance-themed bookstore in the Northern Hemisphere and then opened a Brooklyn location in August 2023.
Proudly woman- and queer-owned, The Ripped Bodice celebrates a diverse selection of romance fiction in both stores and online. My coworkers and I might have spent our work days talking about sex, but I knew that what we were helping our readers explore was complicated and special.
I know this mostly because of my mother: the ultimate romance reader. She’s a woman who has devoured romance novels, sometimes multiple a day, for as long as I can remember. She’s one of the fastest readers I know and lives her life in a similar style: with an open heart, an open mind and an insatiable desire to learn.
My mother can talk as fast as a machine gun about her favorite authors, like Pippa Rayne (“heartwarming humor with a side of sizzle”), Helena Hunting (the queen of heated hockey romances), and Stacy Gail (for the ultimate mafia romance moment). She adores specific tropes like dating the alpha hero, the heroine falling in love with her best friend’s brother and the classic: the secret billionaire who cannot stop courting you.
When I was a teen, we gleefully began to read romance novels together. Burning through bodice-rippers side by side during Long Island summers, we were partaking in one of the purest forms of love: a mother-daughter bond.
As an only child to a single mother, I felt a great responsibility to be the best version of myself. My mother had sacrificed everything to raise me. For over a decade, she lived in an unhappy marriage with an abusive husband who would make fun of her reading habits to make her feel small.
Traditionally, romance novels have been subjugated to “low-brow” status, and the genre has been expected to justify itself both artistically and morally, unlike its counterparts in the sci-fi and mystery sections. The shaming of the romance genre and its readers is a reflection of our society’s discomfort with portrayals of female autonomy, pleasure and fantasy.
Yet, the narrative is changing, and romance itself is evolving for the better. Today’s romance readers are dismantling shame by trading recommendations on BookTok and other online communities, or by strolling into one of the dozens of romance-themed bookstores popping up across the U.S.
Romantasy, a subgenre that combines elements of romance and fantasy and is often set in a world of magic, has become a cultural phenomenon and brought the romance genre to new, increasingly unashamed audiences. During my shifts at work, I witnessed readers who were empowered, who were actively dropping the word “guilty” from “guilty pleasure.”
As a teenager, there was not much I could do materially to support my single mother. I couldn’t pay child support, I couldn’t act as a therapist, and I couldn’t take away any of the physical or emotional labor of raising a daughter on your own. But what I could do was be her hype-woman, encouraging her not to be embarrassed by who she was.
After years of being silenced, it is the free-spoken nature of our relationship that she is the most proud of. While she never asked for a great romantic love story, our story does what great love stories do: allow two people to witness and be witnessed by each other.
During my teen years, I discovered Wattpad, which led me on my own journey of experimenting with self-pleasure. Wattpad is an app and website for reading and publishing original fiction that has launched the careers of popular romance authors like Anna Todd. Often, Wattpad stories were fan fiction, and a typical late-night routine involved getting under the covers and reading smut in the embracing glow of my screen before dozing off to sleep.
As I began to explore what turned me on in the setting of romance novels, I learned about who I was, and I understood in a new way how crucial this genre was — and what it meant for my mother and me to share a love for it.
Almost two decades after the divorce, I still witness moments when my mother makes herself small out of habit. However, when I see her reading the latest Pippa Rayne installment, or raving about how hot a certain firefighter romance is, I see my mother full of life, fighting the shame many romance readers have been taught to feel about their love for the genre.
Romance novels helped my mother regain her authentic self, overcoming trauma and pain. After seeing what romance has brought my mother, I believe this genre is not solely a vehicle for escapism — but is also a tool of survival, of revolution.
When I put my wooden book-shaped name tag on before each shift at The Ripped Bodice, I felt that my work mattered. Despite how society attempts to degrade the romance genre and romance readers, I was and am committed to celebrating freedom of expression, not to mention the broad spectrum of sexuality and gender on display in the modern romance genre.
Do you enjoy F/F mermaid slow-burns? I got you. Are you divorced and looking for an upbeat workplace romance? I know just the book. Are you simply looking for smut to read to unwind after a hard day of existing? I. Got. You.
As a romance bookseller, my role was to create space for each customer to explore the store’s shelves, unabashedly ask questions and learn about who they are as a reader and as a person.
To help someone believe in hot sex, great conversation and true love again, or for the first time. To help guide those who have not seen themselves in the historically white-washed genre to one of the culturally resonant and accurate romance novels that exist in today’s world. Most importantly, my role was to create a safe, inclusive and shame-free environment for every reader.
Romance is a genre to be read not only for pleasure, leisure or fantasy, but also with a seed of hope. As a romance bookseller, I aspired to connect with each customer as I wish I could’ve connected with my mother during a period in her life when she needed someone to tell her: who you are, what you’ve been through and what you read matters.
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