“I wanted to see what I could do with these tropes, but also what these tropes brought out in characters who were queer and South Asian”
IMAGE BY ALEKSANDRIA RUDENKO
These days, everyone seems aware of the popular romance tropes that have populated our screens and the pages of our books for pretty much as long as romance has existed. Tropes, of course, exist in all genres, but romance has often leaned into these tropes, using them to create a sense of comfort for its readers. If you pick up a romance novel with a specific trope, you have a pretty good idea of what you’re in for. Part of the joy of reading it is the comfort of the expectedness of the trope.
I grew up watching, reading and loving romances. One of my favourite authors as a teen was Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries. I also watched so many nineties and noughties romances. I got a healthy dose of romance education from all of these and built a pretty good sense of familiarity with the bones of romance. I grew to love romance tropes and how much fun the genre had with them.
But what was always clear to me even as I was consuming all of this romance is that they really didn’t have a lot of room for people like me. The popular romances were all straight, and often they were also very white. Movies and books about queer people and South Asians, the rare times that they got to exist, felt relegated to being traumatic and serious. Queer characters needed to have a healthy dose of trauma in their lives if they deigned to exist. And South Asians needed to overcome their own cultural baggage before anything else. And queer South Asians? Rarer than unicorns.
When I started writing romance, I wanted to have fun, the same way that I had fun while consuming all of the stories from my youth. I wanted to write characters who got to live all of the tropes that I loved. I wanted to see what I could do with these tropes, but also what these tropes brought out in characters who were queer and South Asian.
For my new book, The Perfect Match, I took elements of the romances I loved when I was younger, and put my own queer and Bengali spin on it, playing with classic romance tropes like rivals-to-lovers and second-chance romance.
It’s a lot of fun to write these tropey romances, but there’s also a power to it. Historically, marginalised people have been excluded from these narratives, sending the message that we need to struggle before we’re allowed to have our happily ever after, if we’re allowed to have our happily ever after at all.
So, writing tropey, fun romances is not just about the romance or about the fun of it, it’s also about claiming our joy and our happily ever after when that’s been historically denied to us, and making space for ourselves without having to legitimise our identity with trauma first.
The Perfect Match by Adiba Jaigirdar is published by Orion Fiction and is available now in paperback, eBook and audio.
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