DEMISE, n. This word showed up in one of the romance novels below (A Caribbean Heiress in Paris) in the sentence “If the duke only knew that his sons had been plotting his demise for weeks […]” In context, the duke’s sons are not plotting his death, but his downfall; they plan to humiliate him and claim the property that is rightfully theirs.
This moment struck me because it’s actually very close to the original meaning of demise—a transfer of property, like an inheritance, that usually coincides with death—and because I went “Oh, it’s mettre!” That’s the French verb for “to put,” and its past participle is mis.e. The English vowel is different, so I had never made the connection. The “mise” in demise is related to “mise-en-scène” (the staging of a play) or “mise en place” (the setting in place of ingredients before cooking), both French expressions that have made their way into English (and, consequently, the OED, whose hyphens those are).
The OED gets a little snippy that it’s not “mettre,” exactly, but “desmettre, démettre, to send away, dismiss, (reflexive) to resign, abdicate” that is the origin here:
In English, the prefix being identical with Latin de-, there is a manifest tendency to treat it as de- prefix 1a, as if to ‘hand down’ or ‘lay down’ were the notion.
Okay, okay, fine. Anyway: demise is the sending away or transfer or property.
Since property transfers often follow a death, over the years, English speakers started using “demise” as a euphemism for death itself. From there, it’s only a short distance to demise as a figurative death—of a career, or a government, or, in the case of this romance novel, a reputation and a fortune, which puts the word’s meaning neatly back where it started.
Brief aside: sometimes I like to put an image in this newsletter just for fun. The Getty has a huge collection of images under a Creative Commons 0 license, so I went poking around in there, searching for cheerful terms like “demise.” That’s how I found this album of photocollages made by an unknown British woman sometime in the 1880 or 90s. Like, obviously I had to click on the piece described as [Woman in a room with hanging heads], because how bizarre and creepy, but then it’s a scene from Bluebeard, and also the curator’s note is that maybe the hanging heads are from photos of people the artist knew? Macabre, but also funny and daring as hell. Whoever you are, weird dead goth Victorian lady, I love you. You would have done numbers on tumblr.
The curator’s essay on Victorian photocollage, and what a bold, witty, private art form it is, is also wonderful. This detail is so romance: “An album also offered a young man and woman an excuse to sit close to each other on the sofa as they turned the pages of the album making flirtation that much easier.” But also: imagine a historical romance heroine cutting up her suitors’ cartes de visite to use their heads in a collage of Bluebeard’s secret room.
Anyway, various demises aside, here’s what I’ve read lately in small-r romance:
Dionysus in Wisconsin (gay? m/bi m, both cis, historical, fantasy) by EH Lupton. This book is set in a magical version of 1969 Madison, Wisconsin. One main character is a grad student who moonlights as a magical private eye, and the other is an archivist at the Wisconsin Historical Society. It wasn’t 1969 when I lived in Madison, and I was a grad student in the Department of French and Italian, not the fictional Department of Magical Studies, but still. They’re hanging out at Tenney Park! They’re getting dinner on State Street! By the time the main characters did a magical ritual in a carrel on the fourth floor of Memorial Library, where I lived, I was internally screaming “YEAH I KNOW IT’S HAUNTED.” So for me this is like reading not just a book set in my town, but a book set in my house. I can’t imagine the setting will hit quite as hard for people who don’t share that experience, but trust me: it’s right on. The magic in this book is deliciously weird and there’s so much wonderful stuff about digging for answers in rare books and private archives. In case you are not a library rat delighted by same, I promise the characters also fight demons and do freaky rituals and go to riotous dance parties and kiss. There’s also really good, poignant stuff here about complicated family relationships, parents and step-parents and siblings and grandparents, and what if the pressure you felt to conform was not just from your parents’ disapproval but also an actual curse they put on you? By the end, I was really invested and wanted more of these characters, so it’s good news for me that the next book in the series is also about them. This one does end happily, though—I just wanted to hang out.
Chick Magnet (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Emma Barry. This romance—about a depressed small-town vet and a cheerful-but-brokenhearted social media star famous for her flock of backyard chickens—was a treat. It deals with our current pandemic, since Will, the vet, is struggling to keep his business afloat after all his regular customers have turned to ordering their pet supplies from the internet. I thought the way this book handled Will’s financial struggles was well-done and very surprising and subversive in a genre where male characters almost always have wealth and where the struggling small-town business always gets some kind of deus ex machina rescue. Nic, the social media star, is reeling from breaking up with her emotionally abusive ex and losing her best friend in the fallout. Newly arrived in town, she and Will are now neighbors, and they chase down one of her chickens together in the rain in one of the best opening sequences I’ve read in a while. As neighbors, they run into each other all the time, and as two very lonely people, they start to confide in each other about their troubles. Also, I absolutely loved that one of the romantic gestures in this involved archival research.
A Caribbean Heiress in Paris (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Adriana Herrera. “Heiress” is a Romance Title Word. There are a lot of these, and sometimes they let you know you’re about to read any kind of romance (Love, Desire, Wedding, Bride, Kiss, etc.), or a historical specifically (any aristocratic title word, e.g. Duke, but also Gentleman, Rake, Scandal, Wicked, Devil), or a contemporary (Billionaire, CEO, Playboy), and so on. This list is not a critique; it’s good to let readers know what’s inside a book. As a romance reader, I rejoice in the familiar. But I love surprises, too, so imagine my delight on discovering that the titular heiress in this book is actually (1) a hardworking rum distiller who (2) owns 10% of a worker-owned co-operative. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in a historical before, and I love it. Luz Alana was raised in the Dominican Republic by a Scottish father and a Dominican mother, but they’ve both passed and now it’s her responsibility to make sure the distillery succeeds, so she’s showing off her rum at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. On the day of the competition, she butts heads with the whisky distiller whose display is next to hers (he’s a handsome Scot, naturally) and sparks fly. The settings in this book are so lush—all the World’s Fair pavilions, the little cafés, the Eiffel Tower, the trains, the docks, the visit to Scotland—and so is the sexual tension.
And in things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read Magic Enuff, a volume of poetry by Tara M. Stringfellow that I received as an advance review copy. The poems are political and intimate, taking on cruelty and mourning, but also love and heartbreak and bourbon and Al Green records and sitting on the porch in the evening chatting with neighbors.
I’ve been asked not to quote from the uncorrected advance copy, for fear of spreading formatting errors or typos, I guess, but this poem was in the email I got from Penguin Random House offering me the book. Surely that’s okay to share? Besides, what am I going to say that has more clarity or depth of feeling than one of the poems? The one below showcases a lot of what the book reflects on: Black womanhood in the US South, Black endurance and resilience in the face of white violence, and the poet’s love, admiration, and respect for her mother.
THIS WOMAN
my mother
was ten when she got her first black eye
some white man at the counter of a North Memphis
deli fixed her with a square jab that sent her flying
off her stool, ketchup adorning her mother’s head
in a blood crown
my mother was inconceivably calm
among the chicken bones on the floor
still as a stone wall
mustard in her hair
while whites screamed at her to go back
to the Memphis zoo
she knelt there on her hands
and knees and tried to breathe
fought the blackness seeping into her vision
the dizziness trying to overtake her
she said she mouthed the Lord’s prayer
this woman asks me for anything,
anything at all,
I give it
Magic Enuff is beautiful and powerful, with stunning poems and an incisive essay in the acknowledgments section about what it means to write about Black life in our current moment of banning books. It comes out in June of this year and you should read it.
Also in poetry, I finally got to the head of the library queue for Mahmoud Darwish’s A River Dies of Thirst, a 2009 translation from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham, and it was breathtaking. The poems are often philosophical and elusive, reflecting on presence and absence and meaning and identity and the self—“you are not you” is a refrain—but many of them are also beautifully concrete, admiring/mourning rivers and olive trees and cities and strangers in love. The prose poems form a travel journal that stops in Paris, Madrid, Rome, Stockholm, Beirut, Rabat, and Cairo, and eventually settling in Haifa (“From now on you are you”). They speak of exile, despair, and longing, but they’re also funny: “I am here. Anything more than that is rumour and slander.” And since poems about absence always make me think of Mark “in a field I am the absence of field” Strand (previously), I was tickled to see Strand show up in one of the journals; apparently he and Darwish hung out in Madrid.
It feels indulgent to put two whole poems in this newsletter, but I can’t not share this one:
That word
He liked a word
He opened the dictionary
He couldn’t find it
or an imprecise meaning for it
but it haunted him at night
musical, harmonious
with a mysterious nature
He said: ‘It needs a poet
and some metaphor so that it turns green and red
on the surface of dark nights’
What is it?
He found the meaning
and the word was lost to him.
Moving from poetry to nonfiction, I also appreciated “Is This Desire?”, a fantastic interview of pornography scholar Clarissa Smith, that gets into how laws about pornography and obscenity are part of larger movements to infringe on bodily autonomy. I’ve said before in this newsletter that I make a distinction between romance novels and porn, not because I’m trying to “elevate” my own work or because porn is shameful or wrong, but the artistic conventions are different. Still, to conservatives, romance novelists and pornographers and sex workers can all be tarred with the same brush. Here in the US they’re banning children’s books with any hint of queerness in them, so I think we need expansive solidarity to counteract that.
That’s all for this time. I’ll be back in your inbox on March 31.