On Dear Emmie Blue and My Not Quite Dead Yet Heart
I just finished reading Dear Emmie Blue by Lia Louis, and as soon as I read the final word, I came to write this post. I should probably stop writing these the night before they're meant to go out, and I will, eventually, when I get my life together and learn to better manage my time. But it worked out for me this time because this book is something I need to write about.
Dear Emmie Blue tells the story of the titular Emmie Blue, who, at the age of 16, attached her name and email address to a balloon and set it free, only for it to end up in France, found by Lucas Moreau. He emailed her and sparked a 14-year-long best friendship which sometimes blurred into a little more than friendship, a borderline toxic will they won't they situation which nonetheless saved Emmie's life. She fell in love with him, or thought she did, only for him to take her to dinner one night and ask her to be best woman at his upcoming wedding when she thought he was going to ask her to be his girlfriend. The rest of the book unfolds as Emmie tries to cope with the hiccup in her plan to live happily ever after with her best friend, in the process reuniting with her best friend's brother with whom she had a falling out when she was 19, for reasons undisclosed until later, getting to know the old woman she's lodging with, learning that she actually has friends who care about her outside of Lucas, working through trauma, and discovering who her father is.
Do not hire me to write synopses for your books, but do hire me to hype them up because goddamn did I love this. I read it in a day and I thought about it when I wasn't reading it, and although it didn't make me cry, it did make my heart do a lot of gymnastics. Not all of them were pleasant gymnastics, because that's the way of it with me and romance novels, but they were gymnastics just the same.
Romance novels tend to achieve the difficult feat of simultaneously making me fiercely yearn and plunging me into abject despair. The good ones do, anyway, and this was one of the good ones, even if it didn't go in the direction I expected. I have never fully believed that love like this will ever happen to me, that I will ever manage to choose someone who will unabashedly choose me back, that I'm destined for the happily ever after or even the happy for now. I believe it less and less as the years go on, which is somewhat balanced by the fact that I also care less and less. Until I read one of these books. Until the hero says something unbearably romantic to the heroine and I find myself breathless, stomach swooping, eyes tearing up, helpless in the grip of what if. Maybe it could be me someday after all. Maybe I'll eventually get it right and stop falling for people who are unable or unwilling to love me back.
So why do I read them then? Why subject myself to the longing and the sadness when I remember that it's fiction, and the heroine is not me, and no one is going to show up unexpectedly at my door on the night of a meteor shower and tell me they've always been right in front of me? Why remind myself in this unnecessary way that I'm always going to be the best friend playing support to the main character?
I don't know. Call it masochism, or delusional optimism. Maybe I want to remind myself that my heart isn't actually shriveled and dead. Maybe I want to prove that I still have the capacity to be moved by the suggestion of romance, regardless of who it's for. Emmie thought she didn't deserve anything good, that no one would ever see her the way she desperately wished to be seen. She had convinced herself to settle for less, and then that she couldn't confess her love to Lucas because there was no universe where he would ever feel the same, and when she found out he was getting married, it was a brutal confirmation of everything she already believed about herself. But she's the heroine, so of course none of that was true, and of course she got her happily ever after, and of course she had been seen and loved all along. So why not me, too? Why not?
Life isn't fiction, but one thing I've learned over the past year or so is that it can still be so sweet. Things can be so nice. I can be so happy. I can also be stressed and tired and sick and sad, but I can be so happy. I know how to scrape that happiness out of nothing, how to turn the barest glimmer of peace into luxury. I know how to tear and claw and fight my way to contentment. This doesn't make romance, but it does make hope, and that's what everything is about. That's what this newsletter is about. And that's what Dear Emmie Blue is about. Where there's hope, there's the capacity for so much more, and why shouldn't some of that more be romance?
I'll be fine without it. I can survive on my own, or, more accurately, with my village of platonic love. I can live off of the way my heart expands when I cuddle my cats, the spontaneous laughter that bursts forth when I talk to my friends, the sunshine on my face, the warm earth beneath my feet. I can make small daily changes until I become the version of me that I deserve to be. I can keep my heart together even as I fall for one of my closest friends, who cannot be available to me, again and again. I can pine quietly to myself and keep going. I know I can do all these things because I'm doing them every day, and it's enough to make a life I love. It is. I'm so glad to be here.
But there could be more out there somewhere. There could be someone who cooks me dinner and loves me at my worst and believes in my best and is always there, steadfast through decades. There could be someone to write poetry for and to fall asleep with and to stand beside, publicly, openly, to tell the world that we are for each other. Sometimes I think I don't want any of this. I'm painfully introverted and I love my own space and my own company and I resent intrusions into my routines. I want to do what I want when I want, without having to consider another person in the equation.
And then I read books like Dear Emmie Blue and I know that actually, this is just another fiction, one I've created to soothe myself in the moments when I know without a doubt that it's just not meant for me. I deliberately sought out friends to lovers romances just to really rub salt into the wound, and this book achieved that goal, such as it is, but it also touched that tender, achy part of me that I try to suppress and healed it a little bit. I felt known and understood by Lia Louis as I read about Emmie's struggle to reclaim and improve her life, and the way she set up a story I thought I knew and then swerved it in a different direction made me think that with a perspective shift, it's possible that I might also find something I didn't even know to want. Things can be so good if you let them be, and for all my relentless determination to find my own happiness, it's hard for me to let them be. It's hard to give up the control that comes with shutting it all down, the self-sabotage of only giving my love to people who have no use for it. None of that makes me happy, but it does keep me safe.
Read Dear Emmie Blue. I think it's very, very good, if you like romance novels even a little bit, if you've ever been in love with any of your best friends, if you've experienced trauma and shrunk your life around the fear it instilled in you. I didn't expect it to be so heavy or emotionally resonant, or to somehow be able to balance that alongside a very charming romance without detracting from either. There was a minor lesbian tragedy plotline I could have done without, and there are few things more frustrating to me than misunderstandings between characters who could so easily resolve them by just opening their dumb mouths and saying words to each other, but those are my only real issues and they're small. I'm going to read everything else Lia Louis has written. I loved this book and I love love and I want it to be possible for me, and I guess that's enough for now.