I write to you from a classroom, fair reader, in far away (or not so far away) Pittsburgh where we are discussing Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. In this class full of colors I am but a white, Catholic girl, adrift in a wave of the international influx which my school is typified by. But I digress.

It is funny to be discussing this particular novel. Ever a wandering mind, I think on all the representations of the Frankenstein monster in film and settle wistfully on that veritable molestation of the senses “Van Helsing” an insult and an amusement at once. Why wistfully? It brings back memories of my freshman year in high school, a time defined by the violent rampage of irreverently lewd thoughts whilst pretending to focus on 20th century American literature, arguably another joke. I remember seeing this movie in my first flush of spring fever, sitting amongst a group of girls, openly idolizing the strapping Hugh Jackman and drooling (privately) at Kate Beckinsale’s corseted body and Eastern European accent, which I will admit to practicing in the shower at home. Clearly nothing has changed.

This brings me to the other reason which smacks ironic when I think about the novel we are discussing. In that same year, around that same time, as a young and painfully ignorant young girl, I first picked up a romance novel (placed before me by a more experienced friend - no peer pressure needed) and found within these books all of the girlish fantasies which I could not myself articulate. A monster was sewn together by naivete and imagination, the pieces of its body an amalgam of snatched pieces of vague grown-up talk and dry biology. The spark of life? My desperate desire to know the mysteries which live between a man and a woman. The monster lived and at last, I felt that I did too.

Since then my love for these books and the wellspring of hope they installed in the part of my brain where sense and seriousness ought to have resided comfortably, have robbed me (or gifted me) with countless hours of day-dreaming and planning, my future imbued with a happy halo-like sense of excitement and certainty - the certainty that hot, sweaty, pulsating romance would happen upon me one day and my fate would be complete. The novel “Frankenstein”, arguably of the Gothic genre, is the birth mother of the genre which had begun to own my life. As with any Gothic novel, the end result was violent and tragic.

Need you wonder at the slow death of my dream? Boy after boy, man after man - I tally the list of my once supposed loves and watch it build before me.

I won’t share the number. It isn’t lady-like.

In any case, it is an embarrassing, double-digited number designed seemingly to remind me of the desperate ardor with which I devoted my teen years instead of dating casually and kissing even more casually and learning to relax around the ever intimidating opposite sex. Orbiting to young adulthood, around 18 I seemed to realize my mistake. I thought I wanted something mature and real. I thought I wanted perfection and praise.

I thought too much. I thought wrong.

Epiphany. Eureka. Romance isn’t dead - it just doesn’t take the form of long haired pillocks in riding breeches and Hessians sensually kissing the inside of a blushing lady’s wrist in a perfumed ballroom. Perfect gentleman have no place in the equation and why should we expect them to? We are not ladies anymore.

In any case I am now left holding the proverbial love bag and wonder where to place it. Having moored my life in a safe harbor away from the tempests of the real world and real relationships, I wonder - should I invest it into another far away dream? Should I hand it to someone in a fit of irrational pleasure at my new found freedom? Should I give it up? Then like an unexpected slap from my mother, it hits me across the face.

Give the monster back to the giver. Conduct an exorcism.

And so I’ve decided to pour it back into the romance novel I am writing. This blog will follow the reversion of my bad romance with romance and my new found (and no longer blind) beleif in love.

Beauty. Fear! I think of you, fair reader from this plastic chair in Porter Hall and admit to no small amount of anxiety. Who are we without our dreams? Who are we without the truths which had previously defined our lives?

Let’s face the monster. Let’s be real.