MONGER, n. A reader (hi!) asked me about this noun, which means a merchant or trader, or the OED specifies, “a person engaged in a petty or disreputable trade or traffic.” Many Germanic languages have a similar word, probably inherited from classical Latin “mangō,” also meaning dealer or trader, specifically of enslaved people. Dealing in human beings is a big part of this word’s usage; in the 1600s, if you just said “monger,” then “whoremonger” was implied.
We don’t normally say “monger” all by itself these days; it’s more likely to be the suffix in “fishmonger” or “cheesemonger.” This second usage carries the following note in the OED:
Originally literally a trader, as cheese-, coster-, fish-, flesh-, ironmonger, etc.; but in formations dating from the 16th cent. also in extended use (frequently derogatory), as ceremony-, fashion-, mass-, merit-, news-, pardon-, scandal-monger, etc.
There are so many in that list that I’ve never seen before! A costermonger sells apples, or fruit or produce more generally. A mass-monger is a Catholic priest, though maybe you shouldn’t call him that to his face. “Merit-monger” is a 16th- and 17th-century derogatory term for “a person who seeks to merit salvation or eternal reward by good works,” and, I presume, is being annoying about it. In our more secular 21st-century context, we might say “virtue signaling.” “Pardon-monger” also seems religious (and derogatory) in usage based on the OED’s examples, but I think we’ve had US Presidents who qualify.
You can also be a warmonger (originally a mercenary, now more likely “one who seeks to bring about war”) or a scaremonger (an alarmist). The OED doesn’t have an entry for fearmonger but Merriam-Webster has my back. In contemporary English, we’ve mostly preserved this word’s negative connotation, the “petty or disreputable trade” part of it, so you don’t see a lot of, say, booksellers calling themselves bookmongers.
There’s a store in my town that sells fish, but I’ve never seen any sign that they call themselves fishmongers. This newsletter has previously touched on “fishwife,” a woman who sells fish. I bring this up because today’s the 235th anniversary of an event in the French Revolution called the October Days, sometimes called the Women’s March on Versailles. Many of the participants were fishwives—poissardes and harengères (herring sellers) in French. They were up early because of their work and they were already accustomed to organizing their guild and doing a formal procession to see the king, so that’s what they did. Starving and angry, they marched by the thousands for six hours in the rain and the mud—followed, a few hours later, by an armed militia. Ultimately, they forced the king to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, to move from Versailles to Paris (where he would be more subject to the people’s moods), and to agree to a constitutional monarchy. That didn’t last, but the fishwives’ place in history did.
And lastly, here’s a passage from Milla Vane’s fantasy romance A Heart of Blood and Ashes (previously reviewed) that contains both an implied fishmonger and another monger whose inclusion I can’t pass up:
…the vendors who took advantage of the captive audience outside the temple missed no opportunity to hawk their wares. Soon [Yvenne] had another skewered fish, and was licking salty juices from her fingers when a cockmonger making her way down the line spotted her. […] The woman’s pushcart held an array of phalluses and potion-pots and a multitude of leather straps…
And now for some bookmongering: here’s what I’ve read lately in small-r romance.
Triple Sec (cis f/cis f/genderqueer, contemporary) by TJ Alexander. Polyamory is delicious, as are most of the cocktails described in this. A divorced butch lesbian bartender gets wooed by a married femme lawyer and then, separately and much later, by the lawyer’s genderqueer wife, a mysterious and aloof artist. This played such a marvelous trick on me, where at first I was like, well obviously I’m rooting for Mel (bartender) and Bebe (lawyer) to get together, but how am I ever gonna learn to like Kade (artist)? They’re so stony and unreadable. But “learn to like them” doesn’t even begin to cover how I felt about Kade by the end, and I love a book that can pull off a transformation like that. Ethereal weirdo, tough hardworking tenderhearted type, and take-no-shit princess is a hell of a cocktail.
Just for the Cameras (m/m/f, all cis and bi, contemporary, erotic) by Viano Oniomoh. Jordanne is a successful Nigerian sex worker living in Manchester, England, who makes a living uploading videos of herself and her loving boyfriend, Kian, for the pleasure of her many subscribers. Jordanne and Kian are happy together, but they’re also both harboring a secret crush on their roommate, Luka, and are thrilled when he suggests making a video where he walks in on them—just for the cameras, naturally. He’s not secretly pining for them. (He totally is.) This is scorching hot. It’s also sweeter and cozier than you might expect from that description, as well as gentle with its characters who are dealing with estrangement from their families because of their sex work or because their dads are shitty or both. It’s really loving. I appreciated how it played with what is public (online, out in the world, with friends and family) and what is private (personal and unspoken, shared among lovers). It’s also beautifully body positive; Jordanne and Kian are both fat, and it’s rare to find fat male characters in romance.
No Man’s Mistress (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Mary Balogh. I was enticed to read this 2001 romance by the promise of real, difficult conflict and big twists, both of which it has—the hero and the heroine believe they are each the rightful owner of the same estate, and things get more complicated from there—and I thought it was time to read a Mary Balogh novel, since I hadn’t ever tried one before. The prose is lovely and the plot pulls things right along. I did enjoy it. The hero reads, in 2024, as someone on the ace spectrum, as he has no desire for sex without a profound emotional connection. That is treated as a moral good, unlike sex work. The characters adopt the attitude that sex work is fine if a woman was coerced into it and not fine if she chose it or enjoyed it. I ended up thinking about French doctor and proto-sociologist Alexandre Parent du Châtelet and his 1836 work De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris while reading this. Parent du Châtelet revolutionized thinking about sex workers by suggesting that many of them were trapped by circumstance, and they weren’t all necessarily filthy lazy sluts who wanted it, so congrats to this novel on capturing real nineteenth-century attitudes, I guess. My understanding of history tells me that being a sex worker in nineteenth-century Paris or London was a violent and miserable affair for most of the women who undertook it or were forced into it, and obviously that’s terrible, but in my romance novels, I prefer less condemnation of women who did find independence or enjoyment in sex work. Justice for sluts.
(The best thing in that Parent du Châtelet book is the list of working names that the lower-class women choose for themselves, including Perfect, Chubby, Beautiful Thigh, Beignet, and Gun.)
(Related: historian and critic Sascha Cohen on modern sex worker memoirs.)
The Other Side of Disappearing (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Kate Clayborn. Not only is this gorgeously written and emotionally deep, it has a plot! Like a real don’t-know-how-this-is-gonna-turn-out suspenseful plot! I’m too bowled over by how good this book was to write anything smart, but it’s brilliantly done. It manages to have one of those massive romance heroes in a way that not only makes sense (he’s a former linebacker), but is also a sly commentary and thoughtful examination of the romance genre’s predilection for giant men: everyone notices his size first, everyone assumes he’s all brawn and no brains, he’s self-conscious, he doesn’t fit comfortably into most spaces, he spent years in the toxic environment of American football being told not to have any feelings or mental health struggles. And the heroine—closed off and difficult and traumatized by being forced to raise her sister after her mother abandoned them, but also tenacious and caring and brave—well, obviously the hero’s in love with her. I’m in love with her. Kate Clayborn writes such memorably specific complicated family dynamics, not just for her main characters but also for her secondary characters. Salem Durant! (You can write a review like this, right? Just saying character names with exclamation marks? Don’t answer that.) Anyway. It’s good.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I also read Adania Shibli’s chilling novella Minor Detail, translated from the Arabic in 2020 by Elisabeth Jaquette. The first half of the novella is based on a true story: in 1949, Israeli soldiers are “clearing” (killing all the Arabs and Bedouins in) the Negev/Naqab desert. After one massacre, a teenage girl survives. They abduct her, gang rape her, and murder her. The second half of the novella follows a modern Palestinian narrator trying to research the murdered girl and tell her story. The narrator’s work is hampered by travel restrictions on Palestinians and the everyday terror of the occupation. It isn’t the sheer horror of the 1949 events that compels the narrator to do this research—“there was nothing really unusual about the main details,” she tells us—but the fact that the crime occurred on her birthday. This minor detail haunts her. For the narrator, this haunting drives her to action, but many of us have this trait to a lesser degree: we learn about a horror, current or historical, and our attention snags on some tiny connection to our own lives. For me, this happened when the narrator takes a shower in her rented room in Israel and is surprised by the flow of water. In her estimation, that single shower uses the amount of water she would use in a week at home in Ramallah, where everyone lives with permanent water restrictions. This detail, so much closer to my everyday life than the bombs, is easy to grasp. It unlocked, for me, how much the apartheid regime looms over everything. The novella is powerfully written, shocking, and visceral. Every checkpoint—and there are so many checkpoints—is terrifying. It was tense even when I knew what was going to happen. I won’t ever forget it.
It bears mentioning here that Minor Detail’s 2022 German translation won a literary prize in Germany and was supposed to be celebrated at the October 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair. In a cowardly act of censorship, the ceremony was canceled “due to the war,” though it seems to me that this is exactly the book we should all read “due to the war.”
That’s all for this time. Let’s all work toward less warmongering and more cheesemongering. I’ll be back in your inbox on October 20.